The Memory Police

Island residents are making rose sacrifices in the river, and the protagonist talks to an award-winning rose-grower whose memories of her dead father were tied to roses and now float away. After three days, the river is clear of petals.

The narrator visits the old man, and she wonders about how the wind takes roses and not other types of flowers during the disappearance, as well as what will become of the rose garden. He says he “doesn’t have much use for a library” (51) but went to the one by the rose garden to see if her books were there. They had been checked out, and this pleases the old man.

They talk about the increasing rate of disappearances as opposed to the lack of creation on the island. She fears that everything—and every person—will disappear. However, the old man reassures her that he overcame the loss of the ferry and the losses before she was born; he says, “as things got thinner, more full of holes, our hearts got thinner too, diluted somehow. I suppose that kept things in balance” (54).

The narrator tries not to worry, and the old man reminds her that

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