The Cleaners

Part of Amazon Original Stories' Faraway collection — a set of reimagined fairy tales — Ken Liu's The Cleaners takes The Princess and the Pea as its distant starting point and turns it into a quiet meditation on memory. In its world, objects accumulate the emotional residue of their owners, and specialists can scrub those layers away. Gui, memory-blind and therefore immune to what he handles, cleans for a living; the sisters Clara and Beatrice must decide what a shared memory is worth.

Short and understated, the story is classic Ken Liu: speculative machinery in service of an intimate, human question about grief, forgiveness, and the parts of the past we choose to keep.