There was once a house built out of memories and inside this house lived a woman called The Memory Snatcher. This woman was my Aunt Beydan.
She was a sorceress and as a child I feared she would stalk me in my sleep and steal all my memories until I could no longer remember who I was. She looked like a witch:. She smelt of camel milk and Camel cigarettes. She could walk into a room filled with joy and slash the niceness in half.
So yes, I detested this Memory Snatcher. But in a small way I saved her life when I was a child. And she returned this favor when I needed it the most as an adult. Memory Snatchers are demoniacs trapped between the past and the future, between the spirit world and the earth, belonging to themselves neither in soul nor sense. So my parents locked her up in the basement and shackled her to her bed. Reader, reader, do not get it twisted.
I repeat, do not get it twisted. Every fruit, whether ripe or rotten, has its roots. So too does this tale. Before Beydan became a Memory Snatcher she was a Mother. Her identity was not hers to keep. Her life was a splintered spine, leaves too loose: an illegible manuscript left languishing on the shelf. She belonged to the men in her family and Satan was now one of them.
These men waged war for the rights to her soul using her body as battlefield. In order to punish each other, in order to prove sovereignty over the other, they thrashed Beydan physically and psychically.
