A Cup of Forgetting

DECEMBER 2025, SHORT STORY, 5000 WORDS

The day Rosemary couldn’t remember her daughter’s name, she knew it was time. The lapse only lasted a few minutes, but it felt to her like the empty eternity that would come after the end of the world. In a way, it was a little end to her world.

She had been visiting her daughter in town, something she did less frequently now to hide the increasing spottiness of her memory. She’d thought it would be safe; it had felt like a good day. Rising from her bed, she’d heard a familiar chirrup out the window and thought: song thrush. She’d broken her fast without incident: chosen the right cutlery, steeped her tea just long enough, found the jar of honey on the shelf and not in the linen cupboard. She’d decided to go into town, before her daughter and her wife took it into their heads to come knocking at her cottage door unannounced.

Rosemary had known from the time her daughter was small that she would not follow in Rosemary’s footsteps and become a witch. Her only child was far too imaginative, a perpetual daydreamer, and impatient to boot. She wanted to learn foreign tongues but tired of each one halfway through a primer. She could recite every word of a dozen minstrels’ ballads but could not keep straight the steps to harvest wild honey. She was quick of mind, generous of heart, and oh so fanciful. And there lay the trouble, for a witch was nothing if not practical.

It had been no surprise when her daughter had wanted to move to town, first to go to school, then to frequent the travelers who stayed a night or two at the inn, regaling the locals with tales of faraway lands. Rosemary counted herself lucky that her daughter’s unbridled spirit hadn’t stirred her to wander even farther afield. Instead, her child had fallen in love with the innkeeper’s daughter, and the two of them had opened a bookshop over which they lived in a small but cheery apartment.

It was to this apartment that Rosemary had come, bearing a pot of blackberry jam. Lily, her daughter’s wife, welcomed her at the top of the stair. As she crossed the threshold, Rosemary saw her daughter at the counter, cutting a loaf of bread, and her lips went to shape a name that suddenly wasn’t there. Rosemary tried desperately to summon it. The slope of her daughter’s shoulders, the frizzing hair at her temples were so utterly familiar, yet where her name should have been Rosemary found only an empty hollow.

And then, as the three of them tucked in to a lunch of thick slices of bread slathered with blackberry jam or topped with hunks of cheese, the name bobbed up to the surface of her mind like a cork and floated serenely there as though it had never left. Violet.

Violet and Lily noticed nothing amiss. Rosemary could scarcely blame them when she’d taken such pains to conceal her troubles from them. If Violet knew how many times she’d now lost her way in the woods on her frequent foraging expeditions, how near she’d come to despairing of ever finding the path back to her cottage, with dusk stealing shadow-clad through the trees, she would have been beside herself with worry. Not just because her mother was growing old and forgetful, no. Violet had been a slip of a girl when Rosemary’s own mother’s memory had begun to flicker and gutter, but Rosemary knew better than to think that Violet had forgotten.

In the early days of Grandmama Ivy’s illness, Violet had taken it all for a game. She delighted in finding the word Ivy was fumbling for first, certain her grandmother was only pretending not to know what to call the teakettle or a thimble. Rosemary had not been laughing, but she yet hoped that her mother’s mind might simply be slowing a little, like the flow of a brook as it broadened at the end of its course.

Grandmama Ivy grew tetchy and rigid, criticizing Rosemary’s housekeeping and scolding Violet harshly for a crooked braid or a ragdoll left on a chair. Once, she even slapped Violet’s hands away when she sought to rearrange a bouquet of larkspur on the kitchen table. Rosemary tried to explain to Violet that the change in her grandmother was not Violet’s fault, nor even Ivy’s. A sickness of the body and mind was cruelly robbing her of her true self. But Violet still grew meek and cowering around Grandmama Ivy. It certainly did not help matters when, one night, Ivy set their bedquilt aflame with an ill-placed candle.

Then came the first day when Ivy did not know them. She accused Rosemary of keeping her caged in this wretched woodland cottage, of poisoning her with the tinctures Rosemary administered to settle her mother’s mind. But what Ivy offered to Violet was even more painful: chilly indifference.

“Who are you?” she asked stonily as her granddaughter approached her rocking chair with an extra blanket for her legs. “What do you want?”

