Forget-me-not
Gerald pulled the hair from the lint trap. It was heavy and golden and hung in a gentle curve, the sort that would cover one eye and then reverse itself to trace a collarbone.
Gerald ran his hand over his scalp. His hair, what there was of it, was thin and curled and the no-color of dust bunnies. A rogue hair, he thought, and felt carefully through the fringe at the back of his skull for a bristly patch, an unexpectedly productive mole. But there was nothing but dry creased skin, nothing like the impossible hair.
Gerald felt cold and flushed at the same time. He set the hair back onto the lint trap, hunched over and took a few long shaky breaths. The hair coiled loosely like a bangle, gleamed against the bed of pale blue lint. The lint smelled gently of flowers; ‘forget-me-not’, Gerald thought, though he could not remember what color they were nor how they smelled.
The box of dryer sheets read “Unscented” and smelled faintly of hospital. The clothes curled in the dryer were white, white shirts with shirt sleeves and white plastic buttons, white undershirts stretched out of true round the middle, white briefs with sagging elastic, slacks and socks such unassertive shades of grey and brown they might as well be white.
Gerald pushed himself upright, took a few careful steps away from the closet that held the laundry, sat in the kitchen chair.
That is not my lint, he thought.
He looked through the living room to the front door, imagining some stranger, some crazy man standing there, laundry basket in hand. Woman, he thought—that fragile perfumed blue—strange woman in my house. But that thought was as impossible as the golden hair.
Much as he was disturbed by it, Gerald could not bring himself to dispose of the mysterious lint. He slid the contents of the filter onto a paper towel and placed it on the small wooden shelf in the laundry closet next to the box of detergent with vague thoughts of police detectives and forensics labs.
“The defendant tried to cover his tracks by using an innocent citizen’s laundry, your honor—”
her tracks, Gerald thought—
“—but our tests prove the lint comes from this shirt.”
Sweater, Gerald thought, a blue cashmere cardigan.
He transferred his wet clothes to the dryer, then checked the front door, the windows, the kitchen door that led to the tiny enclosed patio long abandoned to the wind-stirred leaves. There was no other sign of intrusion, not until the dryer spun down with a rattle. Gerald pulled his clothes out one by one, shook them straight and folded them into the basket—every item expected and accounted for—then carried them to the bedroom and placed them into their drawers. He washed his hands, carefully plastered his fringe of hair back over his scalp, checked his shirts for stray threads.
Only then did he return to the dryer and pull out the lint trap. There was some white there, but not the polyester of his shirts; it was a finer, stronger thread like silk. And there was more of the blue fuzz, and strands of a stretchy black material, and through it all looped more of the golden hairs. In the center nested a small blue button.
Like a robin’s egg, Gerald thought. Like an eye.
* * *
The closet off the kitchen that held the laundry had a slatted folding door. Gerald usually left it open; the stacked washer and dryer were stolidly reassuring with their smooth white enamel, their round bulging doors that reflected the kitchen and the little patio window and his own round face and form. But he closed it now. All that next week as he sat at the table—eating his eggs in the morning, his can of tomato soup and grilled cheese at night—he watched dust motes float in and out of the slats and tried to think of an explanation for the impossible lint.
There was nothing at the carwash that shade of blue, no heads that brilliant gold. The chairs in the office he shared with the boxed financial records and the assistant manager were hard plastic, the floor grey vinyl tile. No customers ever entered the office, no breeze wandered from the waiting room capable of bearing such a long, graceful hair. Not one of the air fresheners on their pegs by the cashier had a scent as delicate, or as suggestively sweet.
The odor lingered in Gerald’s thoughts all week. If he tried too hard to identify it, the memory dispersed into the everyday smells of his life: toast, eggs, sweat, the sharp soap from the carwash. Words came to him from forgotten high school classes: ambiguous, evocative, elusive. But the words only described his confusion; they did nothing to resolve it.
Gerald had never had trouble sleeping; “like a baby” had been his mother’s last words to him each night, even that night from which she herself had not awoken. But now he lay awake in the dark with that sweet scent and that strand of gold tangling his thoughts and then without a clear moment of decision he was out of bed. He shivered a bit in the breeze under the front door, and almost turned back.
