The Forgetting

Short Story

Photo by Floris Bronkhorst on Unsplash

I wonder if Dad knows it’s Ollie’s birthday. He’s barely said a word since he and Mum arrived. Hasn’t touched the slice of cake in front of him. I watch him through the kitchen window as I drop a stack of plates into warm suds, run a sponge over them and place them on the drying rack.

He’s sitting under the verandah by himself, glassy eyed, shoulders curved inwards, shock of white hair with a tuft like a cockatoo at the back of his head. Smoothing his hand over the recycled timber table he made for Josh and me as a wedding gift fifteen years ago. Back when he was still working.

Mum is telling me about an art exhibit she saw in the city last week but her words aren’t catching. She leans against the kitchen counter, picks up a plate and rubs it dry with a tea towel.

“How is he?” I ask, nodding my head towards the window.

She sighs and stacks the plate in the cupboard. “He has his days.”

When I was a little girl, I was obsessed with fossils. I would beg Dad to take me to the Natural History Museum and I would spend hours looking at all of the preserved animals posed behind the glass, imagining what the dinosaurs might have looked like from their fragments of bone, and marvelling at the collection of dragonflies entombed in amber - so haunting with their lives suspended.

Dad would tell me the animals weren’t really dead, just pretending, and that they moved when I wasn’t watching. I would search their eyes for a spark of life and try to catch them out, catch them moving. I never did.

Ollie’s bright laughter floats in through the fly-screen. His rosy cheeked smiling face peeks out from the treehouse Josh is building in the oak tree that shadows the back half of the garden. It’s only four walls and a misshapen roof, but it’s enough to house Ollie’s imagination. He has stolen the hammer Josh was using and Josh is pretending not to be able to reach him in the tree, jumping and causing a fuss, leaving Ollie in stitches. Dad doesn’t seem to have noticed the fun and games. Not a twitch, not a hint of a smile.

I don’t need to ask Mum to know that Dad’s getting worse. The forgetting, slow like resin, is gradually taking him from us. Hardening around his brown eyes, preserving him in amber.

“Cup of tea, Dad?”

I place a steaming mug in front of him and take a seat at the table. Mum settles into her chair, cradling her mug in both hands. The heat of the afternoon has blanketed the garden in a shimmering haze. I kick my sandals off and stretch my legs out underneath the table.

“How’s work?” Dad asks through sips of his tea.

“It’s fine, busy. I’ve got some leave coming up in a few weeks so we’re going to take a trip down to the coast before the school term starts.”

“That will be nice.”

We watch as Ollie slides down the temporary rope ladder, runs up to the table and takes a long gulp from his water bottle.

“Ollie, go put a hat on. The sun is getting hot.”

“I’m fine,” he says, running back to the treehouse.

My seven year old. Time really does move quickly. Seven years since Dad’s diagnosis. Mum didn’t want to tell me at first, concerned the news would bring on my contractions, being two months from my due date. I knew anyway; I’d seen the signs. Dad struggling to find words, losing track of days and where he set things down. He put it down to his retirement, the gentle softening that happens when the stress of work ceases.

We all thought it would sort itself out, his forgetting.

Josh drops a handful of wooden planks onto the grass, stands himself up with a groan and rubs his lower back. He swipes his arm across his forehead, looks around at the tools and materials scattered on the grass underneath the treehouse. It was a Christmas promise from Josh to Ollie - a treehouse built from scratch. I’ve never seen Josh so enthused and frustrated at the same time.

“Pass me that measuring tape would ya, Jerry.” He points to the tape sitting at the end of the table.

Dad turns at the sound of his name, softly shaken from his fog. The chair scrapes against the pavers as he pushes himself out of the chair and takes the tape over to Josh. He stands and watches, arms loose by his sides, as Josh crouches down. Josh slides the tape along the length of the wood, pulls the nub of a pencil out from behind his ear and marks a lead line.

If life were a film, I could slow the rate of frame. Watch each moment at 240 frames-per-second and catch the recognition as it flickers over Dad’s face. A lifetime of wood craft rising to the surface.

“Who built this?” Dad asks, looking at the treehouse.

Josh looks up, raises his hand to his forehead to shield his eyes from the sun. “I did.”

Dad’s shoulders curl back, he stands a little straighter, places his hands on his hips and nods his head. “It’s good work.”

Josh glances over at me; I raise my eyebrows and he smiles.

“I could use a hand with the stairs though.”

“You know, I built Alison a treehouse when she was a little girl.”

I had a lovely childhood. Mum and Dad were an inseparable pair. Jerry and Julie, high school sweethearts. They got married right after graduation, had my brother Brett two years later, then me two years after that. Their love filled our home with warmth and the people on our street felt it; they were drawn to our family. Especially my dad.

