Sci-Fi

by Scribes Stories · 6 min read · 1 view

The Memory Gardener Idris had pruned other people's memories for eleven years, and in that time he had learned that grief was the most common weed people asked him to clear. A husband wanting the memory of his wife's final months removed, keeping only the healthy years. A mother wanting the sting of a child's harsh words trimmed away, leaving the relationship intact but softer. It was delicate work, memory gardening, cutting only what needed cutting, leaving the roots strong enough that the person remained themselves. He had never once been asked to remove himself from someone else's mind, until the day his daughter walked into his clinic and asked for exactly that. Sana was nineteen now, though in his memory she was still six, still small enough to carry on his shoulders through the botanical gardens where he'd first learned to love the idea of tending things carefully. She sat across from him in the client chair, not the daughter chair, professional distance already installed between them like a wall he hadn't seen her build. "I want you to prune my memories of you," she said. "All of them. Clean removal, not a soften." Idris felt something in his chest fold in on itself, quiet and total, the way a structure collapses when its foundation gives out rather than its walls. "Why," he said, though he suspected he already knew. "Because you left when I was seven, and Mom raised me alone, and every memory I have of you is tangled up with every memory I have of her crying in the kitchen when she thought I was asleep. I can't get to the good years without dragging the bad ones with me, and I'm tired of carrying both. I want to start clean." "I understand the impulse," he said carefully, professional voice covering the tremor underneath. "But complete removal of a parent is almost never approved. The identity risk is too high. Memory doesn't grow in isolation, Sana. If I take out every memory of me, I'd have to take pieces of your mother too, pieces of your own childhood, because we're braided together in there whether either of us likes it or not." "Then braid me a different way," she said, and for a moment the wall cracked and he saw the six year old underneath it, furious and hurt and asking her father to fix something he had broken. "Isn't that what you do? You're the best gardener in the district. Everyone says so. Find a way." Idris was quiet for a long moment, professional training warring with something much older and much less trainable. "I can't remove myself from you," he finally said. "Not because the technology can't do it, but because I won't. Not as your gardener, and not as your father." "You don't have the right to refuse," she said, voice sharp now. "I'm an adult. It's my mind." "You're right," he said. "It is your mind, and you have every right to ask this of any gardener in the district, and most of them would probably do it without blinking, because most of them didn't spend six years carrying you through botanical gardens teaching you the names of flowers you've probably long since pruned out of your own memory by now, deliberately or not." Sana's eyes filled, the anger giving way underneath to something rawer. "Then what do you suggest," she said, "since you won't do the one thing I actually came here for?" "Let me prune the pain instead of the person," he said. "There's a difference, even if it doesn't feel like it right now. I can soften the sound of your mother crying so it's not so sharp every time it surfaces. I can dull the specific memory of the day I left, if it's the day itself and not the fact of it that hurts most. But I can't take out eleven years of a father who is sitting right here, still alive, still sorry, still willing to be pruned back into your life instead of out of it, if you'd ever let that happen." "Why should I let you back in," she said, "after you took yourself out?" "You shouldn't, not automatically," he agreed. "But I'm asking. Not as your gardener. As your father, who has spent eleven years learning exactly how much damage careless pruning can do to a person's roots, and who does not want to be the reason yours are damaged any further." She sat with that for a long time, arms crossed, jaw tight in a way that reminded him painfully of her mother. "I'm not saying yes to anything today," she said finally. "I'm not asking you to," he said. "I'm asking you to not do this today either. Go home. Sit with it. If you still want the full removal in a month, I'll refer you to Director Okwuosa, she's the best in the district after me, and she'll do it with more care than anyone else you'd find. But if there's any part of you that came here today hoping I'd say no, hoping I'd fight for a place in your memory instead of quietly cutting myself out of it, then give that part of you a month to speak louder." Sana stood, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand, still every inch the guarded nineteen year old, but something in her shoulders had loosened, some tension unspooling that had walked in tight as wire. "A month," she said. "That's it. I'm not promising anything after that." "A month is all I'm asking for," Idris said. "I've been waiting eleven years, Sana. I can manage one more." She left without hugging him, without softening further, and he did not expect her to. But at the door she paused, hand on the frame, and said, without turning around, "The gardens. Where you used to take me. Are they still there?" "Every Sunday morning," he said. "I still go. Old habit." "Maybe," she said, and did not finish the sentence, and did not need to, because for the first time in eleven years, maybe was the loudest, most hopeful word he had heard his daughter say. He sat alone in his clinic long after she'd gone, surrounded by the quiet machines that could reshape a mind's entire garden with a few careful cuts, and thought about how the hardest thing he had ever learned in eleven years of this work was also the simplest. Some things were not meant to be pruned away. Some things were only meant to be tended, patiently, for as long as it took, until they were ready to grow back toward the light on their own.