But light was streaming out between the slats of the laundry closet door.
The dryer door was open, the little automatic light dazzling in the darkness, and there was a loop of blonde hair glimmering in the slot of the lint trap. Gerald put his finger through the loop—a tingle like dread below his belly—and pulled. The entire lint trap came out, spilling blue fuzz and threads and loops of golden hair. He caught the lint before it could fall to the floor and, hands shaking, one finger still wrapped in gold, he turned to the paper towel on the shelf.
And then he stopped and the quiver in his belly climbed up his spine to stop his breath and blur his sight.
The lint from the week before had been clumped at the center of the paper towel, as knotted as the new batch nestled in his hands. But now, impossibly, it covered the sheet in an even layer, black thread with black thread, blue with blue, the button near the top nestled in neat shining coils of hair.
* * *
The lint trap continued to disgorge its mysterious contents. Soon Gerald was washing his clothes nightly, until his shirts frayed and his slacks thinned to translucence. He wondered if his own lint appeared in some stranger’s dryer; he pictured an air-streamed midcentury design, chrome reflected a gold-framed blue eye, red lips quirked in a curious half-smile.
The paper towel on the laundry shelf quickly filled, so he spread a white bedsheet on the living room floor and gently set each new knot of lint at the center of the sheet. And each morning when he emerged from his bedroom, he found the new lint had worked itself into the emerging pattern.
The blue cashmere formed a rough rectangle, with stubby appendages at the top like three-quarter-length sleeves. Sequins of the same blue wound like vines down the center. The black threads formed a square shape below the blue; a skirt, Gerald thought, though he had vague memories of childhood doctor’s office magazines with actresses in tight, stretchy black shorts, his mother turning the page with a sniff. The white silk threads had burrowed down under the others to form uneven lumps and bands, and a second button appeared to join the first on the cashmere. At the top of the sheet, the blonde hairs formed a wide “S” on the right and a narrow twisting “J” on the left.
And every morning there was a little pile at the bottom of the sheet: clods of pale generic dust, strands of his own dull hair, the occasional coarse curled ones that made him blush and mutter apologies as he carefully brushed the rejected detritus onto a tissue.
Gerald never saw the lint move, though sometimes he thought he heard the whisper of cloth on cloth as he lay in bed. Another school memory came to mind: iron filings on paper and a magnet held underneath, invisible force given shape. The iron had leapt and chattered on the paper as if it was alive. But the movement of the lint was painstaking, the lines it traced, obscure.
Gerald worried over anything that might interfere with its progress. He wedged a towel under the front door to block any draft, and pulled down the shades. He cleared the composted leaves from around the patio gate and dragged it open for the first time since he had taken the apartment, so he could come and go through the kitchen door. And twice a day, he scrubbed himself a gleaming pink, though the rejections of his own lint continued. They would only make you more empty, he thought, as he swept them away.
* * *
After a week of restless nights and preoccupied days at work, Gerald decided to help the shape on the sheet. That Saturday night, wearing latex gloves and a small plastic spatula he bought at the supermarket, he carefully nudged the “arms” even with each other, squared off the oblong of the skirt, slid the buttons down in between the twin lines of the sequins. He had found a doll which came with a tiny brush in the sundries section of the same supermarket, and dropped the doll with its unwanted nylon strands into a garbage can on the walk home. Now, holding the roots down with one trembling finger, he used the brush to tease flat the twisted hank of hair on the left.
Out of her eyes, Gerald thought, and then his hands were shaking too hard to continue.
In the morning, the shape on the sheet had shifted back to the way it had been before his intervention. If anything, it was more uneven than before. The buttons were set at an angle and almost off the top edge of the cashmere. There was a gap in the black that could mark the legs of shorts but looked more like a slit, a tear in the cloth. And the hair that had twisted like a “J” on the left now spread out like a waterfall with a tangled spray of curls at the bottom that half-covered the buttons. The little pile of rejected fibers spilled off the bottom of the sheet and under the sofa, along with one of the latex gloves which Gerald had thought he’d thrown out the night before.
