Fictional Stories for Fictional Audiences

The Price of Forgetting

Money as Pain

Jun 10, 2025

The wad of cash Marcus shoved across my kitchen table still smelled funny. Five grand. All of it, crumpled twenties and fifties, to make me forget her. Not forget her name, or her face, but the specific, gut-punch feeling he got every time he saw cherry blossom petals fall. That was their thing, apparently. Now it just made him want to puke.

"Just... make it stop hurting like that, Alex," he’d mumbled, eyes red-rimmed. "I can't afford to feel this broke and this broken."

I didn't argue. People come to me for one thing: to make the unbearable... affordable. I took the cash. Didn't count it. The weight in my hand, the greasy feel of the bills – that was the real price tag. I shoved it into an empty mason jar, screwed the lid tight, and scribbled on a sticky note: Marcus. Cherry Blossoms. Gut Punch. Slapped it on the jar. Added it to the shelf.

My apartment? Forget minimalist chic. It looked like a hoarder’s bank vault. Floor-to-ceiling shelves, crammed not with books, but with jars. Glass jars. Hundreds of them. Each one stuffed with cash. Tens, twenties, the occasional heartbreaking stack of ones. Each jar labelled with a name and a pain point:

Sarah: Laugh of her ex. Sounds like nails now.
David: Smell of cinnamon rolls (his mom’s, before the stroke).
Anya: Sight of a yellow raincoat (kid she lost).

The Cash Collection. My monument to other people’s paid-for peace. My life’s work? Taking a sliver of someone’s agony and locking it away in a jar, in exchange for the cash they’d scraped together to buy numbness. I told myself I was a necessity. A trauma broker. The truth? I was just good at helping people bury things alive. And I got paid well to do it.

Here’s the kicker, the part I never admit: I kept the cash. All of it. Didn't invest it. Didn't spend it on fancy crap. Just... kept it. Stacked it. Watched it grow. Why? Because that weight, that tangible pile of traded pain? It felt solid. Real. Unlike the hollow space where my own feelings used to be. Safer, somehow, to be surrounded by the echoes of other people’s disasters than to risk my own.

Buzzzzzzzz.

The intercom screamed through the quiet. Another customer. Another installment plan on oblivion.

She looked younger than her eyes. Chloe. Couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, but her gaze had that thousand-yard stare you see in war vets. Her voice was sandpaper. "I need to forget the ocean."

I gestured to the rickety chair – my "client chair" – surrounded by the silent, cash-filled testament to human suffering. "The ocean?" I prompted, leaning against the counter. My own hands felt suddenly cold.

"My brother, Ben," she whispered. A single tear tracked through dust on her cheek. She didn’t wipe it. "He... he loved it. Surfed every dawn. Last year... riptide. Some tourist panicked. Ben went in. He didn't..." She swallowed hard, the sound loud in the room. "Now? The sound of waves... any waves... even on my damn phone... it's not water. It's the silence after he went under. That awful, sucking quiet. I can't go home. Can't breathe near a puddle. Please." She pulled a thick envelope from her worn backpack. Threw it on the table. It landed with a soft thud. "Take it. Take the sound. Make it just... water again."

I didn’t ask how she got that much cash. You learn not to. I just picked up the envelope. Heavy. Probably everything she had. Maybe more. The paper felt cheap, desperate.

"Okay, Chloe," I said, my voice rough. "Close your eyes. Think of the waves. Really hear them. Let it fill you up." My fingers brushed her temples. It’s not magic. It’s focus. A brutal, shared concentration.

And it hit me. Not just the sound. The whole damn tsunami. The screaming tourist. Ben’s determined sprint into the churning grey. The horrifying moment the water just... swallowed him. The silence. God, that silence afterwards, louder than any wave. And Chloe’s own scream, trapped inside her throat, raw and silent too. The salt spray felt real on my face. The despair was a physical weight, crushing my ribs.

I pulled back. Fast. Sweat beaded on my forehead. Chloe gasped like she’d been drowning. The raw terror in her eyes was duller now. Blank. Exhausted.

