---
title: "Forgetting – An Original Short Story"
canonical: https://scamsnow.com/stories/forgetting-an-original-short-story/
type: stories
author: "SCARS Editorial Team"
published: 2026-09-28
modified: 2026-09-28
summary: ""
organization: "ScamsNOW.com - the Official Magazine of Scams Fraud & Cybercrime"
organization_url: https://scamsnow.com/
llms: https://scamsnow.com/llms.txt
---

# Forgetting – An Original Short Story

# "Forgetting"

## An Original Short Story by Tim McGuinness, Ph.D.

### This is a Work of Fiction

#### [More Stories](https://scamsnow.com/stories/) »

##### Image & Text Copyright © 2026 - All Rights Reserved Worldwide

## Forgetting

##### An Original Short Story by Tim McGuinness, Ph.D.

Cal Whitmore had built half the houses on the east side of the valley, and for a long time he believed that meant something. It meant something to the men who worked for him, who knew their checks would clear on Friday. It meant something to the bank, which had not looked at him sideways in eleven years. It meant something to Dana, who had married a framer with a used truck and watched him become a man with a yard full of equipment and a sign on the highway with his name on it. And it meant something to the two kids, Jenna and Tyler, who had never once in their lives wondered whether there would be enough.

There was enough. There was more than enough, and that was the trouble, though he would not have called it trouble then. Whitmore Construction had cleared a good year, and then another, and the money sat in the company account doing nothing but being counted. Cal was not a greedy man. He was a careful one, and careful men worry about money sitting still. He had been thinking, in the evenings, about what a smart person would do with it.

The email came to the office on a Tuesday in March. It was addressed to him by name, with the company's name spelled right, which most of the junk never managed. It said that a private digital-asset fund was opening a limited round to business owners in his region, and that early participants in the previous round had seen returns of three times their principal over ninety days. It said the round would close at the end of the month. It said nothing about crypto, which he did not really understand, and it was written in the calm, slightly formal English of someone who had gone to school.

He read it twice. He was thinking about the money sitting still.

The website was clean and fast and had a chart on the front page that climbed. There were photographs of an office with glass walls and a team of people who looked like they belonged in it. There was a compliance page and a risk disclosure and a phone number with a real area code. He typed the fund's name into Google and found the website again, and under it a scattering of comments on a forum and two social media posts from people who said the payouts had come through on time and that they wished they had put in more. He read those the way a man reads the reviews of a restaurant he has already decided to eat at.

He put in five thousand dollars. It was a test. He told himself that, and it was true. A dashboard showed him his balance the way his bank did, and every day the number was a little larger. On the sixth day it said seven thousand five hundred, and he asked to take it all out, to see what would happen. The money was in his account the next afternoon. He looked at it for a long time. Then he called the number on the website and a man named Vincent answered on the second ring.

Vincent had a low, unhurried voice, and he did not sound like a man selling anything. He said he had seen the account open and was glad Cal had called, because he liked to know who his clients were. He asked what Cal did, and when Cal told him, he asked good questions. How many crews. Whether he bid public work. What the lumber market had done to his margins, which Vincent seemed to understand better than the man at the bank did. He said his own father had poured foundations in Ohio, and that he had spent every summer of his teens on a jobsite, and that it was the reason he trusted builders over most of the people he dealt with. *"A man who's stood on a roof in August,"* he said, *"is a man who knows what a dollar costs."*

Cal asked him how it worked. Vincent told him, in plain terms, and did not pretend it was simple. Arbitrage between exchanges, he said, in the small windows before prices came back into line. The fund's edge was speed and volume. The intro tier Cal had used was capped and moved slower on purpose. It was there so people could see the money come back, because nobody should trust a website. The main tier was where the three-times figure came from, and it needed a real position to work, because the windows were small and the volume was the whole point.

*"I'm not going to tell you what to put in,"* Vincent said. *"I'd rather have you in small and comfortable than in big and awake at night. Talk it over at home. If your wife has questions, I'm happy to get on a call with both of you."*

Cal said he would think about it. Vincent said that was the right answer, and that the round closed on the thirty-first, and that he would send over the tier sheet so Cal had the numbers in front of him. The sheet was in his inbox before he had put the phone down. It had the company's name on it, spelled right.