Gerald cleaned up the spill, head down, reluctant to look back at the shape on the sheet.
“I know it’s not enough,” he said. He climbed to his feet, refuse carefully cupped in his hands. “I—” He risked a glance at the sheet. The shape was still. “I’ll look for more.”
The supermarket had already proven itself unworthy, and the offerings of the faded shops along the main street seemed crass and shabby. At the far end of the street stood the library, as gray as the rest, but made of stone. Gerald had only vaguely registered its presence in the years he’d lived in town; now it seemed massive, and ageless. He blinked at it for a moment. Then he tugged his belt straight and walked up the steps.
The encyclopedia was little help: he learned that cashmere was a sort of goat, and cardigans were originally a type of British soldier’s waistcoat. He was certain the shape forming on his living floor was neither goat nor soldier. Frustrated, he asked at the front desk for books on woman’s clothing. The girl there smirked and snapped her gum and directed him to the reference section.
The reference librarian had a desk at the boundary between the computer carrels and the bookshelves that filled the rear of the building. She was slim and neat and likely close in years to Gerald’s forty. She wore a sweater that, apart from its pale peach color, was so similar to the forget-me-not blue image in Gerald’s mind that he stared at it, silent and blinking, until the woman cleared her throat pointedly and asked if he was looking for something in particular.
Gerald blushed and stammered his way through a description of the outfit in his mind, adding an improvised and somewhat incoherent explanation of plans for a painting.
“A portrait for my mother,” he said. “From a photograph,” he added hastily, as if the librarian might know his mother had been dead for a decade.
The librarian tapped her lips with a finger, then asked, “Could the photo be from the fifties? Or late forties?”
“Yes, yes, exactly,” Gerald blurted. He had always known in his heart that blonde and that blue had belonged to a simpler, more glamorous time.
The librarian led him past the bookcases and down a half-flight of steps to a cool, fluorescent-lit room with boxes stacked on shelves.
“Look,” she said, raising a slender hand to a shelf. “Life.”
A tremor ran down Gerald’s arms and legs at this baffling, prophetic statement. She knows what it is becoming, he thought. But the boxes to which she gestured were labelled with those names: “Life Magazine/1940-1949” read the one to which she pointed, and others held issues of Look and Time and Cosmopolitan from the war and post-war years.
And there they were: sweater girls and cashmere twin sets, beaded cardigans and tight black skirts, bras and girdles that explained the strange patterns drawn by the demure white threads.
He made photocopies of the most likely photos: a woman in a blue cardigan with beaded butterflies down the front, a picture of a girl curled on a sofa in black shorts and a sweater, an ad for Scottish cashmere in which the artists had drawn the sweater posed and hollow, as if the model had faded away.
Away in time, Gerald thought, which was funny because it was in fact an issue of Time from the mid-forties. He paged through the magazine as he walked back from the photocopier and came on a photo so startling he stumbled and almost fell down the half-flight of steps.
It was a picture of a blonde woman, looking down and to the side with a sad expression. Her hair was pulled back on one side over an eyebrow that swept up like a bird’s wing; the other eye was hidden behind a cascade of hair.
I know you, Gerald thought, staring into that dark eye, and realized he did know that face, not from life but from half-forgotten films. Ladd? Lana? he thought, but no, that had been the sweater girl he’d found earlier. Lake. Veronica Lake. The preceding page had a photo of the actress with her long hair caught in a drill press and a staged look of dismay on her face; it was a wartime issue and the article urged “our working ladies to adopt practical hairstyles for safety.”
Gerald was out of quarters for the photocopier. The reference librarian was away from her desk, and he did not want to risk the scorn of the girl at the front, not with his heart still fluttering and his face flushed and sticky with sweat. But that sweep of hair—that strangely sad expression—were too compelling. He tore out the page without ever quite deciding to do so.
He passed the reference librarian on the way out. He muttered something without stopping, waved his photocopies as if offering travel papers to wary border guards. The sheets curled to reveal a single solemn eye. Gerald shoved them into his jacket and hurried toward the door, but there was no reaction, no voices calling out to stop him.
