The baby has been crying for what feels like three days straight. Mari, for her part, has joined in intermittently.

It isn’t just the stress of being a first-time parent. The pain. The exhaustion. The days of delirium. She anticipated all that, having read the horror stories.

Turns out she read the wrong kinds of horror stories.

They were loners, Mari and Daniel. While her parents were dead, his might as well have been. Mari and Daniel were so similar, meeting him had made her feel as though she had found her other half. They fell in love in seconds, married in months, and learned of the baby not long afterward.

The early days were blissful, the two of them alternating between playfully bickering over paint swatches and warning each other not to get too carried away. They couldn’t be sure she would even make it out of the first trimester.

“There’s nothing wrong with getting our hopes up,” Mari said, for once allowing herself to feel the slightest bit optimistic.

“There is if our hopes include a color this ugly,” Daniel replied, pointing to what was, in Mari’s opinion, a perfectly acceptable paint swatch.

“What’s wrong with yellow?” she asked. Then, glancing at the name printed under the swatch, she corrected herself: “What’s wrong with chartreuse?”

Daniel made a face. “It reminds me of the time my best friend from preschool ate a whole crayon and threw it up on my shoe.”

Mari covered her mouth. “Daniel. That’s disgusting.”

They did not paint the room chartreuse.

Four months later, while she was home, composing a list of jokey names, he was at work, then in an ambulance, then at the hospital, unresponsive. When someone finally called, Mari sat in stunned silence, her eyes on her pen as it rolled along the floor.

He never woke up. Never got better. She still has nightmares of that long, eternal flatline. Even once the sound stopped, it kept echoing in her head. She gave birth a widow, a nurse squeezing her hand as she pushed out her son alone.

She considered adoption, knowing she wasn’t in a position to care for a baby by herself. Yet she couldn’t give up what little remained of Daniel. It killed her to imagine someone else raising his son, catching flickers of him in that baby, never knowing whose ghost they were seeing.

So she kept him. Took him home. Nursed him and held him and bathed him and prayed. She didn’t even know what it was she was praying for. She just closed her eyes and begged.

Now the bills are piling up. Hospital bills. Funeral bills. Rent and diapers and food. Before the baby, she worked as an office assistant for the university’s history department, where her superiors were so inflexible, she was not permitted to clock in or out even one minute outside of her scheduled working hours. She can’t imagine returning there now, with a screaming baby strapped to her chest. She doesn’t have any friends or family who could watch him, and hiring a sitter would take away almost all the money she would make working.

It’s expensive to stay alive when everyone around her is dead.

One Saturday evening, after getting the baby to sleep, she wakes her phone from its nap.

fast ways to make money, she types into the search engine.

The first page of results suggests all the things she cannot do: Sell her items. Sell her body. Sell her baby. Sell her soul. The second page is more of the same. It isn’t until she reaches the third page that a bright blue link catches her eye: Walk in with memories. Walk out with money. Same day, guaranteed.

She leans forward, her brow furrowed. Then, tapping the link, she holds her breath and prays for a miracle.

*

She always thought Daniel was her karmic trade-off for losing her parents so young. There were times, early on, when she mourned the fact that they would never get to meet the baby. She never would have guessed Daniel wouldn’t get to meet him either.

He would have made such a good father. Though Mari initially insisted on attending all her appointments alone, stubbornly clinging to her independence like she was still an orphaned child, he offered himself up so entirely, she soon found herself notifying him of their next appointment before even adding it to her own calendar.

After each check-up, on the way home, he would stop by Nugget Shack and purchase her a milkshake.

“Is this healthy?” she would ask.

“For the soul,” he would reply.

Sometimes, when she awakens, she can taste the milkshake on her tongue.

Blinking back tears, she unstraps the baby from his seat, buckles him into his front-facing carrier, and checks her phone yet again. The advertisement includes a photograph of the location, but she still isn’t sure she’s in the right place. It isn’t as if it’s a typical store, with a neon sign above the entrance and a long line of customers trailing out the door. From what she can tell, the memory-purchasing business is run out of a family home.

“Stupid,” she says quietly. “This is very, very stupid.”

When she begins walking, every step feels like a battle, every footfall like the beat of a slowly failing heart.

It takes her a minute to locate the house. The baby wails in protestation as she knocks on the door.

She shifts her weight. She has checked, no fewer than four times, that the building in front of her matched the one in the advertisement, but a part of her still feels as though something’s off.

That’s your intuition, she imagines Daniel telling her. You should leave. It’s not too late.

The door opens.

Well, she thinks, now it is.

A teenager stands in the doorway, her eyes hooded and heavily shadowed. She looks like all the girls Mari secretly envied in high school, the kind who paired raccoon-like makeup with heavy combat boots.