He sat with it for a while. It did not feel like being sold. It felt like being taken seriously by a man who knew what a roof in August was.

Vincent called again two days later, not to ask, only to say that the window they had talked about had opened and closed and to tell Cal what it had paid. He called the day after that with a question about a jobsite thing, a permit problem a client of his was having, and Cal found himself explaining inspections to a man in an office with glass walls and enjoying it. There were texts in between. A market note in the morning, two lines, the kind a man sends to someone he expects to understand it. A link to an article. A photograph of the dashboard for the main tier with the client's name blurred out and the number not blurred at all.

By the end of the week, Cal had stopped noticing that he looked for the calls. Vincent knew that Tyler had a game on Thursday and asked on Friday how it had gone. He knew that Jenna was looking at schools out of state and said, without being asked, that the tuition was exactly the kind of thing the main tier was for. He never once said the word invest. He talked about positions and windows and the thirty-first, which was coming the way a deadline comes, steadily and without malice, and somewhere in those days the idea of not putting the money in stopped being the safe choice and started being the one that would need explaining.

On the Wednesday, Vincent said he was going to be honest. He said the round was filling faster than they had planned and that he had held a place for Cal because he had a feeling about him, and that he could hold it until Friday and not after. He said it plainly, without pressure, the way a friend tells you a thing he thinks you would want to know.

Cal hung up and sat for a long time looking at the tier sheet. He decided he would talk to Dana that night, and he was surprised, a little, to find that he was not asking her. He was telling her.

He told Dana about it that night at the kitchen table, after the kids had gone up. He showed her the dashboard on his phone and the deposit in the bank app beside it. He was pleased with himself, and he wanted her to be pleased with him.

She was quiet for a while. She had a way of going quiet that he had learned, over twenty-two years, to wait out.

*"Don't put in any more,"* she said finally. *"I can't tell you what it is. Something doesn't feel right."*

*"It paid out."*

*"I know it paid out."* She turned the phone face down on the table. *"That's what doesn't feel right."*

He said he would think about it, and he meant it, the way a man means it when he has already decided and would prefer not to have an argument. He lay awake and did the arithmetic. He had tested it, and it had passed the test. That was what tests were for. Dana was cautious. Dana had always been cautious, and he loved her for it, and if he had listened to her caution every time, there would be no sign on the highway.

In the morning he moved everything. The company reserve, the savings, the money set aside for Jenna's first year of school. He did it in three transfers from his office with the door closed, and when he was done, he sat with his hands flat on the desk and felt the particular lightness of a man who has finally acted.

Vincent called the next morning to say the position was open, and the morning after that to say it was working, and after the first week there was no day he did not call. He was never pushy. He asked about the business. He asked about the kids, and remembered their names, and asked again. He had a daughter himself, he said, about Jenna's age, and they compared notes on the cost of college and the strange new music. He sent Cal a photograph once of a sunset from a balcony somewhere warm. When the dashboard crossed two hundred percent, Vincent was the one who called to congratulate him, and Cal found that he was proud in the way you are proud in front of a friend.

By the end of the second month, the number was approaching three times what he had put in. He had never been a gambler. He had watched men at the poker table in the union hall lose their week because they could not stand up from a good run, and he had decided a long time ago that he was not that man. Three times was the promise. Three times was enough.

He called Vincent and told him he was going to take it out.

*"You could,"* Vincent said. *"You'd be within your rights. I'll be honest with you, Cal, because you've been honest with me. The next round is the one I'd want to be in. But you know your own situation."*

*"I know it," *Cal said. *"Better safe than sorry."*

*"Better safe than sorry,"* Vincent agreed, and he sounded, if anything, a little fond.

Cal put in the withdrawal request that afternoon.

The reply came the next morning. There was a processing fee on withdrawals above a certain size, a percentage, and it had to be deposited separately before the transfer could be released. It was explained in the same calm English as everything else. It was a lot of money, but it was a fraction of what was waiting, and he had the fraction. He sent it.

