The first time I saw her use those little antiseptic wipes was at a café near the train station. She would methodically clean her hands, the table surface, even the menu, before ordering her usual black coffee. No sugar, no milk.
“You can never be too careful these days,” she said, noticing my curious gaze. Her name was Yuki, and she worked as a curator at a museum that didn’t exist.
“What kind of museum?” I asked during our third meeting.
“One that preserves memories people want to forget,” she replied, carefully folding the used antiseptic wipe into a perfect square. “We collect them in small glass jars, label them by date and emotion, and store them in climate-controlled rooms.”
I nodded, pretending this made perfect sense. In our city, stranger things happened daily.
“Would you like to visit?” she asked one rainy Tuesday. The antiseptic wipe in her hand gleamed under the fluorescent lights like a tiny, damp flag of surrender.
The museum was housed in an ordinary office building, wedged between a convenience store and a shuttered bookshop. Inside, rows of glass jars lined the walls, each containing what appeared to be nothing but air.
“This one,” Yuki said, picking up a jar labeled ‘First Love, Summer 1987’, “contains a boy’s memory of watching fireworks with a girl who moved away the next day.”
She handed me an antiseptic wipe. “Clean your hands before touching any jars. Memories are surprisingly susceptible to contamination.”
As I wiped my hands, the artificial lemon scent mixed with something else - perhaps the musty smell of old photographs, or the metallic tang of forgotten keys.
“How do you collect them?” I asked.
“People bring them voluntarily,” she explained, straightening a jar labeled ‘Mother’s Last Words, Winter 2019’. “They use these special wipes we provide. As they clean their hands, the memories transfer to the wipes. Then we process them into the jars.”
“What happens to the people who give up their memories?”
“They live lighter lives,” she said. “But sometimes they come back, standing outside the building for hours, feeling that something’s missing but not knowing what.”
Weeks later, I found myself back at our café, alone. On the table where Yuki usually sat was a single antiseptic wipe packet, unopened. The waiter said he hadn’t seen her in days.
I visited the museum building, but found only empty offices and dust. No jars, no memories, no Yuki. When I asked the convenience store owner next door about the museum, he looked at me strangely and said the space had been vacant for years.
That evening, I opened the antiseptic wipe packet she’d left behind. As I cleaned my hands, I caught a whiff of coffee and something else - perhaps the scent of a museum that never existed, or the lingering trace of a curator who collected memories in glass jars.
The wipe dried quickly in the evening air, taking with it something I couldn’t quite remember.