It was a strange and terrifying feeling to forget your own name.
“H-harrows, I mean, uh—Harry Hollows.”
It was supposed to be my first day of work at the local hardware store. I’d put on my best black suit, rehearsed my introduction a thousand times, and even memorised the names of a few common tools—just in case. By the time I reached the door of Knocks and Hardys, I was determined to do anything to keep this job. At least, that was before I stammered over my own name upon seeing the manager—a woman who I swore couldn’t possibly have been human.
The moment she lifted her gaze, the air in the shop shifted. Her eyes held a liquid, mercury-like sheen, utterly alien in a human face. With her hair drawn back into a tight ponytail, her cheekbones tipped slightly upwards into a cat-like feature. She didn’t blink.
“Hollows,” she repeated, as if trying to remember where she had heard that name from.
“Y-yes, I’ve been told that I start work today.”
“Hm.” She stood up from her stool. “Follow me.”
Was that it? No introduction, no questions. Nothing.
I picked up my briefcase and trailed behind her into the cramped store. It was only the size of a bedroom, with shelves of metalware, equipment and gears squeezed into any space you could find. Light fixtures of various designs and length hung from the ceiling, mercilessly cutting away any room for a breath. The aisle was so narrow I had to hunch my shoulders into a tight shrug, the wool of my suit scraping against the shelves on either side.
She stopped and turned. Her unnervingly silver eyes traveled the length of my suit, a slow and appraising sweep that made the fabric feel suddenly cheap and ill-fitting. Her eyebrows knitted together, not in confusion, but cold assessment.
“You know, you don’t have to wear all these,” She paused, seemingly trying to find the correct word. “… costumes. This is not an office job.”
The rest of the day passed by in complete silence. She showed me how to catalogue orders, restock items and write receipts. She worked fast, her hands moved with the chilling precision of a machine. Every instruction was clear and concise, and left no room for mistakes. In a desperate attempt to seem competent, I fumbled for the small notebook in my briefcase and tried to jot down as many tips as I could. Then, as soon as she was done explaining, she sent me back home saying there was nothing more for me to do here.
It only came to me while I was lying in bed, wide awake and staring at the ceiling fan, that I did not know her name.
For weeks, the manager gave the same set of orders: to restock and be on the lookout for customers while she went to the back room and worked on tougher projects. Nothing too difficult, but also nothing to prove that I was ready to handle more tasks. Instead, I was stuck behind the counter, left to my own thoughts.
The only thing unusual was the lack of customers. In fact, there were none. I got it. In this economy, who would even see the need for a hammer or iron fillings? Yet, shipments arrived regularly, and the shelves quietly bled their stocks. As if the store were digesting itself. Revenue kept coming in though, fortunately, and so far there’d been no sign I’d be made redundant. That was all I could ask for, really.
As the afternoon sun set in, casting a golden shimmer upon the store while I tried to fight the drowsiness away, the sharp screeching of the hinges jerked me awake. I stood up hastily, accidentally knocking my stool over and causing a metallic clang to reverberate through the store. There was a customer.
As if programmed into my brain, I responded, “Welcome to Knocks and Hardys! Is there anything I can help you with?”
The customer swivelled around. It was a lady dressed entirely in black, adorning a large top hat that covered half of her face so that only her red lips could be seen. She didn’t look at the shelves for tools or wires. Instead, she stalked directly towards me, stopping in front of the counter. Her hands, sheathed in black lace gloves, rested on the worn wood, leaning closer as if to whisper a secret.
“I heard you sell dreams.” She lifted her gaze. Two glistening eyes stared back at me as though I was the hope she had been looking for.
I was certain I’d heard her wrong. I had to be.
“Dreams?”
As soon as I said that, her eyebrows furrowed and she straightened her back defensively, seeming to realise something about me that I did not know of. She scanned the store, perhaps to look for the manager. Could she be a regular?
“I could call the manager for you, if you’d like?”
“That’d be good, thanks.” She had gone as still as stone, standing awkwardly at the foot of the door while she fidgeted with the purse in her hand.
