Memory (short story)

Memory is a non-German short story by Stephen King that was published in July 2006 in the US magazine Tin House .

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Edgar Freemantle tells of his gruesome accident in which he lost an arm. When he comes to, he is aggressive, has memory gaps and has a language disorder: he cannot use everyday words properly. While still in the hospital, he injures his wife with a plastic knife - after all, she leaves him because he is said to have strangled her, something Edgar no longer knows about. Only later, when he was involved in another accident in which a dog was so badly injured that it had to die in front of Edgar's eyes, did the memories come back in a flood: the accident with the ambulance, the attack on his wife ...

Origins / worth knowing

In February 2006 King himself read his story for the first time during the Six Days of Opening Nights in Florida and made it clear that it was inspired on the one hand by his own serious accident and on the other hand was a 'test run' for his new novel Duma Key , which will appear in 2008 should.

In interviews with Duma Key , King actually describes an almost identical plot: The construction worker Edgar Freemantle, who lives in Minnesota , suffers a serious accident in which he loses an arm. When he unexpectedly wakes up from the coma, he suffers from memory loss and uncontrollable fits of anger, so that his wife finally divorces him. Shortly before he committed suicide, Edgar consults a psychiatrist who advises him to resume his old hobby of drawing. Edgar rediscovers his talent, but he can do more than just draw. He finds out that he can draw things in and erase things out of the real world. Duma Key is the name of a mysterious island that appears to be responsible for Edgar's psychic gift.

The short story is printed in the original version of Richard Bachman's novel Qual ( Blaze ) as an appendix.