In a house at the end of the lane there lived a peculiar man.

A man who mostly wanted to be left alone, but as with most people who want to be left alone, he was constantly bothered by people.

You see, the man was a bit more than peculiar.

He remembered everything. Not in a way where some people like to boast they’re good with names, or numbers.

He remembered everything. Everything.

Since he could talk, he showed amazing feats of memory. He memorized an entire encyclopedia before he was five. He can still recall it to this day.

He spent days memorizing people’s numbers in the phone book. To this day, when he was bored, he’d dial a number, just to see if the number still worked.

This memory made school easy, and he breezed through his classes. His test scores, and grades made his parents hope for a doctor or lawyer, but he had no predilection for either profession, and instead started a small ghostwriting business.

There were less people this way.

But that didn’t stop people from finding out about the man with the amazing memory. They often asked him to show off his memory when they saw him about town.

For them it was a game.

“What was I wearing three years ago?”

“How many gumballs were in the machine the other day?”

And so on, and so on.

Also he could remember everything people said to him. He could tell anyone who wanted to listen every word his mother and father had said to him once he was old enough to remember. He could remember everything his teacher said, and twice they thought he was cheating because he’d write the answers word for word on his exam.

Children often wanted him to repeat some meandering story they told him the week prior.

Soon, he became the town’s collective memory.

“What’s his phone number again?”

“Do remember the last time you saw my dog?”

“Do you know where I parked?”

And so on, and so on.

For years and years he acted like the local version of Google.

Most people didn’t think twice about it. They just asked the man who couldn’t forget over and over.

Even though he preferred to be left alone.

They never thought about how everyone and everything was filling a mind that never emptied. Everything and everyone was recorded and it was starting to feel full.

His head hurt all the time.

Every time he left the house it was hours and hours seeing people and hearing conversations whether he wanted to or not.

And it just never stopped.

Until one day, people started noticing people missing.

One by one they disappeared.

Everyone went to the man who couldn’t forget, and for once he couldn’t remember seeing them.

Or the next few people.

He just couldn’t recall what happened.

And then nearly everyone in town went away. A constable from the neighboring town, drawn by the strange occurrences, arrived with some of his men.

They found the man who couldn’t forget standing over the last towns person.

“I had to stop it. I had to stop it,” he said.

“Stop what?” the constable asked.

“I had to stop the memories. Too many memories. They wouldn’t stop making new ones.”

“Okay,” the constable said looking more and more concerned, “do you know what happened to all the people?”

“Yes…yes…yes I remember,” he said.

“Remember what?”

“I remember where they’re buried.”