As I traced the steps to the back room where the manager spent most of her time in, my mind couldn’t help but probe into the oddity of it. Was she drunk? Was it a joke? Should I have sent her away instead? Then, there was also the dread that had unknowingly snaked its way through my thoughts. The dread of facing the manager.
I hesitated on the doorknob, fearing what would come but also sensing the prying eyes of the customer burning holes through the back of my head. Sucking in a deep breath, I turned the knob.
The door opened inches before two silver orbs appeared from the dark. I stumbled backwards, letting out a surprised gasp as I grabbed for the nearest shelf, catching myself before I fell. The manager slipped through the gap and slammed the door shut behind her.
“Hollows!” She said, a little too loud. “What are you doing here?”
“I was just—” I clutched the thin fabric in front of my chest, trying to still my frantically beating heart. “There’s a customer, and she’s asking for…dreams?”
The manager looked over my shoulders to where the customer stood. Then, without spending another second on me, she squeezed past me in the narrow aisle and walked towards the lady, her ponytail swishing behind her.
Time seemed to move differently in this shop. The clock on the wall read five minutes past the hour, but the conference between the manager and the customer felt eternal. I busied myself with righting the fallen stool back into place, the scrape of its legs the only sound apart from the cryptic conversation that I could not decipher.
There were talks of ‘dreams’ and ‘payments’ and ‘memories’ that simply did not make any sense when strung together in a single sentence. Perhaps the manager was playing along with her, but when she began guiding the customer to the back room—the one place I was careful not to overstep—I couldn’t be so sure anymore.
Who was she? And what was in that back room? One question led to another until everything I thought I knew about this place disintegrated into a million puzzle pieces.
“Hollows?” The manager’s sharp tone snapped me back into reality. “Take care of the store while I’m gone.”
Before I could utter out a reply, the two of them had already vanished through the door.
It began not as a sound, but as the first crack of the ice. A fine, metallic click that split the silence of Knocks and Hardys right down the middle. A familiar frequency that I shouldn’t be able to recognise—a glass being made.
I stood frozen behind the counter, terrified that any movement would shatter the rhythm. The manager and the lady had been in there for over an hour.
The logical part of my brain, the one that needed this job screamed at me to sit back down, to be small and quiet and employed. The other part of me that pleaded for answers leaned forwards. I stepped out of the counter. The wooden floorboards groaned under my weight, daring me to move closer.
The sound stopped.
I held my breath, the silence pulsing in the air like a heartbeat.
The manager emerged just as the final ring faded away. The door closed behind her, sealing away the sound. Her expression was neutral, as cold and unreadable as a sheet of metal, but her silver eyes went straight to me, as if she’d known I’d be standing there, mid-step between the counter and her door.
She looked away, showing the lady out of the door who now seemed to walk with an eerie serenity.
“Hollows, is there a problem with the inventory?” she asked as soon as the customer was out of the door. Her voice was cool, a precise cut through the thick silence that hung in the air.
The question was so mundane, so insultingly normal, that it broke the dread’s hold on my tongue. “I heard it,” I blurted out.
“Hm.” She didn’t pretend to misunderstand. She simply dismissed it as if I was an anomaly in her data.
“What is it?” I pressed on, refusing to let it go just like that. “What’s in the back room?”
She assessed me, not with anger but with a detached focus that was worse than any glare. “You’re very observant, Hollows. However, that is irrelevant to your current duties.”
“Irrelevant?” A spark of frustration that I hadn’t known I was capable of ignited. “What is relevant? No customers, inventories that keep vanishing and people asking for…for dreams? What is this place?”
For a long while, she was silent. Her eyes were fixated on me but her mind was calculating. She was weighing her options, deciding how to deal with me in the quickest, most efficient way because that was how she always was. Pragmatic and always trying to be faster than time.
“Your shift is concluded, Hollows.”
“That’s not an answer.” I couldn’t believe myself, of all the options she had, she chose dismissal. That getting rid of me was what she deemed the easiest way to handle me. That I was expected to simply come to terms with it.
“That is an order, go home.” She headed towards the back room door, a clear brushoff. The conversation was over.
“I will go when my shift is done,” It was all I could say, my timid attempt to protest. “There’s still two hours left.”
