I could see a woman in front of me. Her brown hair was tied back and her eyes greeted me with an odd warmth in them. I recognised her. This was the same woman from earlier—Mrs Wright if I recall correctly. But she no longer wore wrinkles on her face or had grey strands intertwined with her hair.

“What is it this time, Anthony?” she asked, her tone light and playful as she knelt before me.

What was going on? And why was she calling me Anthony?

I couldn’t move. Not my mouth, hands, feet, or anything. In my peripheral, I could barely see my hands. But, they were smaller now and more dainty. There were also light brown strands of hair falling against my forehead, and in the reflection of that woman’s eyes, a pair of green ones stared back at me.

What is this?

“I have a secret to tell you!” I said as a voice that certainly wasn’t mine came out of my mouth. It was of a higher pitch and had this irritatingly sweet tone to it. That woman leaned towards me, bringing her ear closer to my mouth as I whispered to her, “I love you.”

A smile immediately appeared on her face, a soft laugh leaving her lips, as she pulled away to face me again. “Well, it’s lucky that I love you too.”

“Then would you let me go visit Harry again?”

“Oh, aren’t you cheeky, and here I thought you just loved me unconditionally,” she said, giving me a look of offence to accompany her rather melodramatic tone.

“Well I do, but…” I said with a pout, looking up towards her with wide and hopeful eyes, “Can I still go?”

“Alright, you can. But if you and Harry get into trouble again, you both can forget about having any dessert tonight.”

A laughter escaped my lips. The muscles in my mouth contorted upwards in a completely unnatural way to me as a boyish smile came across my face.

Strange. I’d heard before of the capacity of a mother to care and show such affection to their child. But, it was different seeing that tenderness in person and up close. It felt like I was intruding on something that wasn’t meant for me.

My vision began to obscure again as the scene in front of me blurred into something else. That same woman was there again, sitting just across from me on the dining table. There were more grey strands in her hair now and weariness in her eyes.

“You’re not seriously considering joining the war are you?” she asked, her voice stern as she stared down at her plate with hard eyes.

I sighed as I put my fork down on the table. “Everyone else is enlisting.”

“But that doesn’t mean you have to go as well.

“Mother, I can’t just stay behind while Harry and the others are all putting their lives on the line.”

She grew silent. Her face was unreadable as her grip tightened around her fork. But after a long moment, she finally placed her fork down on the table and raised her head to meet my eyes.

“I know that and I know I probably won’t be able to stop you either,” she said before letting out a solemn sigh. “But better you come back safe, or you can forget about ever eating another meal from me again.”

I smiled, a chuckle leaving my throat. “I will, I promise.”

There was another flash of a day where this person ran around the neighbourhood with other young boys and another where he got scolded by a teacher about submitting his homework late. Among all these sprinkled moments across this man’s life were many meals spent with that woman. Every laugh, struggle, moment of fear and happiness was laid bare for me to see from the eyes of this man.

“Anthony, you’re going to be alright… you’re going to be okay…”

A man near me kept repeating those words over and over again. My vision was blurring again and I squinted as I tried to focus on him. A mix of fear and stress was evident on his face as he looked down at me. And then, the familiar noise of bullets and explosions bled into my ears.

My body felt weak. I was barely strong enough to look down and see the blood seeping fast through my uniform. I recognised this pain. I’d been shot.

“Don’t worry, I’m going to be fine,” I said through my ragged breaths as I ignored the raging pain in my chest. I gripped tightly onto that man’s hand, not wanting to let go. This person, this body I was in felt so desperate to hang on. “I promised we’d return home together, didn’t I?”

I couldn’t tell whether this man was being naively hopeful or not, but as my consciousness wavered, I knew his words would be a lie. The world around began to obscure again, but not to white and instead into a pitch of darkness.

I blinked as the scene in front of me shifted back to that embalming room. But while those visions began to leave my mind, those memories stayed lingering with an intense vividness.

What the hell was that just now?

