The River That Forgets

Ilustration JPG

By Alamsyah Gautama

In the far corner of Louisiana, hidden between fields of weeping willows and the deep hush of moss-draped oaks, there lies a town not found on most maps—Cypress Hollow. It is a town with no welcome sign, no gas station, and just one winding road that ends at a wide, slow-moving body of water the locals call The Forgetting River.

They say it flows backwards during the full moon.

They say it erases.

A Return to the Hollow

Marla Rousseau hadn't been back in twenty-two years. Not since the night her baby brother, Jeremiah, disappeared and her mother swore he never existed.

The bus dropped her three miles outside town. With a battered suitcase and a heart full of suspicion, she walked the rest of the way under a sky bruised purple with coming rain. Her grandmother, Mama Sorelle, had passed last week, and the funeral was the only thing strong enough to pull her back.

The house hadn't changed. Two floors of crumbling shutters, walls the color of tobacco spit, and a porch sagging like tired shoulders. Yet the air around it still smelled of eucalyptus and smoke—like secrets being boiled into tea.

Inside, the walls whispered.

A Town That Doesn’t Remember

People stared. Too long. Too knowingly.

Old men outside the feed store nodded at her like they'd been expecting her. Women at the chapel handed her casseroles with names she should have recognized but didn't. A teenage boy on a bicycle slowed down, looked her in the eye, and said:

“You came back. Finally.”

She watched him ride away, her chest tightening.

No one asked her about Jeremiah. No one mentioned his name. When she brought him up, people blinked like their brains skipped a beat. Her own mother, now hollow-eyed and half-there, whispered from a rocking chair, “Baby, there ain’t never been no Jeremiah. You were always my only child.”

But Marla remembered—Jeremiah’s laugh, his fingers in her hair, the day he vanished after playing near the river.

And now, every night, the river crept closer in her dreams.

The Journal of Mama Sorelle

On the second night, Marla found it. Beneath the floorboards in her grandmother’s room, wrapped in dried corn husks: a leather journal with initials carved in Creole script.

Inside were dates, names, and warnings.

“Memory is a garden that feeds or poisons. We bury what we must, so the town don’t die.”

Marla turned page after page of dreams, rituals, and names. Names she didn't recognize. Until she found Jeremiah Rousseau. 2007. Taken.

Next to it: a smear of something brown. Not ink.

She read through the night.

Mama Sorelle had made a pact.

The River’s Hunger

According to the journal, Cypress Hollow had once been the site of a massacre. In 1919, a Black church was burned with fifty-seven people inside. The town elders struck a deal with something old in the river—a spirit, a god, a curse—to forget it. Forget the fire, the blood, the guilt.

Each generation, the river required a memory of something beloved. A child. A brother. A wife.

In exchange, the town stayed peaceful. Whole.

Mama Sorelle had sacrificed Jeremiah to spare the town’s pain.

Confrontation

Marla stood on the banks of the river the next full moon.

Fog curled at her ankles. The water shimmered, glassy and wrong. She called out:

“I remember him. You don’t own him. I’m not afraid to know.”

The water hissed.

And then it rose.

From its depths, she saw shadows—children with empty eyes, hands reaching, not to pull her in, but to be pulled out. The river, bloated with the forgotten, trembled under her voice.

“I won’t forget him. I won’t let this town forget any of them.”

She threw Mama Sorelle’s journal into the water. The surface boiled, and then, stillness.

The Morning After

Marla woke on the riverbank.

The sun was rising. Light spilled golden over Cypress Hollow, and something had changed.

People walked differently. Looked at each other longer. A boy she’d never seen before ran past her and stopped.

“You’re Marla. Jeremiah’s sister, right?”

She nodded slowly. “Yes. I am.”

Her mother, when she returned home, looked up and began to cry—not confusion, but recognition.

That day, Marla began writing.