She stopped. Turned. The afternoon light caught the liquid silver in her irises, making them glow with an unusual…warmth. She looked at me and for the first time, I saw it. A sliver of an opening, as if she wanted to let me in.
“If you insist on knowing the true nature of your employment…” She paused, as if what she was about to say made her uncomfortable. “Return tomorrow at 10pm. I will show you.”
The wait for 10pm was excruciatingly slow. Seconds didn’t just tick by, they fell one by one like single grains in a huge, hollow hourglass. Even the Sun was reluctant to let go of the sky, spreading its orange hues like long fingers desperate to seize every inch of the heavens.
When the last bloody stripe of sunlight finally vanished, replaced by the indifferent night, I grabbed my jacket and made my way to the store.
Knocks and Hardys was the only shop still brightly-lit at ten o’clock, while the others had already hung up their ‘closed’ sign hours ago. I pushed open the front door and went inside.
The manager was nowhere to be found, so I went straight to the back room, stopping short just in front of it. This was it. This was what I wanted, right? Yet, with every minute that passed by without the manager in sight, I grew increasingly worried. What if it was not as simple as I thought this was? Hell, I didn’t even know if this was legal. My thoughts were cut short when the door pulled back.
The manager was here.
But she was not the same. Her hair, normally pulled tight in a ponytail, hung loose. It fell just past her shoulders, the black of her hair blending in with the shadows behind her. Yet, it was the clothes that stood out the most. Her usual shirt and cargo pants for practicality during the day was gone, replaced by a collared black dress that went down to her calves. She struck me as every bit of a perfectionist, meticulous down to the very ruffles of her dress.
“Right on time, Hollows.” She stepped aside from the door, inviting me in.
The back room was not a room. It was a corridor that led to a chamber deeper inside the store. She walked first, leading me to an archway that served as entrance to the chamber. It was huge, with walls that stretched upwards, curving gently as they rose. They met a breathtaking arch of glass that formed the entire ceiling, a crystal lens that framed the starry night sky above.
She stepped through the archway, onto floors that were made of a single, enormous slab of dark, polished marble, so flawless that it reflected the ceiling above—an illusion that made the chamber appear to be extending infinitely in both directions. I lingered at the border where the concrete floor of the corridor intersected the black marble, afraid that my cheap sneakers would taint the grand marble with mud.
“What is this place?” I asked, awestruck by the grandeur that came out of nowhere. It made the hardware store seem insignificant, and unimportant compared to this place.
“Dreams, Hollows.” She looked perfect standing in the middle of it all, like she was the final piece of puzzle to complete this masterpiece. “This is where dreams are made.”
“What do you mean dreams are…made? You can make dreams?”
Her eyes lit up in amusement, and I could’ve sworn the corner of her lips tipped upwards. She spun around, walking further into the chamber, the heels of her boots clicking against the marble. “Come in, Hollows.”
I gulped down. This was definitely not what I had envisioned.
In the heart of the chamber, a furnace towered above all else. It ruled over the place, the burnished steel hummed in the silence.
Its casing was plated and riveted, a ribcage of iron bolted tight around a core of bricks and stones. Heat radiated from it in invisible waves, pressing against skin and settling heavily in my lungs. It did not roar. It breathed.
“This is it, Hollows.” She tilted her head back and closed her eyes, basking in the deep bronze hue.
I stood beside her underneath the furnace, gently watching her. Maybe it was the strangeness of this place. Or maybe it was the sediments and ashes playing tricks in my head, but she looked so peaceful. As if in here, she didn’t have to be sharp all the time, or pretend to be tough and heartless.
As if in here, she was formidable.
“Won’t you ask?” She looked back at me. “I’m sure you have tons of questions running in your head right now. And I’m giving you ten minutes.”
Ten minutes. I chuckled at the absurdity of her supposed ‘generosity’ but nodded anyway.
“Who made these dreams?” I asked.
“Wrong question. Try again.”
I searched her eyes, but there was no hint of mockery. Something about her tonight made me believe that she was genuine. And this was only the beginning.