* * *
Gerald tried twice more to help the shape on the sheet, using his library reference. Each time, the shape, growing thick and solid with each new batch of lint, rejected his aid and twisted itself into an ever more irregular outline. The night after the second attempt he heard a fluttering like bird wings, and in the morning the photocopies were scattered across the floor. He found the picture of Veronica Lake under the couch, smeared with discarded dust and torn so that the single black eye dangled free.
The two buttons had crept entirely off the cashmere and, as if echoing the torn picture, lay in the middle of the golden sweeps of hair, one like an eye, one like a mouth pursed in disapproval. Gerald sat on the corner of the couch farthest from the edge of the sheet with the crumpled photocopies in his hand.
“I’m sorry,” he said to the shape on the sheet. “I don’t know what you want.” He smoothed the papers against his lap and Veronica Lake’s eye came loose, fluttered in slow loops onto the corner of the sheet. He stared at it sadly. “I just don’t have much.…” The blue buttons looked less dissatisfied from this angle, more like, well, a pair of buttons.
He looked at the photos in his hands again. There were sweaters with three buttons and sweaters with eight and sweaters with none at all. There were no sweaters with just two.
Maybe, he thought, and then said out loud, “Maybe something got lost on the way.” Giddy with this insight, he added, “Lost in the wash.”
The buttons nestled in the gold hair offered no opinion. He shrugged and looked down. The black paper eye had drifted from the edge of the sheet to rest against his foot.
* * *
Gerald went back to the library. The reference librarian was wearing her peach-colored sweater; it had three buttons. She set Gerald up at one of the computers. It was not hard, it turned out, to find buttons from the 1940s. After a couple hours, he had found two sets that seemed to match, still sewn to their original display cards. He ordered both sets, even though they each cost a day or two of pay.
It—she, he thought—had worked so hard to be whole again; he would not dishonor that effort with some cheap modern plastic. And anyway, the shape on the sheet was—demanding, he thought—discerning.
He taped a sign to his front door reading “Deliveries at rear door, please,” and swept the patio. The lint trap was productive that week, turning up whole handfuls of the blue cashmere and a number of odd fittings that worked their way underneath the rest.
Both sets of buttons arrived on the same day. He opened them on the kitchen table as his can of soup heated. They looked right, at least by the kitchen light. He snipped one button from each card and, kneeling at the edge of the sheet, carefully held them up against the originals. He could see no difference.
Gerald decided not to attempt to move the two existing buttons. He would place one of the new buttons where he thought it should go, using the librarian’s sweater as reference, and perhaps the others could be lured into line. His soup was bubbling on the stove and the latex gloves were on the shelf in the laundry, but he was so certain of his vision that he reached out, fingertips just brushing the cashmere, and laid the button down.
“So, then,” he said. “I hope that’s alright.” He got to his feet and went to rescue his soup.
He had finished his meal and was scrubbing the burnt bits from the pot when he heard a rattle behind him. He turned and found a button spinning on the floor. The extras were all still attached to their cards. He walked gingerly into the living room, and of course the new button was no longer there on the cashmere.
“Sorry,” Gerald said aloud. Maybe the other set is a better match, he thought. Or maybe I was too eager.
He washed his hands and combed his hair, fetched the latex gloves and the spatula from the laundry closet and one of the buttons from the other card.
“Now then,” he said, kneeling once more by the sheet. “I’ll just put it here in the center, and you do with it what you will.” He tilted the spatula and the button slid onto the blue wool.
It was growing dark, and the ceiling lamp in the kitchen threw his shadow rippling across the shape on the floor.
Gerald stepped to the side, but in the flat light the rippling continued, intensified, the lint lapping against the sheet like waves before a storm. The cashmere tensed and then bubbled up, arms flailing, the skirt blew upward like a balloon and tore in two, the hair twisted and fanned out all at once, like a curtain, to hide its buttons.