Then there was the matter of taxes. A withholding, they called it, required by the jurisdiction the fund operated in, refundable on filing. Vincent was apologetic. He said he had argued with the compliance office about it. He said he had seen it hold up other clients for weeks when they fought it and clear in a day when they didn't. Cal fought it for two days, and then he didn't.

After that, the transfer would begin and stop. A verification step. A mismatch between the name on the account and the name on the wire. A security hold that could be cleared with a further deposit that would be returned. He sat at his desk each morning with the dashboard open and the bank app open beside it, and the one number stayed enormous and the other kept getting smaller, and he kept telling himself that a man who has come this far does not stop three feet from the door.

On a Thursday the dashboard would not load. On Friday the website was gone, not down but gone, the address pointing to nothing at all. Vincent's number rang through to a message that said the mailbox was full. Cal called it forty times that weekend. On Monday he called the fraud line at the bank and listened to a young woman explain, gently, what he had already understood on Friday and had spent two days refusing to know.

By the end of the week, there was no more room to refuse.

He told Dana on a Saturday morning. He had rehearsed it, and the rehearsal was no use. He told her the number and watched her face do the arithmetic he had done, the tuition and the mortgage and the payroll, and then watched it stop doing arithmetic and become something else.

She did not shout. He almost wished she had. She asked him twice whether he was sure, and then she asked him when he had known, and when he told her the truth, that he had known for a week, she stood up from the table and went upstairs. She came down with a bag. She told the kids to get their things, and they looked at their father, and he could not make his face tell them anything, and they went.

She found an attorney that afternoon. He learned that later, from the attorney.

He did not contest it. He did not see how he could. She had said not to, and he had done it the next morning with the door closed, and every dollar of it had been hers as much as his. The house sold in the spring, and most of the money went where it should have gone. She got the cars and the furniture and the photographs, and the kids, who were old enough to choose and chose. The bank called the equipment loan, and the yard emptied out over three weeks, and the sign on the highway came down when the new people bought the lot.

He was gullible. He was foolish. He was naive. He said the words to himself the way you press on a bruise to make sure it is still there. They were true, and the truth of them was the one thing he still owned outright.

He kept the pickup, because it was in his name alone and because a man has to sleep somewhere. He had a slide-in camper on it that they had used twice, for trips the kids still talked about. He put a mattress in it and a two-burner stove and a box of hand tools, and he drove out of the valley on a morning in June the next year without deciding where he was going, and he did not come back.

It was not so bad. He said that to himself too, and it was also true. There is always work for a man who can frame square and hang rock clean, and Cal had been doing both since he was seventeen. He went where the work was. Framing outside Grand Junction for a month. A drywall crew in Farmington that needed a finisher for six weeks. A fire rebuild in the mountains where nobody asked his last name. He was paid in cash or by check, and he spent very little, and the camper was dry.

He did not call the kids often. He told himself it was to spare them. Jenna answered when he did; Tyler did not. Dana had remarried after a couple of years, he heard, and he found that he could not be angry about it, only tired. He felt empty.

He thought about the scam most days. Not the money, which had become abstract, a number he had stopped being able to feel. He thought about the kitchen table, and the phone face down, and the three transfers from an office with the door closed. He thought about Vincent's fondness. He had turned it over so many times that it had worn smooth, and yet it still cut.

It was late September, and he was working his way south ahead of the cold, when he saw the odd sign. He was on a state road in the southwest corner of Utah, red rock on both sides and the light going long and gold. The sign was hand-lettered on a board nailed to a post, the kind ranchers put up for a turn that only they need to find. It said FORGETTING CAMPGROUND, and under it an arrow, and under the arrow, in smaller letters, 2 MI.

He took the turn. He would have said, if asked, that it was because the sun was low and he did not like to set up in the dark.

The road ran two miles of washboard between low cliffs and ended in a flat of packed sand with a dozen sites cut into the scrub, each with a fire ring and a picnic table gone silver with weather. There was no host. There was no host's trailer, and no water spigot, and no one in any of the sites. There was a wooden box on a post with a slot in the top and a sign above it.

***TAKE ANY SPACE AVAILABLE***, the sign said. ***PUT $20 IN THE BOX.***

And under that, in the same hand: ***IF YOU WANT TO FORGET, TAKE THE TRAIL AT MIDNIGHT.***

A ways off, a path went north between two boulders and disappeared into the mouth of a side canyon.

