Stephen Snyder

Though I’ve tried, I’ve found no way to fill in the voids left by the Memory Police.

Perhaps it was necessary to rid oneself of everything that was superfluous in order to immerse completely in this airless, soundproof, narrow space shrouded in the fear of discovery and arrest. In recompense for a mind that was able to retain everything, every memory, perhaps it was necessary that the body gradually fade away.

The film of age gets peeled away and their luster returns—it isn’t grand, but something humble, even solitary.

like a marionette whose strings had been cut.

Did you know that an insect will fall silent if you cut off its antennae? It will just sit there, as if frozen, and even refuse to eat. The same as you, really. When you lost your voice, you lost the ability to make sense of yourself

You’ll live among the fading voices trapped in these typewriters

Tension and fear lingered in their bodies, leaving no room for other sensations.

It felt terrible that your fate depended on something as insignificant as the corner of a rug

How could I have so easily forgotten something I’d heard for so many years, a sound that had been silenced only for a fraction of that time?

But in a world turned upside down, things I thought were mine and mine alone can be taken away much more easily than I would have imagined. If my body were cut up in pieces and those pieces mixed with those of other bodies, and then if someone told me, “Find your left eye,” I suppose it would be difficult to do so.