The girl, chomping on pink bubblegum, gives Mari a once-over.

Mari takes a breath. “I—”

“The memory crane thing, right?”

Mari blinks. She’s clearly older than the girl standing before her, but a part of her feels far younger.

“Come in,” the girl says, releasing her grip on the door. “I’ll go get my mom.”

Mari’s thank-you comes out as a whisper.

“I probably don’t have to tell you,” the girl says, not even bothering to turn around, “but you need to take off your shoes.”

She’s right. Mari would have taken off her shoes anyhow.

Growing up, Daniel had always worn shoes in the house. She would have let him keep them on, but the moment he noticed she liked to keep hers off, he quickly followed suit.

It’s an Asian thing, she explained.

It’s a good thing, he replied. Much less dirt in the apartment.

Keeping one hand on the baby, she steps out of her shoes and enters the house. The girl points to the table in the center of the room.

The entire place feels oddly dim, the narrow space made even more claustrophobic by the shelves lining the walls. The orangish tint of the overhead light reminds Mari of a spirit-summoning scene in a cheap horror film she and Daniel rented once, back when they were still dating. The movie was terrible, but his company and the sound of his laughter more than made up for it.

Mari has just taken a seat when the girl turns her head and shouts, “MOM, MEMORY SELLER.”

The baby squeaks.

The girl swivels back around to Mari. “She’ll be right out.”

Mari runs a hand over the baby’s head. “Thank you.”

The girl drops into one of the other chairs. Mari gets the sense the girl has been instructed not to leave any strangers alone in the house.

For a while, the two are quiet. Mari takes a look around. Against the far wall is what appears to be a china cabinet. Yet rather than fine dishes, the shelves have been lined with origami cranes.

They are arranged in something close to rainbow order, beginning with red and ending with light pink, tacked on after purple. The cranes are small, half the size of her palm, a paper gift tag looped around each bird’s neck.

POP.

Mari and the baby jump. Mari looks over at the girl, but she’s just staring at the wall, her head propped up on one hand and her eyelids dropped, as if she’s in the middle of a boring lecture.

Unable to stomach the thought of spending the next indeterminate number of minutes listening to nothing but the pop of the girl’s gum, Mari says, “So you and your mother buy memories?”

The girl snaps her gum. “She does. I’ve got nothing to do with it.”

Mari opens her mouth, then closes it. The baby lets out an uncertain grumble.

Sighing as if Mari has demanded something of her, the girl straightens up. “I’m only telling you this because if I don’t, Mom will, and she takes forever to explain anything.”

Mari pauses. “Okay.”

“We buy the memories, but we’re not the ones who use them. My mom sells them to, like, rich people.”

The baby squirms. Shifting positions, Mari says, “Rich people?”

“Yeah. People who have so much money, they run out of yachts and islands to buy and start looking for ways to be happy again. Hedonistic treadmill or whatever, right?”

The baby shakes his tiny fists, as if to say, Those blasted rich people.

The girl slips her phone out of the pocket of her shorts and begins scrolling. “You come here. You put your memories in the paper. My mom pays you for them. She gets in touch with her clients. She’s on the phone with one now. They come and buy the cranes and do God-knows-what with them, hoping against hope that this handful of memories will be the thing that makes them happy.”

Mari frowns. “How does that work, though?”

“What, the memory thing?” The girl shrugs. “They disembody the crane.”

Mari pulls back. “I’m sorry?”

“Me too. Poor crane.” SMACK. “They open it. That’s what I mean. They open it, and the memory goes into their brain and settles down in there, making them think it’s theirs.”

“Like an organ transplant,” Mari says softly.

Daniel was an organ donor. His body is with other people now, sprinkled around the country like seeds in the wind.

“Sure.” Stretching out a hand, the girl studies her nails. “Whatever.”

Mari licks her lips. “Does that mean there’s a chance they won’t transfer correctly?”

The girl exhales. “I don’t know. I’m not the expert.”

Mari thinks for a moment. Then, bouncing the baby, she says, “He doesn’t have a name.”

The girl looks up. After snapping her gum, she taps the screen of her phone. “That’s nice, I guess.”

“No, I mean…” Mari once again licks her lips. “He has no name. Can I get more?”

THWOP. The teenager’s tongue slips out to pull the spray of bubblegum back into her mouth. “More what?”

Mari’s face flushes. “More… money, I guess.”

She writhes under the girl’s gaze, loathing herself for even bringing it up. She just thought maybe, with the baby unnamed, it would be easier for the memories to acclimate to their new owners’ brains.

“You’re desperate, huh?” the girl says.

Mari flinches. “I didn’t—”

“I mean, everyone who comes here is kind of desperate. You just seem”—the girl tilts her head, squinting to better display the layers of eyeshadow coating her eyelids—“extra desperate.”