I remember the street parties they used to hold. All the neighbours gathered together for a barbecue on hot summer nights. The adults lounging in plastic lawn chairs, kids playing in the street. Dad would tell stories, long meandering tales punctuated with his deep booming laughter. A character, he was, with an eye for detail and memory like a bank vault.

The forgetting slipped in unseen over the years, a silent assassin stealing details from his stories, words from the tip of his tongue. Eventually he stopped telling his tales all together and history was rendered silent. The doctors said it was down to luck of the gene pool. Dementia runs in families, his aunt meeting the same fate. Likely to get progressively worse as he ages.

Just one of those things.

“Ali, remember the treehouse I built?” Dad says, looking over at me. “You and Brett couldn’t decide on the colour so I painted one half yellow and the other half purple.” I nod and he turns towards Josh.

“Ali decorated her half with pinwheels and paper flowers. Brett made a flag and hung it in front of the door. They called it Castle Hart. What was the name of your friend, Ali? The girl in your netball team who broke her leg when she fell out of the tree?” Dad snaps his fingers, rubs his hand along his brow. “She was a tiny, blonde thing, always chewed with her mouth open. Oh, what was her name?”

“Candice.”

“That’s right. You loved that treehouse. All the kids in the street camping out, your mum made fairy bread and hot chocolate, and you all played rounds and rounds of that game…the one where you had to hide…I…what was that?”

“Yeah, I remember. It was Murder in the Dark.”

“That’s the one.” Dad looks over at me, his hands resting on his hips. A wistfulness settles into his jaw, a passing shadow of something clouds his eyes. “You were a happy girl.”

“Still am, Dad.” I raise my mug towards him. He smiles, tight lipped.

Josh’s rhythmic sawing breaks the silence. Dad turns towards him, picks up a plank of wood and taps Josh on the shoulder. “Can I show you a trick?”

I look over at Mum as she watches Dad line up the saw against the wood, slipping easily into a skill reliant on repetition rather than recall. The movements built into the fibre of his muscles. She rubs her lips together and downs the dregs of her tea.

Sometimes, in the liminal moments, I catch the living grief in the lines of Mum’s face. The softness of her mouth when it isn’t posed or pulled into a tight smile for the world. The pain she hides behind the glass and reveals only when she thinks no one is watching. A preserved version of herself.

She sees me looking and stands up. “I think I’ll make another cup of tea.”

I pick at the arm of my chair, splinters peeling away from a half-moon shaped chip in the wood. Mum has always been the straight man to Dad’s jokester. Bearing witness to his stories, holding them safe in her own memory bank. I hope, one day down the track, she will share her memories with us and we will reconstruct Dad’s shape from his bones.

It’s early evening when Dad and Josh hammer the final nail into the wooden stairs on the treehouse. The oak tree is bathed in the orange glow of the sunset. Ollie hops up and down the stairs, his squeals of delight echoing across the garden. Josh disappears into the shed and returns with a small pot of paint and a brush.

“Ollie, would you like to mark the treehouse?”

Ollie jumps onto the grass from the top of the stairs and runs over to his dad. Josh explains his idea - to paint their hands on the side of the treehouse, the artists signing their work. He calls Dad over and Mum and I join them to watch the ceremony.

Josh coats Ollie’s palm with the red paint, holding his elbow as he squirms, crying out. It tickles. Dad is next, Josh swipes the pigment over his shaking hand. He holds it out, turned upwards like an offering to the sky. The three of them stand beside the treehouse wall. Josh picks Ollie up and cradles him as he presses his seven-year-old hand to the raw wood. It leaves a perfect handprint, five fingers that were once impossibly small.

Dad looks at Josh, unsure of what is being asked of him. Josh guides Dad’s red palm towards the wall and pushes it flat against the wood, just beside Ollie’s print. Josh adds his hand and stands back to admire his work. The three hands, red as the blood that connects them, are tilted inwards. Reaching for each other.

Josh takes a black marker from his back pocket and scribbles the date below the paint. It’s quiet in the garden, the lilting bird song grown still. None of us move. We stand in the grass, looking at the handprints. Three generations.

Dad holds out his hand towards Josh, points at the marker. Josh gives it to him. He approaches the wall, pauses a moment before writing in a looping script, Happy 7th Birthday, Ollie. Love Grandpa.

Something raw and unspoken bubbles up inside of me and bursts out as laughter. My eyes well up as my family standing next to me joins in, a wave of joy overcoming us. I hold my hands out to Dad and pull him into an embrace, feeling his scratchy whiskers against my cheek. As I pull away, he takes my hand in his and I squeeze. He looks at me, eyes sparkling in the blanketing dusk.

Even when the time comes, when Dad becomes entombed, I know I’ll still search for that spark of life behind his amber eyes.

---

This story was chosen as 7th place in the winning entries for the eleventh Writers’ Playground challenge (July 2025). Prompts for the competition were: a carpenter, a treehouse and the required element a piece of amber with something relating to or derived from living matter preserved in it.