Standing transfixed by the window, Gerald felt more than heard a woosh in one ear. There was a sharp slap to the side of his head and then the crash of glass behind him. He turned to look: a perfect round hole had appeared in the paper window shade and the glass in one pane had shattered outward.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw the shape collapse, and slowly settle back onto the sheet. Not quite looking at anything in particular, he fumbled at the lamp by the sofa but couldn’t find the switch. He didn’t need to see, though, to know the offered button was gone.
* * *
That night, Gerald did not sleep. The rejected button had left a bloody groove along the side of his head. He lay on his side with a cool washcloth on the lump and stared at the bedroom door, listened to the soft, persistent sounds from the other side.
In the morning, he called in sick and lingered in bed through midmorning. When he finally made his way to the kitchen, he kept his eyes on his feet. Even so, he couldn’t help but catch glimpses of the sheet; the shape there was pinched and twisted; the one visible button shadowed and reproachful.
He checked the lint trap; the thought of letting that strange process clog up seemed cruel, even if the form it fed was angry.
Disappointed, he thought, as his mother had been. He had done his chores then as well, no matter what she said, right to the end. It had never been enough.
The lint trap was mostly empty, though, just a few sequins and a knot of white silk. He emptied it onto a paper towel and set it on the shelf in the closet.
I’ll put it on the sheet later, he thought. It just needs some time.
But he wasn’t at all sure that more time was what it—she, he thought—needed. He could not get the image from the night before out of his mind: the shape bubbling and flapping and finally deflating.
Like a tent, he thought, a circus tent with the poles and wires and the audience and the animals and the performers in their sparkles and feathers and everything all gone.
“Empty,” he said aloud, the word as sharp in his ears as glass cracking, as a discarded button rattling to a stop on the floor. He knew then with absolute clarity what it was the shape on the sheet needed.
“Life,” the reference librarian had said. And then she had raised her hand.
He needed time to think. He kept his eyes down as he shuffled to the bedroom, but the buttons in their wreath of hair were at the edge of sheet, as if eager to see what he was doing. He piled all the clothes from his chest of drawers into the laundry basket, even the grown-up suit he’d worn just the one time, and lugged it carefully back to the kitchen and ran load after load.
Perhaps the lint trap’s earlier barrenness had just been the deep breath before the final push, because now it overflowed. Gerald pulled out clumps of wool and nests of black thread and handfuls of sequins and snaps and loop after loop of thick golden hair, until shelf and kitchen table were covered in paper towels, each with its precious burden.
He pulled on a pair of slacks but the cloth, thinned to tissue, tore all the way down one leg. He put on the suit, instead, which was a better choice anyway because the jacket had an inside pocket. He put a kitchen knife into that pocket, and wary of the breeze, slipped out the back door.
The library had a back door, an emergency exit, and by tracing the line of the windows he could tell it was half a floor down from the front entrance and must connect to that dim back room with its shelves of forgotten magazines. The street behind the library was quiet; two people could walk that way back to his apartment, arm in arm, passing no one who might notice a knife, or a look of fear.
The gum-chewing girl was not up front, but the reference librarian was at her desk, standing over an enormous book, taking notes on a yellow pad. She was not wearing her peach cardigan.
That flustered Gerald for a second, but then he thought, She won’t need it, and gasped a single, short, shockingly evil laugh.
The librarian looked up, and Gerald said, “Excuse me,” as if he had made a rude noise.
She smiled politely and tilted her head, and when he didn’t continue—Sorry, I didn’t mean excuse me like that. I’m not ready, he was thinking—she asked, “Can I help you find something?”
Gerald’s heart was pounding. He put his hand to his chest, pressed the knife against his ribs, and stepped toward her. “I think what I need is … is in the back room.”
The reference librarian lifted her chin in recognition. “Your painting,” she said brightly. “For your mother, wasn’t it?”
Gerald nodded, then shook his head. “For my friend. It’s her …” Birthday, he thought. But he said, “She’s dead.”
The reference librarian frowned in confusion. “I’m sorry. Your mother?”
Gerald nodded helplessly.
“I’m sorry,” the librarian said again. She half-turned and pulled a sweater from the back of her chair. It was a thick, cabled fisherman’s cardigan of undyed wool. “It’s so cold down there,” she said as she shrugged it on.
