Sirens cut through the fog like wounds opening in the air.

  Red and blue lights bled into the white, fractured by moisture, distorted into halos that hovered without edges. The road no longer looked like a road—just a suggestion of one, swallowed by damp and silence.

  Michael drifted in and out of awareness.

  Sound arrived before meaning. Voices overlapped, urgent but distant, as if spoken underwater.

  "—male driver—unconscious—"

  "—pulse present—careful with the neck—"

  Cold air hit his face as a door was wrenched open. The smell of metal and antifreeze mixed with wet earth. Hands touched him—professional, firm, not cruel—but his body reacted anyway, flinching beneath the restraint of the moment.

  Something inside him wanted to fight.

  Not the people.

  The helplessness.

  A torchlight passed over his eyes. Pain flared behind them, sharp and immediate, then dulled into something heavy and spreading.

  "What's your name?" someone asked.

  He tried to answer.

  Nothing came.

  Not silence—absence.

  As if the place where his name should have lived had been scraped clean.

  They lifted him carefully, the world tiltingagain, this time slower. The sky above was a blank, glowing sheet, the fog reflecting the emergency lights back onto themselves.

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  A paramedic leaned closer. "Can you tell me who to call?"

  Michael's mouth opened.

  His throat worked.

  There was a name on the edge of him. Not spoken—felt. Warm. Anchoring. Something like home.

  But when he reached for it, his mind closed around nothing.

  "I—" His voice cracked. "I don't know."

  The words landed heavier than the crash.

  The paramedic nodded gently, already reaching for his phone. "We'll figure it out."

  They always said that.

  As the doors of the ambulance closed, sealing him into light and motion, Michael stared at the ceiling and felt something fundamental slip loose.

  Not memory.

  Orientation.

  As if the compass inside him had shattered, leaving him moving forward without any sense of where forward was supposed to be.

  The siren wailed again, and the ambulance pulled away from Guisborough Road, carrying him toward a place he did not recognise—

  and a life he no longer remembered choosing.

  Willow's Diary

  I woke up at 3:12 a.m.

  for no reason.

  The room felt wrong.

  Like someone had taken something

  that didn't belong to them.

  If you're lost,

  please don't be alone.

  Poem — Sirens

  I hear you

  even when you don't know

  how to call my name.

  Something terrible has happened.

  I'm already on my way.