THERE ARE NO WAYS to take Memories from the living, only the dead.

This is what Nkechi, She-Who-Swallows-Memories knows, and yet there is a man in front of her, and he has come for her own.

His name rises up in the back of her throat, and it is on fire. She wants to speak it, and then she wants to make him choke.

So she looks at him, and he looks at her, and the very air stills.

She is the first to break the silence.

"I have five thousand Memories, each one of them different than their fellow," she says. "You have come for those, then, since you cannot mean mine."

"I do not think I hesitated," he answers, a coolness in his voice. She does not like the way it sounds. "I have come for yours, and I intend to have them."

"And I do not think you will." She lifts her chin. "You cannot come into a place that is not your own and expect to be given things that do not belong to you. You will get neither."

He hesitates, this time. "I always have."

Nkechi spits into the dust beneath her feet. "And that," she says, "is because you have either killed everyone who tried to tell you otherwise, or you have had them killed for you."

There is a type of anger, coiled up in the pit of her now, and Nkechi cradles Death underneath her tongue. It is a strange thing, how Death can be hidden in her mouth and standing behind him at the same time, but it is true. Death takes many forms. Even rainfall on the bow of a leaf carries his seal. A plant that has not been watered for a long time will drown from generosity.

Nkechi is not a plant, and she is not drowning.

Neither does she want to be generous.

There is an ant, crawling in the space between her and him, and Nkechi closes her eyes. In a moment, perhaps less, it will be gone. He, however, is not an ant, and he will not leave as easily.

Still, she wants him to. She is willing to do anything to have it happen.

He senses this, perhaps, as when he speaks again he sounds more subdued that anything else.

"I do not want them just because I can," he tells her, in an effort to keep her from leaving, "I only want them because I would like to forget."

She cracks an eyelid open, but just barely. There are a million seconds of Memory in that space, another half a million heartbeats that will split into fragments as she stands.

She closes it back. "What, pray tell, could be so terrible as to warrant a forgetting that is not yours?"

At first, she does not think he will answer. She has asked harder questions than this, and men have balked at less.

And still, he does. He runs a hand over his face. She can tell, because when he does little ripples of his Soul move out to meet her, the kind that spread when a boy-who-is-not-yet-a-man throws a pebble into a pond.

There is no need to open her eyes, not yet. Not when this man is as easy to read as a broken stela in the palm of her hand.

He takes a haggard breath. Two. Then he speaks.

"Too many things," he says, and she is surprised by the rawness in it. "But I am not here to infringe upon your village's hospitality by asking you to take all of them away. Just one. One would be enough."

She waits for a moment. "I do not see why you cannot do it yourself."

There is a sound that emerges from him, and it sounds like the bastard child of a scoff and a strangled groan. She opens her eyes to see if it will end, and sees the look on his face instead.

She is tempted to close them back.

"You do not think I have tried?" He asks, and it is as if someone has scraped all the words out of him, like an empty jar. "You do not think I have searched every inch of this earth to find someone who could do it for me? If I had found them, I would not be here."

"And so you come to me." Nkechi swallows a laugh, albeit one that is quieter than her last. "You put so much trust in One-Who-Speaks-In-Dreams, you of the dust, and you have not even tried to decipher your own."

A pause. "I did not think so little of you, at first. But now I see I was wrong."

He is offended, she knows. This much is evident by the set of his jaw, the nursing of wounded pride. The rawness is still there, like a wound, but it is scabbing.

"Are you refusing me, then?"

"No," she tells him, "I am only speaking the truth. From what I see, you may have tried. But you have not tried hard enough."

"Truth." He says the word as if it is a sour thing, one that he can spit out at his leisure. "The only truth I see here is that there is no reason to turn me away."

"And there is no reason to keep you here, if I come to the same conclusion as you have." She smiles, and allows the sharpness of that smile to seep through her teeth. "Your efforts are futile, you of the dust. If I say I do not want you here, you cannot come and say that I said otherwise."

"If another man comes here and asks you for the same thing that I have, will you let him have it?" There is a type of fierceness creeping into his voice, hard as iron, and Nkechi is intrigued by it.

"Yes," she answers, "because he is not you."

In truth, she does not know why she says this. It is aggravating enough, though, for it is with no little bitterness that he opens his mouth the next time the opportunity affords it.

"And what is it about me," he hisses, "that unsettles you?"

Nkechi swallows. Tamps down the anger that is slowly rising up again beneath her breast.

