The Last Conversation (Forward Collection, #5)

by Paul Tremblay

the first treadmill was invented by a man in nineteenth-century England. Its purpose was to punish and break its prisoners. You quoted a prison guard named James Hardie, who once wrote of the treadmill: “monotonous steadiness, and not its severity, which constitutes its terror.”

A phantom is something you imagine, something that isn’t there. You wonder if time is a phantom because it feels like you walked for longer than thirty minutes. You wonder if she is lying to you.

These memories are proof of you, and someday soon you won’t need or rely on Anne to define you.

To forget is to lose something that was once yours, that was once of yourself. But how could one lose something as expansive as an ocean in a dusty corner of one’s mind? What if, instead, to forget is to open a door to a void; the memory is not retrievable because it is not there, was never there.

“How many of us said yes?” “None of you. Not a single fucking one of you.”