That was the day Rosemary learned you could see the moment a person’s heart broke on their face. It was like when a wet teacup slipped from your hands and struck the floor: before you could react, it already lay in two pieces on the ground.

A more merciful disease would not have let Ivy remember them again, but she did. Each time, with a child’s unflagging hope, Violet believed her grandmother’s mind was mending. Each time, she was crushed anew when Grandmama Ivy glanced at her without a touch of recognition.

Violet was a grown woman now. She was not a child, yet she remained Rosemary’s child, and Rosemary could not tamp down a desperate desire to shield her daughter from pain. She could not bear for Violet to suffer that cruelty again. And this time would be worse. Now it was Violet’s own mother who would forget her.

Violet and Lily spoke gaily between bites of bread, and Rosemary tried her best to keep up with their talk of book deliveries gone astray and children found hiding in the stacks after closing time. She had trouble keeping the thread, but she suspected it was less her failing mind than her distraction over the decision she had just come to. If this was to be her course, there was much to plan, and quickly, before she had not the wits for it.

She bid the girls goodbye, brushing off their entreaties for her to visit again soon. Couldn’t they see she was busy? Just because a witch was old didn’t mean she was now at leisure. Quite the contrary. She was so absorbed in drawing up a mental list of ingredients to gather and tomes to consult when she reached her cottage that she was startled when a broad awning draped its shade across her shoulders. The sudden cool made her look up.

The awning extended over a labyrinth of crates in front of a greengrocer’s Rosemary had never seen before. How could this be? She always took the same route to and from Violet and Lily’s. If she hadn’t been paying attention, her feet should have known the way. Now her attention was caught, and it was like those recent mishaps in the forest, when she confused one deer path for another or mixed up her own discreet trail markers.

She squinted up and down the street. Neither direction looked familiar, but that couldn’t be right. This was another hole punched in her memory. It was vexing to be lost in one’s own town, but beneath her irritation, Rosemary felt a brush of fear. It was as if the fabric of the world she’d always been firmly stitched to was tearing away from her, leaving her to unravel.

“Mother Rosemary!”

Rosemary turned as fast as her old bones would permit to see a plump young woman in a checkered dress coming down the block, a basket on her arm. It was Annie the brewer.

“Heading home?” said Annie, smiling warmly at her. “I’m going the same way, as far as my mother-in-law’s house.”

“Don’t let me keep you,” Rosemary told the brewer even as she fell into grateful step beside her. “I’m not as spry as I once was.”

Annie laughed. “Nonsense! I’m glad to have met you, and I’m in no hurry. We still can’t thank you enough for curing Rowan of his earaches.”

Rowan was Annie’s son, a boy of four. Rosemary could picture him, a big lad with his father’s red hair. She remembered the mullein flower oil she’d prepared for him last summer, fortified with an incantation murmured by the light of the waning moon.

She nodded along to the young mother’s soothing chatter as they walked. By the time Annie had to turn off on a side street, Rosemary could see the town’s west gate ahead and make out the beginning of the wood beyond.

Back home, she drank a cup of lavender tea to settle her jangled nerves. Only then was she struck by the significance of her encounter with Annie. It had been a relief to recognize her at once and to recall Rowan’s earaches and the remedy she’d concocted for him. But the fact that Annie and dozens of other townspeople knew her as Mother Rosemary the forest witch, mother of Violet the bookseller, put a wrinkle in her plans. It was a good thing she’d realized. She would just have to account for that too.

 

 When Rosemary had first been forced to acknowledge, with grim recognition, that her forgetfulness was cause for alarm, she had started brewing herself tisanes of rosemary and lemon balm to strengthen her memory. She resorted to spells too, though sparingly, to unmuddle her thoughts when she found herself struggling through the recipe for a potion she’d prepared a hundred times. But these were all stopgaps. She’d treated her mother in the same way. For a while, it had helped, but some illnesses were beyond a forest witch’s power to heal.

Now, Rosemary needed all her faculties to accomplish her last, greatest spell. Time was of the essence. She could not afford to wait, lest her mind’s light dim too much to see the task through. Besides, since meeting Annie, she’d decided to act the day of the harvest festival. She had to be ready by then.

