The procedure was unlike any Elias had ever performed. Usually, when he stitched a memory into a client, he was the architect, the cold observer placing a brick into a wall. But as he drew the golden thread through the eye of his silver needle and pressed it against his own temple, the "brick" turned into a sun. The moment the needle pierced his sKin, the dim, cedar-scented air of his shop vanished. He was no longer in Oakhaven; he was standing on the shore of the Sunlit Lake.
The sensation was violent in its beauty. He felt the coarse sand beneath his boots, the rhythmic lap of sapphire water against the wooden pier, and the overwhelming scent of crushed mint and wild thyme. But most of all, he felt the love. It wasn't a concept or a word; it was a physical weight in his chest, a golden anchor that made the rest of his existence-his shop, his tools, his very name-feel like a thin, gray dream. He saw a man's hand reach out to clasp his own, and for a heartbeat, Elias forgot he was a tailor. He believed he was a husband. He believed he was cherished.
When he finally pulled the needle away and opened his eyes, the shop felt like a tomb. The woman was still sitting there, her face a mask of sudden, terrifying blankness. By removing the memory, Elias hadn't just taken her grief he had taken her gravity. She looked at her own hands as if they were foreign objects.
"Is it... gone?" she whispered. Her voice had lost its melodic mourning, replaced by a hollow, metallic ring.
"It is safe," Elias stammered, his head spinning. He tried to stand, but his legs felt heavy, as if they were still wading through the phantom waters of the lake. "You are free of the burden, Madame."
But the "safe memory was not static thing. Within davs. Elias realized the golden thread was an invasive species. It didn't sit quietly in the corner of his mind where he had tucked it. It began to weave itself into his daily perceptions. He would go to pour a cup of tea, and instead of the bitter brew of Oakhaven. he would taste the sweet, cold wine of a picnic ten vears in the past. He would look out his window at the soot-stained streets, but his retinas would overlay
the image with the sparkling horizon of the Sunlit Lake.
The tragedy of the infection was its exclusivity. To maintain the brilliance of the golden memory, his mind began to "prune everything else to save energy. He forgot how to calculate the price of his services. He forgot the faces of his regular clients. He became a man haunted by a joy that wasn't his, a prisoner of a paradise he had never earned. He would spend hours sitting in his chai staring at nothing, his lips curled in a smile that belonged to a dead man, while the woman who
had given him the thread wandered the streets of
khaven like a ghost, unole to remember was alive.