A cool, meditative story about grief and the fragility of memory. The narrator inherits a key to the facility that stores thousands of hours of footage recorded by an assiduous drone, documenting the life of his late, estranged wife. “I owned once again what I hadn’t known I had lost, hadn’t known what was precious to me,” he says, after viewing a brief scene of the two of them in a hotel room in Ibiza. It unlocks his previously unacknowledged grief and makes him hungry for more, but he soon discovers that there are disappointing lacunae in the drone’s coverage, and serious flaws in the facility’s technology. Although access is supposedly random, most scenes are set in winter, a season the narrator’s wife tried to avoid, and every playback increases the slow, inexorable degradation of the quality of all the stored recordings, manifested as the kind of snow that blights reception in old cathode-ray TVs. Finally, the narrator abandons his search (“I would not stay watching until there was only snow”), and makes peace with his loss and his all-too human memories. At a time when tech bros, too arrogant to recognise their ignorance, are attempting to find digital fixes for the glorious mess of human life, it seems more relevant than ever.

First published in Omni, 1985. Collected in Antiquities, Incunabula Press, 1993, it can also be read here