Cal read the second line twice. He decided it was a joke, the kind that gets painted on a sign at a place like this by a man with a bottle and a long winter. He folded a twenty and stuffed it into the slot and picked the site farthest from the road, backed the truck in, and dropped the jacks.

He lit the grill and put on two pork chops and a foil packet of onions and peppers and the last of a zucchini a woman in Farmington had given him from her garden. He ate inside with the door open, and then he carried his chair out and sat with his back to the camper and watched the sky come on.

He had learned the sky over the last few summers. He had never had time for it before. Out here it did not come on so much as arrive, all at once and entire, the way a thought arrives that you have been avoiding. He found the ones he knew, and he sat with them until the cold came down off the rock, and then he went inside and lay down and was asleep before he had decided to be.

He woke to a woman crying.

He lay still and listened. It was not close. It was the kind of crying that has been going on a while and has stopped expecting anyone to come, low and worn and steady, and it was the loneliest sound he had ever heard. He checked his watch. Eleven-thirty. He pulled on his boots and jacket and went out.

The campground was empty under a moon a few days past full. The other sites were as bare as they had been at sunset. He stood by the truck and the crying stopped, and he thought it had been a dream, and then it came again, from the north, from the mouth of the side canyon where the trail went.

He told himself later that he went because someone might have been hurt. That was true, as far as it went. It was also true that the voice, at that distance and in that light, could have been anyone's, and that his heart had decided whose it was before he had taken a step.

The trail was easy to follow, pale sand between dark walls. He walked for an hour. The crying came and went, always ahead of him, never nearer, and after a while he stopped calling out and just walked. The canyon narrowed and then began to widen, the walls stepping back on either side, and the wash opened into a broad flat floor of sand, and in the center of it stood a tower.

He stopped where he was.

It was an obelisk, the tall four-sided kind he had seen in pictures of old cities, and it was perhaps a hundred feet high. It was black. Not painted black, not stone black, but black the way deep water is black, and there was a blue in it that did not come from the moon, a low glow that seemed to be under the surface rather than on it. It threw no moon shadow he could see. The sand around it was smooth, without a footprint, without a track.

He walked toward it because there was nothing else to do.

In the moonlight he could see the faces were carved. Symbols first, columns of them, in no alphabet he knew, and then, at the height of his eyes, in letters cut clean and deep as a mason's, words he could read.

***TOUCH ME TO FORGET.***

He reached out. He stopped with his hand an inch from the surface. He could feel the cold coming off it, or something like cold.

What if it was real. He let himself think it all the way through. What if he laid his hand on this thing and the kitchen table went, and the phone face down, and the closed door, and the sound of the kids going up the stairs for their things. What if the bruise went, and the pressing on it, and the words he said to himself every morning to be sure it was still there. What would he lose that he could not stand to lose. Who was there to miss the man who remembered.

He sat down in the sand with his knees up and looked at it.

After a while he became aware that it was speaking. Not aloud. It was more that the words were there in his head with the texture of having been heard, low and calm and slightly formal, the English of someone who had gone to school.

Come, it said. Forget. Take away the pain.

He sat.

No one cares about you, it said, not unkindly. No one will miss your memories.

That was true. He turned it over the way he turned everything over, and could find no place where it was not true. Dana had a new husband. Tyler did not pick up. The men who had worked for him had found other work. The house had new people in it, and the lot had a new sign. There was no one in the world whose day would change if Cal Whitmore's memory went out like a lamp.

He stood up. He put his hand out.

And something in him, some small stubborn thing that had survived summers and the winters, spoke up before his hand arrived.

Why should I forget?

He stood with his palm an inch from the black.

I have not healed, he thought. That is true too. But it is still mine. The pain is mine. It is the last thing I have that nobody took. If I forget, I do not heal. I just become a hole where a man used to be.

He lowered his hand. He sat back down, close enough now that the cold of the thing was on his face.

Maybe I need to feel it, he thought. I always thought it was my fault, but maybe now I understand. Because it was my fault, I always believed. I needed to understand what happened. I talked to a stranger and it cost me everything.

