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A psychological novella about June Calder, a young sound archivist who discovers parts of her life flagged for erasure. She allies with a retired technician and two colleagues to reclaim missing hours from a city's policy of curated forgetting, confronting institutional quiet and learning to live with shared memories.
June Calder learned the city by its sounds. She catalogued it in a ledger she kept under her mattress: the clack of tram wheels on cold rails at two in the morning, the thin bell of a delivery bicycle that cut like a question, the particular way a rainstorm sounded on corrugated iron in the eastern quarter. Those noises stacked in her like coins in a tin. She could tell you, from memory, the exact pitch of the voice of the woman who sold boiled peanuts on Fallow Street and the way the landlord's laugh came out too loud and broke into syllables. She had made a quiet career of listening.
The Memory Bank sat on a block of limewashed brick that had been leaning since before she was born. Behind its glass doors, in a room that smelled of varnish and cold metal, tapes and hard drives were shelved in small wooden cubbies like bones in a museum. The Bank took in the city's verbal debris: arguments, lullabies, shopkeepers' morning prayers. Staff came and went in the small hours to catalogue, to tag, to decide which things would live in the archive and which would be allowed to soften into silence. June worked nights, her fingers stained with ink, her ears open like a seam.
On a night when the rain was a stencil against the windows, Samir brought in a box that rattled. He set it on the central table and slid off the lid like revealing a secret. "Found it in a paper bag behind the old theatre," he said, voice dusted with cigarette smoke. He had a habit of talking as if the past might still be coaxed back if asked politely. June held up one of the glass canisters. Inside a ribbon of magnetic tape lay curled around itself, labeled in a handwriting that kept the slope of someone who wrote while standing: JUNe_CALDER_2001.
June's mouth went dry. She held the canister too long and could feel the weight of something long gone and suddenly present. She had catalogued hundreds of other people's names and faces, other people's heartbreaks. She had never found a piece of herself shelved like this, a quiet parcel tucked between the recorded confession of a man who said he never wanted to be a father and a two-minute snippet of someone singing the wrong words to a hymn. The tape's label looked ordinary, but a small white tag had been threaded through the lid's wire: FLAGGED. The tag smelled faintly of oblivion and lemon polish. Samir watched her with the soft, practised patience of someone who had raised index fingers to mute many alarms. "Someone asked the Board for it," he said. "It came with a request to review."
June set the canister down as if it might bite. The room hummed with refrigerators and the low breath of servers. Outside, the city's lights were a moth-swarm. She knew, in a way that made her stomach fold, that there were reasons for things to be set aside. She also knew she had not requested this. Her hand hovered, then found the strip of rubber around her wrist where she kept the little metal tally of her life: a key, a coin, a tooth-shaped pendant from her mother. She rubbed it like one might rub a place that hurt.