She worked slowly and methodically, taking full advantage of her good days and desisting from labor on her bad days. Sometimes, on those bad days, she forgot she wasn’t meant to be tinkering with potion formulas or mulling over incantations, but then she usually grew so frustrated by her own sluggish brain that she gave up before she could blunder into any foolishness. She wrote herself notes in block letters, reminders to her less mentally present self. Occasionally, some letter eluded her, and she would fling aside pen and paper in aggravation, or else just leave gaps in her words. They looked like Violet’s smile when she’d lost her front teeth.

Grown-up Violet came to the woods one day after Rosemary hadn’t visited the bookshop for an entire week.

“What’s keeping you so busy, Mother?” she teased as she came through the gate in the low stone wall. The gate always hung open, its hinges rusted in place, and the tumbledown wall was lumpy with moss. Rosemary was standing in the garden, contemplating the herbs in the bed. Violet’s sudden appearance startled her into blurting out a version of the truth.

“I want to make something for the harvest festival. Something to share. A new recipe.”

Violet’s eyes sparkled with anticipation as she brushed past bobbing clusters of flowering vervain. “What is it?”

“It will be a surprise,” Rosemary replied. A twinge of guilt passed through her, and for a moment, she couldn’t meet Violet’s eyes. Was this really the right course? But she remembered, as if it were that morning, Violet’s jagged-edged expression the first time Grandmama Ivy had looked at her without recognition, and the recollection filled the sail of her resolve.

Violet laughed, unoffended. “Well, if you ever decide to make mead again, Lily says she wants to learn.”

Rosemary smiled, though the knowledge that she and her daughter-in-law would likely never have the chance gave her a pang.

“It’s a hot day for walking,” she said. “Come in and have a drink.”

Violet followed her into the cottage. Rosemary went down to the root cellar to fetch the bottle of elderberry cordial. When she reemerged from the cool darkness, she saw Violet peering with interest at a scrap of paper nailed to the kitchen table. It read: POTIONS FOR HARVEST FESTIVAL.

“Potions, eh?” Violet said.

Luckily, it was one of Rosemary’s good days. She approached the table at a leisurely pace, set the bottle down with a light clunk, and managed a tsk of mock outrage as she ripped the note away and stuffed it into her apron pocket. “A surprise, I said.”

They sipped the refreshing cordial in silence for a few minutes. A curious bee meandered in through the open window and circled Violet’s cup. She didn’t shoo it away, a habit Rosemary knew her daughter had picked up from her.

“Was it lonely for you, growing up outside of town?” she asked Violet. The question probably came across as abrupt and unexpected, but in fact it was rather calculated on her part.

Violet did look taken aback. “No. I don’t think so. It wasn’t as if we didn’t go to town often enough to deliver your salves and teas. And I loved the forest. I still do. If the bookshop didn’t keep me so busy, I’d come more often.”

“What are your favorite memories?” Rosemary held her breath, afraid she’d been too obvious. She had two motives in posing the question, and both were self-centered. It was easier for her to talk about the more distant past; she was less likely to betray herself through lapses or mix-ups. More selfishly still, she wanted to hear Violet talk about her. About tramping after Rosemary on brisk spring mornings to tap the birches in the woods. About listening to her tell the ancient tales that were reserved for the shortest days of the year, when the falling snow muffled the world and dusk fell in midafternoon. Rosemary wanted to savor Violet’s remembering while she still could.

But to her dismay, none of Violet’s reminiscences included her. Or rather, they did—who had brought home the chicks that grew into the laying hens they’d kept for years, or taught Violet to feed the blind baby squirrels fallen from their nest?—but only implicitly. Her daughter never mentioned her directly beyond a casual we. She took Rosemary’s presence in those stories for granted and saw no need to tell her mother what role she had played in them.

Later, after Violet had gone, Rosemary noticed two strands of dark brown hair caught on the back of Violet’s chair, where the top slat met the stile. She worked them carefully out from where they were stuck and coiled them in a jar.

Sometimes, always on good days when the work was going well, Rosemary wondered if what she meant to do was monstrous. What right did she have to take something so intrinsic away from Violet? Her illness was cruel enough for being random, a curse on her mind and body for which no one could be blamed. This was different, an attempt to cheat her disease out of one of its collateral victims by taking its weapons into her own hands. But was it not wrong to wield them with the will of a conscious soul? She was giving Violet no choice in the matter, had not even asked her what she would want.