"Is it... gone?" she rasped.

"The sound," I confirmed, shoving the thick envelope into a fresh jar. My hands shook a little. "The way it ties to... that moment. The memory’s still there. But the trigger? The sound itself linking straight to the horror? Severed. It’ll just be waves again." Maybe. Hopefully. Eventually. Who the hell knows?

She nodded, vacant. Stood up. Didn’t look at the jar holding her payment, her pain. Just shuffled out. A ghost who’d just sold a piece of her haunting.

Alone. Just me and the jars. I held Chloe’s jar. The cash inside was a dense, accusing brick. I walked towards the "Grief & Loss" section – yeah, I have sections, pathetic, right? – but stopped dead.

This one... this despair... it tasted familiar. Not the details. The hollowness. That echoing void after the world implodes. It vibrated against something deep inside my own carefully barricaded emptiness.

My feet moved without telling my brain. I crouched low, behind the sofa, where dust bunnies held court. There, shoved way back on the bottom shelf, almost invisible: one single jar. No sticky note. Just thick, grimy glass. Inside? Not a neat stack. A messy wad of old bills – some twenties, mostly crumpled fives and ones. Kid money. Money that smelled like wet earth and panic.

I hadn’t touched it in fifteen years. Not since I paid Mrs. Gable down the street to make me forget. The reason I started this whole screwed-up business.

Chloe’s jar pulsed hot in my hand. My own forgotten jar... it seemed to hum back. A low, sick frequency. My carefully constructed inner dam? It cracked. Just a hairline fracture. Enough.

The sound of rain. Not waves. Rain. Hammering on our old trailer’s tin roof. The smell of mud and diesel from the logging road above. The screech of brakes giving way. The awful, wet thud. Then... silence. Not peaceful quiet. The ringing, deafening silence after the rain, after the impact that took my parents. The silence that made the sound of rain feel like knives. The silence that made twelve-year-old me empty her piggy bank, her birthday money, every crumpled dollar from her dad’s old jacket pocket, and beg Mrs. Gable to take the rain away. Just like Chloe just paid me to take the waves.

I hadn’t forgotten the crash. I’d just bankrupted myself to silence the soundtrack. Built this entire fortress of other people’s paid miseries to hide inside. Because facing my own financial ruin – the cost of that silence – was too damn terrifying.

I looked at Chloe’s jar. Heavy with her fresh hell. Then at my own dusty jar of kid-money and stolen rain-silence. Saw myself clearly for the first time in years. Not a trauma broker. Not a necessity. A scared kid hiding behind a mountain of other people’s pain-money. A hoarder of despair, because admitting my own bankruptcy felt like death.

A hot tear escaped. Just one. It tracked through the dust on my cheek, mirroring Chloe’s path. Not for Marcus, or Chloe, or any of the ghosts in jars around me. For me. For the terrified kid who heard the rain and went broke trying to silence it.

Slowly, stupidly, I reached for my jar. The glass was cold, gritty. I pulled it out. Didn’t open it. Just set it on the scratched kitchen table. Right next to Chloe’s still-warm jar of ocean silence.

Two payments. Two silences bought. Two monuments to the crushing cost of going broke to feel numb.

The Cash Collection wasn't just a pile of money. It was a cage. Built bill by bill, jar by jar, to keep my own financial ruin – my own terrifying emotional poverty – locked away.

I sat there in the gloom, surrounded by the fortune I’d made from other people’s pain. The silence wasn't comforting anymore. It was the heavy, suffocating quiet before you finally admit you’re drowning in debt.

Getting free? It wouldn’t come from taking another payment. It would start when I finally cracked open my own damn jar. Faced the kid’s money inside. Remembered the cost of that silence. And finally let the rain fall.

My fingers trembled. Not reaching for Chloe’s jar. Reaching for my own. The rain, paid to be silent for fifteen years, waited behind the grimy glass. Time to go bankrupt all over again. Time to finally hear the storm.