Mari’s face burns.

Mistake, mistake, mistake, her body screams. Get out, get out, get OUT.

She has just placed a hand on the table, about to stand and make her grand escape, when a woman steps into the room.

“Hello, hello,” she crows, bustling over to the table. “Sorry for the delay. A water bottle for you, dear.”

Mari stares at the bottle, heat still creeping up her neck. “Thank you.”

“Of course, love.” The woman collapses into one of the chairs, the action so graceless, the baby’s head snaps up. “Now, let me tell you a little about the cranes.”

“Let’s not,” the girl says, still scrolling on her phone. “I explained it all already.”

Irritation sparks along the woman’s face. “Well, I didn’t. We have certain protocols. I need to make sure she fully understands what she’s doing.”

“She does.” The girl looks up, locking eyes with Mari. “Right?”

Mari hesitates.

The sooner she gets started, the sooner she gets her money.

She is desperate, after all. Desperate and extra pathetic.

“Yes,” she says. “Yes, that’s right.”

*

The woman ends up doing some explaining of her own, much to her daughter’s displeasure, but all in all, it seems like an easier process than Mari would have expected. All she has to do is write a short summary of a memory on one of the tags, take a white origami paper from the stack, and recall a certain memory, at least a minute long. The longer the memory, the more valuable the crane.

The first time Mari opens her eyes, having summoned a memory of her childhood, she’s surprised to find that the once-white paper has been dyed a rosy pink. According to the woman, the color of the paper changes based on the memory it contains: red for lustful thoughts and moments of fiery passion. Yellow for happy memories. Pink for displays of tender familial or platonic affection.

Mari watches, her throat tight, as the pink paper folds itself into a crane.

“Go ahead and loop that around its neck,” the woman tells Mari, gesturing to the tag.

Speechless, Mari obeys. Before releasing the crane, she takes one last look at the tag.

the time my best friend held my hand when I was scared, it reads.

Mari shifts in her seat, jostling the baby, as the woman takes the crane.

It seems like a nice memory.

She just doesn’t remember it anymore.

By the time she leaves the house, she has sold roughly fifty cranes. It seems like a lot, fifty of her memories, but it’s worth it. She now has more money than she’s had in a while.

“See? This was the right decision,” she says aloud, on the way back from the house. She is speaking to the baby, or else to Daniel.

Behind her, the baby grunts, reluctantly agreeing.

*

Between caring for the baby, fielding calls from increasingly impatient and self-important claims specialists, and applying for the ever-dropping number of remote positions for which she is qualified, Mari has very little time to sit and think.

She therefore doesn’t miss them.

The memories she sold.

She repeatedly returns to the memory crane house, selling more and more of her memories to pay the rent and medical bills. She never makes enough to stop worrying, exactly, but she no longer lives in a state of constant dread. She feels light, unburdened, and not just because she has less in her head. Every time she goes, she reminds herself of her rule: she will not touch anything to do with the dead. Not her mother. Not her father. Not Daniel. None of them.

Then the rent goes up. The baby gets sick. She is informed that the remote job she had been interviewing for has been filled by another candidate.

When she returns to the memory house, she tells herself to hold it in. Hold it in, suck it up, and don’t say anything to the girl or her mother.

The moment she sits down at the table, it all comes spilling out, her fears and concerns pouring out of her like the vomit her baby had been spewing days before. By the time she finishes, she’s a sad, weepy mess, a growing wad of tissues clenched in one hand. She sees no other option but to touch the memories she once declared off-limits.

Don’t, Daniel whispers. Don’t erase me or your parents. You can’t get us back, you know. You will never make any more memories with us.

I know, she wants to tell him.

I KNOW, she wants to scream.

Mari peers down at her baby, still nameless. Still sleepless. Still fatherless.

Still young.

“What about babies?” she blurts out, the words skittering across the table.

The girl frowns. “Jesus. You want to sell your baby?”

“No, no,” Mari says quickly. “Not him. My memories of him. The ones of my first days with him.”

She turns to the woman, desperation leaking from her like milk.

“Would that pay?” she asks. “I mean, would you buy that?”

The woman hesitates, her fingers clamped around her cup. “I suppose. It’s just… are you sure?”

Mari glances down at her baby. He looks more like Daniel every day.

She wants so much for him. Peace. Stability. Enough love to keep him sane. If she doesn’t sell her memories, he’ll never have a chance.

“It’s fine,” Mari tells the woman. “If you’ll buy it, it’s all fine.”

The woman hands over another stack of snow-white papers. Mari is just about to reach for them when the baby begins to fuss. He waves his tiny hands, flailing as if pained. The girl covers her ears as he lets out a mournful wail.