And yet, when these doubts crowded in and Rosemary questioned whether she was doing harm, she always convinced herself that she was acting to prevent a far greater harm. The decay of her mind would soon make her inflict great pain on Violet. By her art, Rosemary could spare her daughter that pain. Moreover, she had the right to escape being its instrument if she could.

In lower moments, she wondered why, if it was possible to gently tip memories into nothingness, she could not protect or restore her own. But that was the way of things: it was always easier to destroy than to mend.

The day of the harvest festival arrived. In late afternoon, the sky was a blue so uniform it looked like porcelain. Rosemary was ready. She had rehearsed the actions she had to take countless times so that hopefully, even if their purpose slipped her mind, she would still feel certain it was important that she perform them. And anyway, it seemed to be another good day, for which she was grateful.

Violet and Lily had closed the bookshop for the day in order to help Lily’s parents at the inn. When Rosemary found them, her daughter seemed not to recall the surprise Rosemary had supposedly been preparing for the occasion. Violet’s face was flushed from the heat of the kitchen.

“Sit here,” she said, indicating the bench nearest the dining room hearth. “I’ll bring you a rabbit pie fresh from the oven.”

Rosemary settled onto the hard bench, thinking ruefully of the cushions on her chairs at home. She couldn’t stay long at the inn, but something made her linger for now, and when Violet approached again with the golden-brown pie tucked in a napkin, holding it out to her with warm pleasure and comfortable familiarity in her gaze, Rosemary knew what it had been. The desire to see that look one more time. She wanted to savor it, like the scent of a flower that would never bloom again.

She couldn’t tarry, though. As soon as she had finished the pie, she ventured outside again. The inn stood on the town square, where most of the festivities would take place. Rosemary crossed the square to Bert the cidermaker’s stall. Manning the counter with him was one of his sons, who was watching a flock of children play a ball-tossing game with longing on his face. To Rosemary’s relief, it wasn’t hard to persuade Bert to let the boy join his friends in exchange for her assistance serving the cider. Bert seemed to think he was indulging an old woman who wanted to feel useful, but that suited her purpose.

Bert had filled a huge cauldron from his vats. The cauldron squatted behind the stand, and all Rosemary had to do was pour ladlefuls of fermented apple juice into wooden cups. Bert was a voluble man, eager to converse with everyone who came by, and Rosemary soon seized her chance to uncork one of the vials in her pocket and discreetly tip its contents into the cauldron. She swirled the cider vigorously with her ladle.

When she next looked up, Annie the brewer was at the stall, Rowan holding tight to her skirts.

“Good evening, Mother Rosemary,” Annie said brightly. She smiled fondly at her son. “We’ll have a cup, won’t we? I’ll give you a sip.”

Rosemary served them and watched the brewer let the little boy taste the cider first. Then Annie drank deeply from the cup. Rosemary couldn’t help staring, as though her potion’s effect would be instantaneous and visible. The one she’d added to the cauldron was the simpler of the two, though highly concentrated. She needed as many of the townspeople to stop by for a cup of cider as possible. Given the general enthusiasm for cider at the harvest festival, she was not overly fretful. Her pocket held more vials, since one cauldron would hardly last the whole evening.

Rosemary had ladled out half of the second cauldron when there finally came a lull. The dancing had started up in one corner of the square, and she could make out Violet and Lily twirling to the scrape of the fiddle and the buzz of the hurdy-gurdy. This was her opportunity. Behind the counter, she filled two cups with cider and unstopped the bottle in the other pocket of her dress. She held her breath as she divided its contents between the two cups. This potion, which had required all her art to fashion, was only meant for Violet, but she didn’t trust herself to remember which cup she’d dosed by the time she reached the girls. It would do Lily no harm; it was merely superfluous.

Both hands full, she advanced carefully across the cobbles of the square and arrived just as the musicians finished the dance.

“Mother!” Violet spotted her at once. “We were wondering where you’d gotten to. Why didn’t you stay in the dining room?”