The silence in my apartment was now thick. Suffocating. Like cheap carpet soaked in spilled beer and regret. My own jar – the grimy one stuffed with kid-money and fifteen years of terrified silence – sat on the scratched kitchen table. Right next to Chloe’s thick envelope of ocean-hell. Two down payments on oblivion. Staring at me.

I hadn’t slept. Couldn’t. Every time I closed my eyes? Rain. Not the gentle kind. The hammering, angry kind. On tin. The smell of wet pine needles and… something sharper. Gasoline? Maybe. My hands wouldn’t stop shaking. Not fear, exactly. More like… the tremors you get after you’ve held something too heavy for too long. The weight of all those jars. All that paid-for pain.

Here’s the ugly truth they don’t tell you about selling silence: You don’t just take their money. You take the weight of the thing they’re paying to forget. It sits in your bones. In the greasy feel of the bills. In the smell. Marcus’s cash reeked of stale bar floors. Chloe’s? Salt. Actual, dried sea salt crusting the envelope’s edge. Like she’d clutched it walking the shore one last time.

Buzzzzzzz.

The intercom screamed again. My heart did a frantic tap-dance against my ribs. Too soon. Way too soon. Who pays to forget before breakfast?

I pressed the talk button, my voice raspy. "Yeah?"

"Alex? It’s… it’s Chloe." Her voice was thin. Wobbly. Not the hollowed-out ghost from yesterday. Scared.

Shit. Buyers remorse? That happened. Sometimes they’d show up begging for a refund, for the pain back, like it was a sweater that didn’t fit. As if I could stuff that genie back in the bottle. Or the jar. I opened the door.

She looked worse. Eyes red-raw, hair tangled like she’d been fighting the wind. But there was something else there. Not just fear. Panic. Raw, animal panic.

"It’s not gone," she blurted before I could speak. "The waves. They’re… different. Not Ben’s silence. Worse."

I stepped back, let her stumble in. The stale air of my apartment felt suddenly charged. Electric. Dangerous. "Different how?" I kept my voice low. Calm. Like talking down a spooked horse. Inside? My own jar pulsed on the table. Rain. Tin roof. Silence.

"It’s not the sound," Chloe choked out, wrapping her arms tight around herself. "It’s… the money."

I froze. "The… money?"

"The cash I gave you. In the envelope." She pointed a trembling finger at Chloe’s jar on the table. "Where did I get it, Alex?"

I frowned. "You brought it. I didn’t ask." Standard practice. Don’t ask where the blood money comes from. Makes it easier to sleep. Sometimes.

"I sold my car," she whispered, her gaze fixed on the jar like it might bite. "My crappy Honda. Got five grand. Barely. That’s what’s in there. My car money." She swallowed hard. "This morning… I heard the ocean. Not in my head. Outside. On the radio. Some surfing ad. And instead of the silence… that awful silence after Ben… I heard…" She shuddered. "I heard the clunk of the dealer handing me the envelope of cash. The smell of his cheap cologne. The feeling of the passenger seat being gone. That hollow space where my car used to be."

She looked at me, her eyes wide with a new kind of terror. "It’s attached, Alex. The forgetting… it didn’t just take the ocean sound linked to Ben. It took the ocean sound… and stitched it to the pain of losing my car. To paying. The cost. Now every wave sounds like… like losing everything I had left."

My blood turned to ice water. Stitched. Attached. I looked from her jar to my own grimy one on the table. That messy wad of kid-money. Bills from my piggy bank. Birthday cash. The crumpled fives and ones I’d scrounged from Dad’s old jacket…

The Twist Hits Like a Punch:

That’s why I kept the cash. All of it. Not because I was greedy. Not because it felt solid.

Because the pain sticks to the money.

Mrs. Gable, the old Mnemosyne down the street who took my rain-silence payment? She didn’t just take the memory. She transferred the association. From the rain… to the act of paying. To the weight of those bills in my twelve-year-old hand. The greasy feel. The smell of stale bubblegum and desperation on the cash. The agony of being broke and broken.

