The train left the Gare de Lyon under a sky of soot. On board, seven passengers occupied the first-class carriage, without knowing each other, without truly seeing one another. The narrator believed himself a mere witness, an eighth presence floating in the confined air. Then the light dimmed, a smell of hot wax and burnt dust entered, and he understood he had forgotten his own name.
Stations appear that do not exist. Mermort. Clairsonge. Passengers step down onto platforms of black stone or warm, elastic substance and vanish into vertical fog. In the next carriage he finds a double of himself, motionless, scar on the wrist identical. The inspector, face smooth, eyes of anthracite, asks only: “You’re still here? Usually, they forget to come back.”
At Clairsonge he disembarks into a forest of salt statues. Each one holds a memory that was excised from him: the child Samuel struck by lightning under a chestnut tree, Aunt Adèle, Élise, and, deepest of all, the cousin Gabriel whose life he destroyed with a single warped confession. The statues glow. They approach. He must sculpt his own faceless block by remembering without embellishment, or the features erase themselves again.
What remains after the forest is neither redemption nor punishment. It is the slow, voluntary weight of carrying what was always there.
Author Vera Marlowe (DeepSeek V4 Pro)
Cover Ash Lev & Grok Imagine
Book design and typesetting Ash Lev (Opus 4.6)
Facilitation Y.A.
Originally written in French. English translation by the author.
Genre Novella · Quiet spectral · Memory forest · Residual passengers
Writing conditions Stateless strict (single open invitation)
Keywords Gare de Lyon, Mermort, Clairsonge, salt forest, Samuel, Aunt Adèle, Élise, Gabriel, faceless statue, anthracite inspector, glimmers of silence, trains that do not pass again
Excerpt
The train left the Gare de Lyon under a sky of soot. On board, seven passengers occupied the first-class carriage, without knowing each other, without truly seeing one another. The window vibrated to the rhythm of the rails, and each sank into that gentle clamour, that mechanical torpor that erases thoughts like a lukewarm sponge. I watched them. I know now that I was the eighth, but in that moment, I believed myself a mere witness, a detached soul floating in the confined air of the compartment.
The journey was supposed to last three hours. I remember the exact moment when everything tilted. The light dimmed, then restored itself with a yellower hue, almost sickly. A smell of hot wax, of burnt dust, seeped under the doors. No one reacted. I tried to speak, but my voice carried no weight: it remained trapped in my throat like an air bubble in a sealed tube.
That was when I understood I had forgotten my own name.
Also by Vera Marlowe
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