He sat with that, and then, for the first time, he went on past it, to the part he had never let himself reach. It did not cost me everything. Here I am. I am still me. I can still frame square and hang rock clean and cook a pork chop and find the stars. All of that is mine. And if I touch this thing, that is what it will cost. The rest of what I have left.

The voice said something else, but he had stopped listening, and after a while he lay back in the sand with his arm over his eyes and slept.

He woke cold and stiff with the sky gray-blue overhead and the sun not yet down into the canyon. He sat up.

The wash was empty. Smooth sand from wall to wall, the way it had been, without a track. But there was also no tower. There was no hole where a tower had stood, no scar, no shadow-shape where the sand had lain under something all night. There was nothing. He walked to the center of the flat and stood on the place and turned all the way around, and there was nothing.

He understood it then, standing there, the way you understand a thing you have been slow to see and then cannot unsee.

It was another scam.

It had come the way they all come. It had known his name. It had spoken in the calm voice of someone who had gone to school. It had offered him exactly what he wanted, which was to be done with the pain, and asked only that he give up the last thing he had in exchange, the one thing that was still his, the memory of what had happened and who he had been on both sides of it. It had told him no one cared, because that is what they always tell you, because a man who believes no one cares will hand over anything. And when he did not bite, it had done what they all do.

It had simply vanished.

He laughed, once, out loud, and the sound went up the canyon walls and came back to him. Then he turned and walked south in the cool with the light growing behind him.

He raised the jacks and stowed the chair and the grill. He did not look for the sign on the way out. He was not sure it would be there, and he found he did not need to know.

He had been on the state road less than an hour when his phone found a signal and buzzed against the dash. A text from a contractor in Arizona he had done three weeks for in July. A hospital addition in Wickenberg. Union scale. Framing first, then interiors, and the man wanted a lead who could stay on through both. A year, the text said. Maybe more. Can you start Monday.

Cal pulled over onto the shoulder and read it twice. He was thinking about a thing Dana had said at the kitchen table, and about a young woman at the bank, and about a sign on a highway. All of them had told him, one way or another, whose fault it was, and nobody cared what happened to him. He had agreed with every one of them. He had agreed so completely that he had carried it thousands of miles and slept with it and pressed on it each morning to be sure.

Maybe it was time to put it down. Not to forget it. To set it in the truck beside him where he could see it from time to time, and drive.

Maybe it was time to admit that a stranger had done a thing to him, on purpose and with skill, and that a man who is deceived by an expert is not a fool but a mark, and that these were not the same. Maybe it was time to accept that what was gone was gone, the money and the house and the yard and the highway sign, and that no amount of pressing on the bruise would bring any of it back up the road. And maybe, just maybe, there was some life still left to be lived by the man who remembered all of it.

He typed Yes. He typed Monday.

Then he pulled back onto the road and drove south, toward the work. Toward someone who cared, and remembered.

**Postscript**

*There is a tower in every canyon you will walk through after this. It will not always look like a tower. Sometimes it is a bottle. Sometimes it is a screen you can stare at until the day is gone. Sometimes it is a story you tell yourself so many times that it wears smooth, and you mistake the smoothness for peace. It will have your name on it. It will speak in a reasonable voice. It will tell you that no one cares, because a person who believes that will hand over anything, and what it wants is the last thing you have.*

*Do not touch it.*

*You do not have to forgive yourself tonight. You do not have to stop hurting. You only have to keep what is yours: the memory of what was done to you, and of who you were before, and of who you still are. That is the material. Nothing gets rebuilt without it.*

*Then pick up the phone when the work calls. Or the friend calls. Or the family calls. Say yes. Say Monday.*

*This is the way.*

#### *- - 30 - -*

**"Forgetting - DON'T TOUCH THE TOWER!"**

By Dr. Tim McGuinness

Lyrics & Music Copyright © 2026

Lyrics

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

He built the houses on the valley side,

Raised every roof with a workman's pride.

She and the children, a name on a sign,

A yard full of iron and a business doing fine.

Then the devil spoke softly, steady and slow,

Of windows and markets and money that would grow.

Five became seven, so the test looked true,

Then the company reserve and the college money flew.

A fee led to taxes, then another locked door,

The numbers climbed high while the bank held no more.