That’s why the sound of rain didn’t gut me anymore. Because the trauma wasn’t gone. It was banked. Invested. The trigger shifted from rain… to the ghost of that payment. To the very idea of money. That’s why I hoarded it. Why touching cash, any cash, felt like handling live wires coated in other people’s grief. Why I lived like a hermit surrounded by paid-for agony. Every jar wasn't just a stored pain. It was a landmine. And I was sitting in the minefield.

"Chloe," I said, my voice scraping bottom. "The forgetting… it doesn’t erase. It transfers. The pain finds a new anchor. Usually… the payment itself."

Her face crumpled. "My car? Losing my car is the price? Forever?"

"It’s… the association." I looked at my own jar. The rain wasn’t the problem anymore. The cost was. The weight of that kid-money. The feeling of being utterly, terrifyingly bankrupt. Emotionally. Financially. That’s the silence I’d really been paying for. And I’d built my whole damn life around collecting more of it.

Suddenly, the shelves weren't just full. They were screaming. Hundreds of jars. Millions in transferred agony. Marcus’s cherry blossom pain anchored to… what? The bar tab he couldn’t pay? Sarah’s ex’s laugh tied to the maxed-out credit card she used? This wasn't a collection. It was a debt factory. And I was the foreman.

Chloe slumped into the rickety chair, staring at her jar. "So… what now? I’m broke and now waves sound like repo men?"

I looked at my own jar. The one I’d been too terrified to open. The answer wasn't inside it. The answer was it. And all the others.

The Unforeseen Worldbuilding Cracks Open:

This wasn't just my messed-up coping mechanism. This was the economy. The dirty secret of the Mnemosyne network Mrs. Gable hinted at years ago. We weren't healers. We were launderers. We didn’t delete pain. We laundered it. Washed it through the medium of cash, transferring its hook from the original trauma to the act of financial sacrifice. The bigger the pain, the bigger the payment… and the heavier the new anchor.

No wonder people came back sometimes, hollow-eyed and confused, complaining of new, strange aches. They weren't cured. They’d just taken out a high-interest emotional loan. And the collateral was their peace of mind.

Chloe’s panicked breathing filled the room. My own jar hummed on the table, a low, sickening frequency. The rain wasn't the threat anymore. The cost was. The terrifying, bottomless debt of forgetting.

I reached out. Not for Chloe’s jar. Not even for my own.

I picked up Marcus’s jar. The one labelled Cherry Blossoms. Gut Punch. I unscrewed the lid. The smell of stale beer and hopelessness wafted out.

"Alex?" Chloe whispered, her voice tight with new fear. "What are you doing?"

I didn’t know. Not really. But I knew this: hoarding the debt wasn't working. Maybe… maybe the only way out was through. Maybe you had to spend the pain to break its hold.

My hand hovered over the crumpled bills inside Marcus’s jar. The physical manifestation of his paid-for agony. The weight of a thousand rainstorms and silent oceans pressed down.

"Something stupid," I breathed. And plunged my hand in. The cash felt… alive. Pulsing. Sick. Like grabbing a fistful of raw nerves.

The storm hit. Not rain. Cherry blossoms. A blizzard of pink, smelling faintly of cola and cheap perfume. The gut-punch sorrow of a love lost. Marcus’s pain. Raw. Unfiltered. Flooding into me. I gasped, doubling over, the jar slipping from my other hand, bills spilling onto the dusty floor like fallen petals.

It hurt. God, it hurt worse than anything. Worse than the silence.

But beneath the pain? For the first time in fifteen years… a terrible, electric aliveness. The rain wasn't just a sound anymore. It was a feeling. And it was finally, finally mine.

Chloe stared, horrified. "Alex!"

I looked up from the floor, tears streaming, Marcus's heartbreak a fresh wound in my chest, the scent of cherry blossoms thick in the air. My own jar sat untouched on the table. Still silent. Still terrifying.

But now? Now I knew what I had to buy back. And the price was going to be astronomical.

I wiped my face with the back of my hand, smearing tears and dust. Looked at Chloe, then at the chaos of spilled cash and borrowed sorrow.

"Get comfortable," I rasped, my voice raw with someone else's grief. "We need to talk about interest rates."

Thank you!

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