The Dress by Yana Bazylevych

He was an Old Man filled with regret,
but he didn’t know it. The details of his past seemed distant and ambiguous, and he couldn’t quite grasp what was real. Sometimes he would remember something – a random name or a face, but there would almost never be a corresponding memory attached to them. The brief moments of clarity hid did have were getting rarer, the times of chaos and confusion when he could hardly remember his own name were becoming his new reality.
He was an Old Man, that much was clear. He sometimes had difficulty moving, his joints hurt on a daily basis and it was getting harder and harder to see. At times a Young Man with dark hair would come around to visit him, and it was a shock every time the stranger told him he was his son.
The Old Man remembered his days well enough, granted they were all the same. Just this dreary, endless grind of existence inside his house, punctuated by occasional visits from the young Man who brought him food and mail and looked at him strangely. The problem was remembering anything beyond. No matter how hard he tried, the Old Man couldn’t remember his youth, or his job, or even his family. He would often sit in his chair on the porch, smoking slowly and thinking about the things he could have been. He liked touching metal and wood, he seemed to even faintly remember fixing something around the house. So perhaps a mechanic? But no, he couldn’t have been one – he had a feeling he was some sort of artist, a master of some complex and beautiful craft.
The Man would sometimes pick up a random object from around his house and would feel something shift within himself. He would feel the significance of that object in his very bones, but try as he might – no clear memory ever emerged.
He liked to come into the garage by his house and look around all the objects stored there. Among old tools and the pieces of discarded furniture were many stacks of cardboard boxes. The Old Man would often pick one and examine the objects inside – but they never held any meaning for him. As far as he was concerned, they could have belonged to a stranger.
One day, he was rummaging around one of the boxes in his garage when his fingers touched something he had not expected – it was a piece of smooth fabric. Squinting through the dust, the Old Man pulled it out and brought it up to the light. It was a little girl’s dress from a bygone era, with a flowery pattern and lacy little collar. There are dark brown stains all down the front of it, stains that look awfully like dried blood. All of a sudden, he feels his heart skip a beat as he stares at the dress, and it’s as though a lighting bolt flashes inside his brain.
A small girl’s scream as he advances slowly and confidently towards her, like a predator cornering his prey, knowing she doesn’t have a chance of escaping. The crunch of a bone breaking as he squeezes her wrist, holding her down. The wonderful, heavy smell of blood, as it pools around her, staining the lacy white collar of her dress. He remembers bringing his knife slowly up to the tortured child’s throat, tracing it down her cheek – she had finally given up screaming and was just staring at him, eyes wide and terrified. He remembered the feeling of finally slicing her throat, the
warm spurt of blood, the sound of skin and muscle severing, the child’s eyes finally glazing over, staring blankly at the ceiling.
The Old Man gasped, his fingers clutching the old dress tightly as the memories finally come – not one by one in perfect order, but all at once and jumbled together. He remembered the different children, the women, that one man who had seen too much. He remembered all the sheds and hotels and dark alleys, the blood and the screams, the way their eyes seemed to turn to glass when he finally allowed them to die – but most of all he remembered Her, the little girl with the lacy white collar, his first one.
The Old Man lowered himself slowly onto the dirty garage floor, remembering his craft. Finally, he had found it – his life’s work, the art he had mastered to perfection – the art of death. He was feeling a strange mix of pride and guilt, the feeling he now remembered very well. This is who he was, he understood this clearly now. This is why the objects around his house or even his son’s face sparked no memories – they were meaningless, compared to what he was holding in hands right now. This was a treasure – the bloodstained dress of a child he had murdered more than half a century ago was the meaning which had been missing from his life for so long.
The Murderer put the miraculous dress back into the box, hoping to find something else he had kept as a souvenir. He was still thinking of his craft, of the depth of precision and mastery it required. His mind seemed clearer than every as he remembered each one of them, a content smile spreading over the wrinkled old face. Wait, what was his craft again? The Old Man straightened up suddenly, looking around. He had found something, something wonderful and meaningful – but what was it?
He surveyed the piles of rubbish around him – the remains of someone else’s life, entirely meaningless to him. He turned around and shuffled slowly back towards the house, his shoulders hunched forwards in defeat. “Maybe I’ll look around there again tomorrow” he thought to himself vaguely, without any real hope. He was an Old Man filled with regret, but he didn’t know it.