“I’ve been helping Bert at his stall,” said Rosemary. “I wasn’t going to sit indoors all evening.” She proffered the cups of cider. “I thought you might be thirsty.”

Violet and Lily happily accepted the drinks and sipped from them at once. It happened so quickly. Rosemary wished she had said something more before letting the cider touch Violet’s lips, but she had no idea what she might have said. The girls chatted with her for a few more minutes. There was no discernible change in their manner, but the potion needed an hour or two to take effect. By the time Rosemary made her way back to Bert’s stall, she could remember nothing of her last exchange with her daughter.

Rather than staying in town until the end of the festival, Rosemary walked home while the moon yet lit her way and sank into bed, where she slept soundly until morning. She stayed close to her cottage in the woods for a few days, but she couldn’t hide forever. On the third day, she returned to face what her spells had wrought.

She wended her way through the streets of town, taking a meandering route to Violet and Lily’s place. She knew she was stalling. A handful of people waved at her or greeted her, but unusually, nobody inquired about her daughter or asked whether she was headed to the bookshop. It might have been a coincidence, but she didn’t think so.

Finally, she turned onto the street the bookshop was on. By a stroke of luck, Violet was outside, shelving volumes on the book cart they wheeled out on sunny days to entice passersby to browse. Rosemary ambled up the block, turning her head from side to side as though unsure where she was. For once, though, she knew her way all too clearly.

Violet glanced up and smiled at her, and even before she spoke, Rosemary knew she had succeeded. She couldn’t have explained what it was about Violet’s expression that told her, what precise spark of intimacy was absent, but it was plain to her.

“Good morning, Mother Rosemary,” Violet said. She made no move to approach Rosemary, nor did she even pause in her work.

“Good morning, child,” Rosemary said, almost choking on the word. She hadn’t wanted to say Violet’s name, lest she infuse it with telltale feeling, but what came out still made her heart twist so viciously she nearly brought a hand to her chest. Instead, she gestured vaguely forward, as though to indicate a destination, and hastened past the bookshop.

She would have to come back, but she needed to collect herself first. She’d thought she was prepared, that it would be like when her mother had stopped knowing her, but it was so much worse. Grandmama Ivy had had a life before Rosemary, but Violet’s life was contained wholly within Rosemary’s. Rosemary had given her life, had raised her, had sent her out into the world little by little without ever having to let her go entirely. Until today.

Rosemary had considered alternative means of achieving her purpose. She could have simply left, quietly disappearing and living out her decline somewhere out of the way where no one knew her or would care if she forgot them. But that would have hurt Violet too. Rosemary couldn’t work out which betrayal would have hurt Violet worse; in the end it didn’t matter, since Rosemary had refused both options. She could have given the potion to Violet to drink and then left, thereby sparing herself some pain, perhaps. She was too cowardly for that, though, or too selfish. She did not want to abandon her home, to go into exile and suffer alone or among strangers, not as long as a cobweb of memory still clung to the rafters of her mind. This town would take care of its forest witch, even if that was all she was to any of them, Violet included.

When she felt steady enough, she wandered back toward the bookshop and passed by its front windows, first in one direction, then the other way, and then back again. A bell tinkled as the shop door opened, and Violet stepped out.

“Do you need something, Mother Rosemary?”

Rosemary looked vaguely past her daughter, not wanting to glimpse the gentle but slightly impersonal concern she imagined she would see in Violet’s eyes. “I seem to have lost my way.”

“Where are you going?” Violet asked kindly.

“Home.”

There was a pause in which Violet’s surprise was palpable; this was clearly not the answer she’d expected. But, recovering, she said, “It’s just three more blocks that way, and then a left turn down Baker Street, which will take you all the way to …”

She trailed off, as though she doubted Rosemary was following. For her part, Rosemary thought her face must show nothing but abject misery, but perhaps such wretchedness was not inconceivable for an old woman in her situation.

“Why don’t you come in?” Violet suggested. “Have a drink of water, and then we’ll walk you home. It’s nearly time to close for lunch anyway.”

While Rosemary rested in the rocking chair in the front corner of the bookshop, she overheard snatches of Violet and Lily’s discussion in the back.

“… seem quite right …forgotten how to get …”

“… fine at the harvest festival … seen her as often in town, lately.”