“What are these dreams?” I asked instead, “And why do people buy it?”
“Dreams are exactly what you think it is, Hollows. They’re fantasies your brain conjures up when you sleep. And people buy it for many different reasons. The lady that came in yesterday, she bought them so she could fantasise about her dead husband loving her again. Her dead husband that she killed.” She said it with such normalcy that you wouldn’t even realise she was talking about murder when you hear it the first time. “What you should be asking is ‘how’?”
She stared at me. Waiting.
“H-how?”
Her lips curled into a lopsided smile. “I weave them together, using people’s memories, into dream sequences that each contain a unique narrative.”
“And this—this furnace?” Its presence was unbearable. The vents exhaled in long, laboured breaths. Even the dust seemed to drift in a slow orbit around it. Suspended in its authority.
The manager did not appear to be affected by it at all. “You can’t weave dreams out of clutter, Hollows. Not the kind people pay for. First you burn away what doesn’t belong, the guilt, the truth, the parts that wake people up in a cold sweat. What’s left is clean. Malleable. That is what I work with.”
My eyebrows furrowed in confusion. “I don’t understand—”
Three sharp raps on a wooden surface interrupted us. Customers were starting to file in.
“Another time, Hollows.” She slid away towards the incoming train of customers.
Extracting memories looked painful.
Not loud. Not dramatic. Just…slow.
She stood before the furnace with her hands cupped around the sides of a man’s head. Her thumbs pressed against the temple. The bronze light diffused across her knuckles and seeped into her fingertips towards the man’s head. The man did not scream. He only trembled, his jaw clenched so tight I could see the muscle ticking.
The hum deepened.
The air grew heavier, thick with heated dust. A thin, shimmering thread passed through her palms. The man’s breathing was staggered. In. Out. In—held.
I watched his expression change. From troubled to confused. Then, peace.
My heart dropped at the terrible understanding of what was being taken.
The manager held out an empty vial and the argent thread slithered into the hollow container with ease. The man was then presented with another vial, the threads inside glittered pink.
“I—” The man frowned. “I feel better. Thank you.”
“It’s not painful, you know,’ the manager reassured me, as if sensing my discomfort.
The last of the customers had left, leaving the two of us in the empty chamber. The furnace had dimmed, shrinking to a low steady pulse that seemed almost shy in the sudden quiet.
I leaned against a nearby column, finally allowing myself to breathe fully. The air was lighter now, but still warm enough to remind me that the furnace was never truly off.
The manager stood beside me, gazing at the glass ceiling above us. The night sky had faded just enough for sunlight to bleach through it.
“I know.” I peered down at her. She was close enough for me to make out the shadows pooling under her eyes, a result of many sleepless nights. “I just don’t get why people would do it. Trade their memories for delusions, I mean.”
She sighed. “Sometimes living in delusions hurts less than remembering.”
She paused, thinking. Then, she said, “Come, let me show you something.”
She pushed herself off the wall, her hands brushing ever so slightly against my knuckles, and walked towards a worktable. I followed behind her.
“Do you know what this is?” the manager asked.
She was holding up a vial, small enough to place in your pocket. The contents swirled inside—a thin, golden thread. It was nothing like I had ever seen, not even like the other dream vials, which held multiple, different coloured threads. At the bottom of the vial, a label read ‘First Sight’.
“This is my latest dream sequence.” She admired it in her hand. “It allows the dreamer to live an experience again.”
“An experience,” I echoed. My eyes stayed on the vial. The golden threads inside shifted softly, as if it were breathing. “Any experience?”
“The first,” she said, softly. “The first time something mattered.”
“That’s…vague.”
“It’s on purpose.”
She set the vial down on the counter between us. The glass clicked as it met the wood.
I let out a quiet breath. The shop felt different at this hour, emptier, calmer as if the walls were leaning in to listen.
“Why are you showing me this?”
Her lips parted, and then closed. She shrugged instead. “Because you’re here.”
When I clocked in for my usual night shift at 9pm one night, I hesitated.
Weeks had gone by wordlessly since my transition to night shift, but tonight, returning, I felt dread. As if something, someone was begging me not to show up. Just this once.