"I do believe I could ask you the same question," she says, though she has not given him the answer he desires. "I am not a person to be afraid of. Not by my standards."

A moment passes. Then another. "But then, you of the dust, I am not a person to follow orders that have no business being given."

He curses, though in what tongue she is not sure. "I am not giving you orders. I am only asking."

"And you are asking," she replies, "as if the answer is already granted. It is not."

It is remarkable, she thinks, how much it can take to unearth the desires of a man who does not know you.

All men, then, must be very much alike.

"I did not come all this way only to be ignored," he says, and for the first time his voice is not steady. It is rising, like the sun, when it should be setting in acknowledgement of what she has said.

Nkechi allows herself to match his fervency. "True. But I am not your slave."

She checks, only once, to make sure that her basket is still swung over her shoulder, and then she lifts her chin. "Leave, you of the dust. This dust is not as welcoming as you would like it to be."

She makes as if she will brush past him, and he grabs her by the arm.

She feels the bite of it as if it were her own death.

They are looking at each other, again. She wants to know, in the deepest parts of her, how long it will take for him to look away from her, and he in turn wants to know how long it will take for her to listen.

She blinks. It is a smooth thing, but it is enough to trigger a thousand Memories of another time, another place. She traces the angles of his profile, the slight curvature of his neck, and then she halts. Allows herself to notice the way his hand curls around her arm, and the warmth she feels there.

There is a dark corner, the thump of a body pushed against a wall, the press of weight against it. A sucking sound, that of lips on skin. Drunken hands creeping like vines up the towers of thighs pressed together. A grip like a vice, and a prying apart.

She flinches. It is her turn, now, for these are her Memories, but she is not going to tell him to let her go. She is not as weak as that.

But he will not allow himself to beg. This she knows well. The word Please is stuck at the bottom of his throat like a bone accidentally swallowed, and he would rather choke on it rather than spit it out.

Despite all this, he is not like the chief. At least, the man who calls himself one. That man has taken many times over, and he has taken things that have never belonged to him and never will.

He is like the monkey who sticks his hand into a pit and cannot pull it out again because of his greediness.

This man, however, knows better.

With his other hand, he reaches for his dagger. Nkechi watches as he does, and, if she is to acknowledge the truth, she is curious to see what he will do with it.

The pads of his fingers brush against its sheath. He lowers his voice to barely above a whisper, and she strains to hear it.

"If I give you something that I have never let part from me," he says, "will that be enough?"

She takes in his meaning, at last. There is a bond between he and his weapon, something that is a hundred Memories deep and twice as many strong, and yet still he wants to give it to her in exchange for peace.

He wants to forget. That, she supposes, is enough for her to take pity on him, though she had not thought of it before now.

He follows her gaze to where he has caught her, the flesh around his fingers blanching from the pressure. There is a wordless sound of apology that lingers at the back of his tongue, and then he lets her go.

Nkechi does not linger long on that fact. When she gets home and washes herself she will scrub herself raw to forget that touch. It has been a long time since a man has touched her, and twice as long since one has met her without a wanting in him.

But as for here, now, she ignores it.

"Keep your dagger," she tells him, and she is ashamed of the way that her voice trembles. Not regarding this, it seems that he does not understand. Before he asks again, she repeats herself.

"Keep your dagger." This time, she thinks, he knows, and her voice is stronger because of it. There is a sharp, unexpected intake of breath on his part, and then he lets it go. The tension leaves as well.

She listens to it, tunes her ears to the sound it makes when it leaves him, but she does not smile.

It would sound the same way if she settled a dagger in between his ribs. It would be even better if it was his own.

"You are a persistent man," she says. Like her, in a way. "Come. If you want to forget we must begin before it is dark."

She does not tell him what she tells herself, that the reason for it is because she has been in darker places than here.

Sometimes, the darkest place is one's mind.

She turns away from him and puts one foot forward, almost hesitantly, and then another, until she is walking away from the river. She does not pause to listen, though behind her there are the footfalls of one who follows.

When he came to her, first, there were a thousand words on the underside of his tongue that he had wanted to say, all tucked inside of him. Now, he is going back with her, and not even a quarter of those have been said. She would not be surprised if there are another thousand waiting to be born after this.

Nkechi notes these things, and tucks her own Memories back behind the wall in her chest.

If, she said, and it is true. She will give him Memories, like he has asked, and she will make him forget, as foolish an endeavor as it may seem.

But she has not promised him anything that is innately hers to give. It is a type of treachery, perhaps, but it is necessary.

There will be Memories, but they will not be hers.