Memory Wall: Stories

by Anthony Doerr

Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing.

She is remembering how to remember. This is what they want to hear.

A person can get up and leave her life. The world is that big. You can take a $4,000 inheritance and walk into an airport and before your heartache catches up with you, you can be in the middle of a desert city listening to dogs bark and no one for three thousand miles will know your name.

she wonders how she can be a thirty-five-year-old orphan when just yesterday she was a nine-year-old in Moon Boots. When

“The stars,” a junior high science teacher once told Herb, “are up there during the day, too.” And understanding that changed Herb’s life.

Draw the darkness, Esther thinks, and it will point out the light which has been in the paper all the while. Inside this world is folded another.

Why, Esther wonders, do any of us believe our lives lead outward through time? How do we know we aren’t continually traveling inward, toward our centers? Because this is how it feels to Esther when she sits on her deck in Geneva, Ohio, in the last spring of her life; it feels as if she is being drawn down some path that leads deeper inside, toward a miniature, shrouded, final kingdom that has waited within her all along.

You bury your childhood here and there. It waits for you, all your life, to come back and dig it up.