See? Daniel whispers. We don’t want you to do this.

In her mind, she responds: If you wanted a say, you shouldn’t have died on me.

Imaginary Daniel falls quiet as their baby starts to scream.

“Hey, hey,” Mari says, unbuckling the baby and lifting him to her face. “It’s okay. We’ll make lots more memories together.”

The baby stares up at her, one fist in his mouth.

Then, slowly, he grins, as if he has forgotten what upset him in the first place.

*

Memories. Memories. More and more memories. She sells so many memories, she forgets what she has sold. The early days with her baby disappear in an instant, snatched up by people who will think her son’s their own. At one point, she begins to wonder if her baby was ever sick at all or if that was nothing but a nightmare. The only proof of his sickness is the bill from the doctor, cold and clinical, devoid of any concern or fear she imagines she must have had when she first discovered the baby was ill.

She was worried. Wasn’t she? She had to be. This is her baby.

More than that, he’s Daniel’s baby. This baby is all Mari has left.

She loses out on another job. She knew it was a long shot, but it devastates her anyhow. She has been rejected from fifty-four jobs now. She tracks this, her rejections, but not the number of memories she has sold. Keeping tabs on one statistic feels depressing enough.

“It’s time,” she tells her reflection as she applies a shaky layer of eyeliner. “It’s time to give them all away.”

Throughout the drive back to the memory crane house, she keeps her jaw tightly clenched. In the backseat, the baby babbles. He has begun forming sounds that seem eerily like words. She is almost positive he hasn’t actually spoken yet, but a part of her can’t be sure.

When she gets to the house, the woman is once again in a call. The girl brings her into the house and sits with her at the table. An uneasy silence settles in the room like dust.

“We’re hiring, you know,” the girl says suddenly.

Mari looks up. “I’m sorry?”

“We’re hiring.” The girl spins her phone on the table, one index finger on the screen. “At MiniStarMart, I mean.”

Mari lifts her head. “Mini… StarMart?”

“The trashy convenience store by my house.”

“No, I know what it is.” Mari bought a 168-count diaper pack from that very store a few weeks back. “It’s just…”

“Not what you thought you would be doing at”—the girl squints at her, her mouth puckered—“however many years old you are?”

“That’s not it,” Mari says. “I’m not picky.”

Not anymore, anyway.

The girl rolls her eyes. “It’s fine. You can say it. It’s just my stupid part-time job.”

“I wasn’t—”

“It’s pretty soul-crushing, sure. Bowing down to capitalism or whatever.” The girl pops her gum. “But so is pawning your memories to sad rich people.”

Mari blinks.

Then, before she can stop herself, she begins to cry.

“If you don’t want to do it anymore,” the girl says, continuing as if nothing has happened, “then don’t. Work retail with me. It’s hell, but it pays. There are other mothers there too.”

Mari sniffles. “Other mothers?”

The girl nods. “The manager has a soft spot for single moms. Probably something personal. I never asked. I heard they have some sort of sitter switch-off or something. Sounds like a cult to me, but you could ask them about it, I guess. Plus, sometimes, if the slushy machine breaks, everyone gets free drinks until it gets fixed.”

Mari attempts to cover her face, or at least wipe her tears before they dribble onto the baby, but her body’s so heavy, she can’t even lift an arm.

The girl pushes the box of tissues over to her, one corner jabbing Mari’s elbow.

“It sucks,” the girl says. “Doesn’t it?”

Mari isn’t sure whether she means the MiniStarMart job, the memory-crane business, the burden of being a single mother, or just life in general, but regardless, she nods.

“Thank you,” she says. “I think maybe I’ll try it. MiniStarMart, I mean.”

“Sure. Cool.” The girl pops her gum. “I’ll text my manager to tell him you’re interested.”

Mari dabs at her eyes. “Thank you.”

“Yeah, sure. Whatever.” The girl taps on her phone for a moment. After shooting off a text, she holds up her hands, as if in surrender. “There. It’s done.”

“Thank you.”

“Yeah. I guess. Whatever.”

Another silence falls. Mari can just barely hear the woman’s voice, cheerful and overly bright, coming from the other room.

Mari pauses, her eyes skimming the girl’s face.

“What?” the girl asks. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“No, nothing,” Mari says. “I just realized I don’t know your name.”

The girl sighs, as if this is a far harder ask than informing her boss that a near-stranger will be coming in to inquire about a job.

“Inori,” she says finally. “It means, like, prayer or whatever. Gross, I know.”

Mari watches her for a moment. Then, returning her gaze to her baby, she says, “Actually, I think that’s beautiful.”

The girl scoffs, as if she doesn’t believe her.

Then, turning her head, Inori rests her chin on her hand and smiles.