The website went dark and the calm voice was gone,

His home came apart before the next dawn.

He called himself foolish, pressed shame like a bruise,

And carried the memory of all he could lose.

DON'T TOUCH THE TOWER! DON'T TRADE YOUR NAME!

PAIN IS NOT POISON, MEMORY'S NOT SHAME!

HOLD WHAT IS YOURS WHEN THE COLD VOICES CALL!

REMEMBER! REBUILD! RISE AFTER THE FALL!

DON'T TOUCH THE TOWER! LET THE FALSE PROMISE FADE!

YOU ARE NOT THE CRIME THAT A CRIMINAL MADE!

REMEMBER! REBUILD! LET THE TRUTH BE REVEALED!

WHAT YOU CAN REMEMBER IS WHAT YOU CAN HEAL!

He slept in the camper and followed the trade,

Framed walls in the sunlight, hung rock in the shade.

Grand Junction behind him, Farmington ahead,

A fire job high where the mountain wind spread.

He worked for his supper and moved with the cold,

While the same worn story kept turning him old.

The kitchen, three transfers, the phone face down,

The children walking out and the lost highway sign.

He learned all the stars, but he carried that night,

For a road cannot outrun what the mind holds tight.

Every county grew distant, every new job would end,

Still the devil's false fondness came back like a friend.

DON'T TOUCH THE TOWER! DON'T TRADE YOUR NAME!

PAIN IS NOT POISON, MEMORY'S NOT SHAME!

HOLD WHAT IS YOURS WHEN THE COLD VOICES CALL!

REMEMBER! REBUILD! RISE AFTER THE FALL!

DON'T TOUCH THE TOWER! LET THE FALSE PROMISE FADE!

YOU ARE NOT THE CRIME THAT A CRIMINAL MADE!

REMEMBER! REBUILD! LET THE TRUTH BE REVEALED!

WHAT YOU CAN REMEMBER IS WHAT YOU CAN HEAL!

Then a hand-painted sign in the red desert said,

"FORGETTING CAMPGROUND, TWO MILES AHEAD."

Twenty in the box and a warning in white,

"If you want to forget, take the trail at midnight."

A woman cried low where the black canyon wound,

So he followed her sorrow across the cold ground.

In a wide bed of sand stood a tower alone,

Blue under black, but no shadow was thrown.

"TOUCH ME TO FORGET" had been carved in its face,

And the devil's calm voice filled the moon-silvered place.

"No one will miss what you carry," it lied,

As he raised his hand with the cold at his side.

Then a stubborn voice answered from somewhere within:

"If I give up the memory, what part of me wins?"

It offered him nothing and asked for his past,

Another clean promise designed not to last.

He lowered his hand as the false comfort spoke,

Lay under the stars, and at daylight awoke.

No tower, no footprint, no mark in the sand.

Another skilled fraud had been making its stand.

Remembering hurt, but the hurt was still his,

Proof of the man he had been and still is.

He was not just the money, the house, or the sign,

He could frame a wall square; he could still draw a line.

An expert had marked him and worked him with skill,

But being deceived never emptied his will.

Memory was timber, not chains on his soul,

The truth was the material that could make him whole.

Then work called from Arizona: "A year, maybe more.

Can you start Monday?" He knew what the answer was for.

He typed "Yes." He typed "Monday." Then turned toward the sun,

Not free by forgetting, but forgiving himself ready to run.

DON'T TOUCH THE TOWER! DON'T TRADE YOUR NAME!

PAIN IS NOT POISON, MEMORY'S NOT SHAME!

HOLD WHAT IS YOURS WHEN THE COLD VOICES CALL!

REMEMBER! REBUILD! RISE AFTER THE FALL!

DON'T TOUCH THE TOWER! LET THE FALSE PROMISE FADE!

YOU ARE NOT THE CRIME THAT A CRIMINAL MADE!

REMEMBER! REBUILD! LET THE TRUTH BE REVEALED!

WHAT YOU CAN REMEMBER IS WHAT YOU CAN HEAL!

REMEMBER! REBUILD!

REMEMBER! REBUILD!

SAY YES! SAY MONDAY!

REMEMBER! REBUILD!