There was a sprig of tiny pale blue flowers pinned to her sweater. Gerald lifted a finger to them. His other hand slipped into his coat to grasp the knife. “Forget-me-not?” he asked, in a voice he barely recognized as his own.
The reference librarian nodded and looked down and to the side. She stroked the stem, her finger almost touching his. “For remembrance,” she said. Gerald thought she sounded sad.
“May I?” he asked, and leaned over her. She’s so small, he thought, despairing, and she’s so empty.
He took a deep breath. The forget-me-not smelled of fresh-cut grass and supermarket bouquets. The scent was nothing at all like he remembered.
* * *
In the end he stammered a somewhat confused question about Veronica Lake’s hair, and the reference librarian found an article from the early 1970s, an obituary, as it turned out. After the actress had cut her hair for the war effort, she never regained her earlier popularity, though that had been more due to her drinking and unreliable moods than her hairstyle. She had died of renal failure, alone in a hospital in Vermont. “A shell of herself,” the article said.
Gerald left with a quiet “Thank you” for the librarian. He dropped the knife in the same garbage can in which he had disposed of the doll from the supermarket.
When he got home, he took off the suit and washed his hands and put on his gloves, then carefully carried the paper towels from the kitchen, one by one, to place the contents onto the sheet. The first clumps were already creeping into position by the time he set the last one into the center.
“Everything she had,” he said, by way of apology, “would not have been enough.”
He took off his socks and undershirt and boxers and put them into the washer with the suit, then folded the rest of his laundry and put it away. He had forgotten to buy more soup, so he made a grilled cheese sandwich and ate it while the dryer spun. When the cycle ended, he was not at all surprised to find the lint trap perfectly, spotlessly empty.
He took a shower and scrubbed until his skin stung, then shaved himself, from the tiny hairs between the joints of his toes to the fine fringe around his ears. His reflection in the mirror over the sink, dimmed and vignetted by condensation, looked like a framed photo of his earliest self.
Like a baby, he thought.
The living room was dim. Street light bled around the edges of the shades; streamed through the hole the button had cut to trace a line in the drifting dust, sparked gold and blue at the head of the sheet. He could not bring himself to turn on the light, not so much out of fear of the final shape on the sheet, as of seeing it and not being able to find it lovely.
Gerald stood there for a long time, as the dusk settled around him. He felt massive, substantial, as it was he and not the darkness that filled the room.
A shell of herself, he thought. How terrible to be hollow. Even in … memory. He meant “death,” but he would not say that word, not even in his thoughts.
Nor would he disturb the sheet and restart that agonizing slow process of becoming. He knelt, and crawled across the floor, the wood rough against his heavy flesh, until he reached the edge of the sheet. His eyes were adapting to the dark; the faint glow of the sheet with its dark center echoed the square halo of streetlight around the windows. The round spot of light from the hole in the window shade fell perfectly on one of the buttons. Or maybe the button had crept there, finally in place.
Something shifted in the dimness, a quiet sigh like cloth on cloth, and he closed his eyes. He lay down and slowly, careful of a slip or breeze, slid himself onto the sheet.
After a long wait, an arm settled across his chest. Gerald trembled, briefly, at that gentle touch. Cashmere cradled his head, silk brushed his thighs, until he was wrapped all in warmth. He opened his eyes but there was nothing but dark now and, after a day or two, a sweet, unforgettable scent that was nothing like flowers, nothing at all. It was enough.
Gregory Norman Bossert is an author, filmmaker, and musician based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He started writing on a dare in 2009 at the age of forty-seven. Since then his fiction has appeared in print and online, in audio, foreign translation, and Year’s Best anthologies, with stories in Conjunctions, the Saturday Evening Post, and The Unquiet Dreamer: A Tribute to Harlan Ellison. His story “The Telling” won the 2013 World Fantasy Award. When not writing, he wrangles spaceships and superheroes for legendary visual effects studio Industrial Light & Magic.
Copyright © 2025 Gregory Norman Bossert.