Instead, she picked up a pen and did the only thing a true lister could do: she wrote one final entry. Not an episode. A note to herself.
“You’re almost there,” Leo said now. “EP039b is the first missing episode. There are others. EP107c. EP247a. EP502—which doesn’t exist because the series only has 1,200 episodes, but the list says there’s a 502nd. And at the end of the list, after the final aired episode, there’s an entry with no number. Just a title.”
One night, deep in the fourth journal, she found a new entry. She hadn’t written it. The ink was a deep, arterial red, and the handwriting was her brother’s—Leo, who had stopped speaking to her six years ago after she’d corrected his memory of the Butterfree incident. pokémon episode list
Elara never listed again. She burned the journals, one by one, in a trash can behind her building. The flames turned each episode title into a brief, bright ember: “Pikachu’s Goodbye.” “The Tower of Terror.” “The Breeding Center Secret.” Each pop of fire was a memory released.
The entry read:
He told her about that night in 1998. He’d been sick with a fever, unable to sleep. The TV was on low, tuned to a Tokyo station that usually played infomercials after midnight. Instead, a Pokémon episode began. No opening theme. No title card. Just Ash in his pajamas, walking through Pallet Town under a moon that looked like a cracked egg.
But that night, as she lay in bed, she noticed something on her nightstand. A single piece of paper. On it, in her own handwriting, was a title she didn’t remember writing: Instead, she picked up a pen and did
The boy in the reflection smiled. Then he faded, leaving only the flicker of a dead channel—gray static, the ghost of a Butterfree, and the distant, muffled sound of a man talking about zoning laws.