2025 MIDWEST CONTEST
​RUNNER-UP

"I loved the idea of a store where you can dig back inside yourself and find your earliest memories and experience them as an adult. This was so beautifully written, funny, and very affecting. It was like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind turned inside out." 
Amber Sparks, Guest Judge

Marvelous Memories

Flash by ​Whitney Weisenberg

Marvelous Memories opened where the old Winn-Dixie was. They gave out punch cards and had weekly staff pics like “city pool” and “traveling in Thailand,” which pulled at a thread inside of me and tugged.

I went there after work. I liked how the shelves were always expanding and how no one ever rushed you. There was even a sign on one of the glass cases that read, “We’ve got nothing but time.”

It wasn’t technically true. There was a mood section in the back.

The customers who hung out in the past were always dressed nicely. Suits. Ties. Church clothes. But, the “mood swingers” shirts looked like they had been slept in. Their hair was unwashed. Some of their teeth were missing.

They loitered by the counter waiting for free samples of Euphoria and Joy.

Some of my friends swore by psychics. But their promises of someday depressed me. I wanted to live a thousand lives, and the thought of only living one and having it mapped out for me was suffocating.

Behind the counter, Maple was unimpressive, with hair burnt and orange at the ends and splotches of broken blood vessels spread across her cheeks as if her skin had been stamped, but her memories were my favorite. Her mother read her stories in funny voices; her first boyfriend, Alan, called her name like it was molasses, sweet and thick, dripping from a tree.

The intimate moments cost more, so I saved, and on the weekend Alan’s fingers skipped up and down my clavicle in figure eights.

My boss gave me a gift card. “For doing a great job.” He said, and when I looked confused, he added. “And an early birthday present.” My birthday wasn’t for five months, but thrilled, I hugged him.

He straightened the bottom of his jacket and mumbled, “Keep up the good work, Libby,” but I was already imagining bottling my own memories, envisioning the employees asking me to work there, to start my own Libby’s Line.

I came in on a Sunday morning to do the extraction. The manager pulled out a green fabric beanbag chair. It looked like the one that sat in the corner of Maple’s childhood bedroom. The one that she and Alan had sat on when they crammed for a chemistry test. Alan had wrapped his fingers around her hair and circled the strands around his mouth. It was odd and intimate.

The beanbag folded and caved underneath me, and I wondered if I had been a fan of someone else’s memories, someone who slept on a futon, if I’d be sitting on that instead. 

The manager rolled something that looked like a giant speaker with flashing numbers and lights, attached a long clear hose to the front, and said, “Breathe.” He pointed to a square. “When it turns yellow, you’re done.”

I blew.

They put it in a clear bottle with a pink stopper.

I opened it that night and absorbed it with a glass of white wine.

I had purchased the mystery package, so I didn’t know what to expect. My first kiss, a bike ride, a night out with friends, but instead my boss was standing in front of my desk, straightening the bottom of his jacket, mumbling, “Keep up the good work, Libby, keep up the good work.”

I returned to the store. I used words that I had always wanted to try on. “I was hoodwinked.” I said. “I was bamboozled.”

The manager pointed to a disclaimer and underlined the words "crapshoot" and “no guarantees” with his finger. But after I insisted, he apologized; after all, they strived for satisfaction; he’d do it again, no cost, dig deeper, and go farther than before. So, I returned a week later, where he repeated the process. This time when he instructed me to breathe, it took a long time for the square to turn yellow. I felt like I was a hundred years old and was asked to blow out every single candle on my cake.

At home, I put the memory in milk, dipped a cookie in and out of it, and then swallowed it down.

​As soon as it started, I was sure the manager had made another mistake, I thought; the fool must’ve replaced one of my experiences with Maples because this memory felt foreign.

A beautiful woman was singing to me, holding me in a hand-knitted purple blanket. It was dark outside; the one window without a shade revealed the black night. I wasn’t tired, but she was. The night's shadows and crescent moon creeping underneath her eyes. My mother…still young. Her body swayed. Her lips cooed.

She lowered us into a white wicker chair that rocked. She rubbed a spot in between my eyes up and down and up and down again and again. Her touch was gentle but insistent.

Somewhere in the darkness an owl hooted, calling out, “Who? Who? Who?” The world around me was already asking, “Who do you want to be?” Begging me to decide, but my mother hushed it and shushed me. “You have the rest of your life to figure it out, sweet girl. Just shut your eyes and dream.”

Whitney Weisenberg

Whitney is a writer, artist, teacher, master educator, and mother of two daughters and a Doodle named Noodle who drinks out of toilet bowls and then tries to give wet kisses.  Her work has appeared in Dead Skunk Magazine, Five Minutes, Gabby and Min's Literary Review, Jung Library, Nat 1 Publishing, Nine Cloud Journal, Nunum-Done in a Hundred Anthology, Paper Dragon, Please See Me, Poet's Choice, Porter House Review, Little Old Lady, Storybottle Co, The Blue Mountain Review, Vine Leaves Press, and WILDsound Writing Festival.