Vert first saw the advertising in a sidebar with her email program. Three-dimensional Memory (aka 3DM) was a new service that many beauty shops now offered along with waxing, massage, nails, and the old favorites hair coloring and cutting. 3DM allowed clients to re-experience memories from their unconscious. Intrigued, she decided to give it a try.

Vert laid back in the comfortable lounge chair and breathed deeply as the technician adjusted the face mask and cranked on the mist. Vert felt herself fading into unconsciousness immediately. In her “dream” she saw a screen with a list of all memories, categorized by feeling. Amazing! She used the touch screen to scroll through her happy memories.

There it was: the day her parents took her and her brother to Paradise Point for a picnic. She touched the screen; immediately she was a child again, looking through her child’s eyes at the beach, running and laughing with Jimmy, her brother. She smelled the charcoal from the grill and saw the seagulls wheeling overhead and heard their cries. Looking back, she saw her mom setting items on the picnic table and her dad turning the food on the grill.

It was then she noticed a man, standing in the shadows of the trees, looking towards her parents. He looked familiar. Her parents were caught up in their activities and didn’t notice him. Jimmy called Vert to come and see something so she went to the water’s edge to see minnows hiding in the seaweed.

Then it came to her; she knew who the man was. His face was on the front page of the newspaper: he was the man who raped her mother and killed her father.

Vert ran as fast as she could back towards her parents to tell them what she knew. She tried to explain to them, but they, like she and Jimmy, were like newsreels playing in her subconscious…

[319 words]

Fandango is the host of Fandango’s Flash Fiction Challenge.  Fandango says:
Welcome to “Fandango’s Flash Fiction Challenge.” Each week I will be posting a photo I grab off the internet and challenge bloggers to write a flash fiction piece or poem inspired by the photo. There are no style or word limits.

The [top] image [above] is from Cottonbro at Pexels.com.