I drew several steadying breaths, pushed down the unsettling feeling in my gut and made myself enter the store. The manager was waiting by the furnace, with her back towards the entrance. I walked over.
“You’re here.” Her voice was shaking as she stood. Her hands, usually so still, were clenched at her sides.
Something was off.
“What’s wrong?” I took a tentative step closer to where she was, her back still turned against me, hiding.
“Nothing,” She sniffled once, and then hardened, squaring her shoulders. “I forgot to mention that there will be no customers tonight, Hollows. You may go home now.”
She went over to a worktable on the far side of the chamber, her strides were rigid, as though she was something soulless and bloodless. The manager could be so unpredictable, but this pattern, I had learnt.
“You’re always like this.” I followed behind her. “You stand under the furnace when you’re thinking.”
Silence.
“And you only dismiss me when you’re afraid.”
That did it.
She turned.
Her silver eyes held fractures, threads of dull grey flickering through them like cracks in glass.
“I am not afraid,” she said, too quickly.
I stepped closer. “Then what’s happening?”
Her hands hovered over the edge of the table, fingers brushing against the wood as if seeking for something to anchor herself. I waited, unsure what she was going to say next.
She drew a slow breath, the kind that carried both fatigue and resolve. For a while, she looked away, staring at the cold steel of the furnace as if it could answer for her.
“I’m retiring.”
The word left me hollow.
As quickly as she had entered my life, she was now going to leave it, without notice.
“When the final dream is used, a dream weaver must retire.”
“Retire where?”
She didn’t answer. Instead, she picked up the vial from the table. A prominent gold filtered through the glass—First Sight.
“No one knows.” She shrugged. “We were told it’s a place of rest.”
I nodded absent-mindedly, but there was nothing I understood. Her words tuned out until there was only the stirring of the furnace. This time, I noticed, the furnace didn’t always breathe slowly. It was taking its last few gasps of air.
“Why can’t you stop?” I scrambled for words, even though I knew, certainly, that it wouldn’t matter to her as much as it did to me. “Why can’t you just save your last dream so that you won’t disappear to god knows where!”
“Dream weavers exist for a reason, Harry. Plus, I’ve been here for more centuries than you can even imagine. I will not let you take that away from me.”
Her words did not register at first.
Centuries.
She was here when empires were built, she watched as each one of them fell and crumbled to rocks and ash. She had woven through plagues, wars and revolutions. She had been here since time was first invented.
The enormity of it crushed the air in my lungs.
Her lips curled upwards, not in amusement. It was sympathy. She twirled the vial in her hand and set it back down on the table, clicking once.
“Don’t do this,” I grabbed her wrist, desperate, irrational. “You don’t even know what you’ll see.”
“I suspect,” She gazed at me, her eyes holding an intensity I could not decipher. “That I do.”
I looked at the vial on the table. Her greatest creation.
Her last creation.
First it was the marble floor beneath my shoes, liquefying into black gloss. Then, the walls bled into ink. The chamber stretched, thinned, dissolved until there was no chamber at all.
Only dark.
The manager was gone.
It began as an itch beneath my skin, a single thread stitching itself into the folds of my brain. Then, I saw it.
Gold. It hovered in the air before me, breathing.
I reached my hand out, but the thread was so delicate it disintegrated at the touch of my fingertips, not into darkness, but into summer.
The first time something mattered.
The string pulled taut. Every memory was so vivid that it didn’t feel like nostalgia. It felt like a reincarnation.
The first time I walked into Knocks and Hardys.
The first time I looked into her eyes.
The first time I saw her standing beneath the furnace.
Then, everything burned. It disintegrated from the tips of her fingertips and the ends of her hair into tiny flakes of ash.
All the memories of us traded away, and in return—the first time I truly saw her.
Horrified, I grappled at every piece of memory I could hold onto. There was something I had to remember. Something I could not afford to forget.
Her name.
Maya—
Reve.
The first thing I knew, deep in a place before bone or memory, was that I had been here before.
It was a strange and terrifying feeling to forget your own name.
“H-harrows, I mean, uh—Harry Hollows.”
Written by: Yu En