My mind was a mess as thoughts ran through it with no end. I felt faint. It was a feeling I’d only experienced during combat. I stumbled backwards, my head overcome with dizziness as it hit the ground. The tools in my hand fell to the floor with me, rattling loudly in my ears.

“Hey!”

The last thing I saw was Hendrik rushing over to me. He looked at me with wide eyes and a concern on his face I hadn’t seen from him before.

How inconvenient.

—

A soldier once told me that déjà vu was this feeling you’d already experienced a situation before.

That was exactly what I felt when I opened my eyes. I was lying back down on my bed in my room as I was met with four familiar drywalls. Davis had pulled a chair up next to me, sitting there as he looked vacantly down at his hands. He seemed rather stressed.

“Director,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper. I tried to sit up as jabbing pain nagged at my head.

“Oh thank God you’re awake,” he said as relief washed over his face. “How are you feeling? You were unconscious for an hour.”

“I’m fine.”

My head was still light and body weary, but I didn’t appear to have sustained any real injuries. Even if I did, they would’ve healed by now. But, there was still something gnawing at me as those memories, visions, or whatever they were, remained clear in my mind.

“That woman from earlier... what happened to her?” I asked.

“Mrs Wright? She left a little after you fainted,” he said before letting out a heavy sigh. “That poor woman and many others are only just finally having their loved ones from the war returned to them.”

I narrowed my eyes. “What do you mean ‘finally’?”

“Well, since the war ended, the government’s been trying to retrieve all the bodies of the soldiers who passed away during the war. They want to give them all a proper funeral since most were initially buried hastily.”

I knew that procedure. I had to follow it first-hand during the war. Often, if someone fell in battle, their bodies would be recovered when safe to do so and buried in mass burial sites near the battlefield.

But as memories of digging graves and moving bodies flooded my mind, I immediately pushed them away.

“But there’s something I still don’t understand.”

He tilted his head as he looked at me with confusion “And what’s that?”

“It’s standard military procedure that a body is identified by its name tag. But, that woman refused to accept that body as her son regardless, why is that?”

Davis paused, staring at me for a moment after I asked my question. He crossed his arms as he looked down towards the floor. “I think it’s because she doesn’t want to believe that her son is dead. She’s trying to hold onto the possibility that he’s still alive.”

“But doesn’t she realise that the truth will be the truth regardless of what she believes?”

“It’s more complicated than that,” he tried to explain, his voice growing solemn. “If there was a truth you wanted to believe no matter what, wouldn’t you hold onto that regardless of what the reality was?”

To be frank, I would not. That logic seemed beyond irrational and contradictory which only made her actions all the more confusing.

“I see,” I said anyway. I felt compelled to accept his explanation. I was unsure if further questions would do anything to help me understand something so terribly flawed.

His eyes narrowed at me. He could tell that something was wrong with how quickly I accepted his words. “There’s something else bothering you, isn’t there?”

Should I tell him about what I’d just seen? The idea of seeing someone’s memories was complete lunacy. I would’ve dismissed it entirely if I didn’t experience it for myself. But truthfully, I still doubted what I saw. Maybe it was just a hallucination—a play of the mind—and yet, something inside of me couldn’t accept that explanation.

The director was the only other person who knew about my past, my abilities, and what I was capable of. While seeing a dead man’s memories was certainly a leap from that, if anyone would believe me or be willing to hear me out, it was him.

“There is.” I leaned my head back against the headboard. I took a deep breath to buy a few extra seconds of thinking before I told him. “I saw Anthony Wright’s memories.”

Davis froze, unsure if he’d heard me correctly. “I’m sorry, what?”

“When I touched that body, all his memories flooded into my head. I saw a younger version of Mrs Wright who I called my mother, so they could not be my own, meaning they must’ve belonged to Mister Wright.”

A silence filled the room as Davis just stared at me. A blank look covered his face as if processing my words or trying to discern if I was lying or not. But there was something I could at least tell.

He didn’t believe me.