They reached some decision, and as they came down the aisle between the bookcases, Rosemary heard their voices more clearly.

“How well do you remember the way to her cottage?” Lily was asking.

“I’m sure we can find it,” Violet said. “We all go there to request a remedy now and again, don’t we?”

After protesting at their excess of kindness, Rosemary let the girls accompany her out of town, through the forest, and into her own garden.

“I’d forgotten how lovely it is,” Violet told her wife, admiring the profusion of cornflowers and silvery herbs.

“May we come in a moment?” Lily said to Rosemary. Her tone was polite, but Rosemary could tell Lily was determined to see whether there would be further cause for worry inside.

“Of course,” she said.

She poured them cups of sweet well water and asked them about business at the bookstore, as she imagined she would have done to paper over her embarrassment if any other shopkeepers had brought her home. All this pretense exhausted her, though. Even sitting across the table from her daughter, who had instinctively chosen the chair that had been hers since childhood, was almost too much for her. She half wished she could forget Violet’s name again, so that the gulf between what they each remembered would not be quite so vast.

Finally, she announced that she had to lie down. She was a little surprised that the girls didn’t spring up at once to excuse themselves. She told them they were welcome to wash their hands if they wished and could let themselves out. Then she retreated to her bed in the cottage’s second room without closing the door.

Violet and Lily stayed in the kitchen a few minutes more. Though they kept their voices low, Rosemary’s ears were still sharp.

“The cottage looks well kept,” Lily was saying, “but I worry about her living here all alone. Especially if she’s forgetting the way home. The forest is a big place.”

“I doubt she could be persuaded to come live in town,” Violet said. “Not right away, at least. But we can talk to everyone, and we’ll all help look after her.”

The following day, Violet came by again to see how Rosemary was faring. Rosemary pretended not to remember yesterday’s incident and called Violet Lily.

“I’m Violet,” Violet said earnestly. Then her brow crinkled, as though she regretted correcting Rosemary. She did not look broken up. This was Rosemary’s purpose fulfilled, this was what it had all been for, and yet she wanted to weep.

Most days, someone from town stopped by her house to check on her. It might be Violet or Lily—rarely both of them together—Annie with or without Rowan, Bert with one of his sons. If Violet seemed to come more often than most of the others, it might have been Rosemary’s imagination, and in any case, soon she could no longer keep track. She couldn’t have said who had visited the day before, or even that very morning.

But what her mind stubbornly refused to forget was who Violet was. Violet, who saw her only as Mother Rosemary the forest witch now. On her good days, when Rosemary remembered exactly what she had done, she did not regret her actions. She was not remorseful. But oh, how she ached. When the day came when she didn’t know her daughter anymore either, she would welcome it, like the peace of death itself.

Return to Issue #99

Behind the Scenes with Eleanor Glewwe

What was the initial inspiration for this story, and were there significant changes from that inspiration through edits and revisions? 

I don’t remember how the idea for this story originally came to me. According to some early notes, the initial idea was about an Alzheimer’s patient choosing to erase their loved ones’ memories of them rather than subject those loved ones to the pain of seeing the patient forget them. I noted that the story could be fantasy. I had to work out why the character would decide she had no option other than to make her loved ones forget her. And apparently–I had forgotten this–I considered, probably briefly, writing the story from Rosemary’s daughter’s perspective rather than from the perspective of the person losing her memory. But once I actually began to write the story, nothing much changed through the subsequent drafting and editing. 

How does this story fit into your body of work – is it similar in ways to what you usually write or is it very different?

This story is different in certain ways from a lot of my other work. It’s pretty unusual for me to write about–and from the perspective of–an older protagonist. Also, in most of my stories, the characters are people of color and the setting (if it’s a secondary world) is non-Western in certain ways. That’s not the case in “A Cup of Forgetting,” where the setting is of the European fairy tale variety and one could fairly assume that all the characters are white. On the other hand, I do think this story has the same tone and voice that makes all my stories sound like they were written by me (hopefully that’s not wishful thinking on my part!).  

How would you describe the heart of this story?

I’d say the heart of this story is one woman’s choice to make a decision for herself and others for reasons she believes are justified. It’s a story about agency, and who has it, and who has a right to it.