Lizzie Davis: A Short Story

Lizzie Davis

A Short Story

By Willemijn Fransen

Synopsis
Lizzie Davis wakes up every day thinking that she’s 16 years old living with her parents in Washington. When she is actually 18 years old and not living with her parents but with someone else. She doesn’t recognize the man lying next to her. The 18-year-old in the mirror doesn’t look right. She’s not even sure where she is. Not unlike Guy Pearce’s memorable lead in “Memento,” Lizzie has psychogenic amnesia. She was in a car accident over a 2 years ago. Since that day, she has rebooted after every night’s sleep.

She doesn’t remember anything that happened the day before, and only gets occasional flashes of memory of the past 2 years. Her boyfriend Derek has to go through the same routine every morning, helped by photos on the bathroom wall with Post-Its like

In the bathroom, Lizzie finds pictures taped to the wall of herself as a much older woman and the man in the bed who tells her he is her husband. Lizzie is shocked and frightened, especially when a glance in the mirror tells her that the pictures are accurate even though she is convinced she is only twenty-five, not forty-seven. The man in the bed tells her he is her husband Derek, that they have been married for many years, and that she had an accident that has left her unable to retain new memories.
After Derek leaves for his job as a teacher at a nearby school, Lizzie receives a call from a stranger who tells her he is Dr. Smith, a man who has been helping her attempt to recover some of her memories. Dr. Smith picks Lizzie up and takes her to a local park where he explains their work together and shows her a journal she has been keeping for several weeks. Dr. Smith explains that Lizzie asked him to read the journal a few days earlier. Dr. Smith asks Lizzie to read the journal and then to contact him should she want to continue with their