Disclaimer: To Lois Lowry, The Giver; to their respective authors, the reminders; to some unknown photographer, the cover image; to me, the tale I will thee tell.

It was a day much like any other – as most days are, of course, in a Community dedicated to a policy of Sameness. Roughly two months had passed since the disappearance of the young Receiver-in-training; he still hadn't been found, but neither had the troubles of eleven years ago recurred, so it was presumed that he was still alive somewhere. (Inquiries had been sent out to nearby Communities, but none had had any new arrivals from Elsewhere recently.) In any case, the anticipation and dread that had been almost palpable in the Community all through December had slowly evaporated, and life had returned to normal. By the fifteenth of February, no-one was expecting anything unusual – certainly nothing like what occurred.

It happened near the beginning of the afternoon, just as the schoolchildren were returning from recreation. The scene in the Sevens' classroom was typical: most of the students had settled down into their seats, a few were still giggling with residual ebullience, and the Instructor was smiling tolerantly as she waited for those last few to calm down.

Katharine was among those who were already settled in place. She was feeling a bit tired today, and not as energetic as she usually was; she wasn't sure why. Probably her father would help her to understand it at the sharing of feelings that evening, but the truth was that she didn't really mind not understanding it. The important thing about feelings was to feel them, not to think about them.

Of course, that wasn't the way her father saw things at all. He was an Instructor of Fives, and he thought it was very important to think about feelings. "If you don't understand your feelings," he would say, "you'll end up doing some very foolish things because of them." And that made sense to Katharine, but she still thought that it must be all right to just be happy, or sad, or pensive every now and then, without worrying about why. So long as you didn't let it keep you from doing what you were supposed to; wasn't that the important thing?

Well, anyway, right now she was supposed to be paying attention to her Instructor. She straightened herself in her seat, and raised a hand to smooth out her hair ribbons – and, at that moment, the speaker on the wall crackled to life.

ATTENTION, came the Speaker's voice. THIS IS A REMINDER…

And then it stopped – just stopped right there, in the middle of the announcement. It was as though the school's connection to the Speaker's office had somehow been cut off – but it hadn't been, obviously, because the light above the speaker was still gleaming as brightly as ever. And, besides, it hadn't sounded like the sort of stop caused by a broken connection; there was a different sort of sound to the Speaker's voice than when he got cut off in the middle of a sentence. This time, it was as though he had started to make an announcement and then forgotten what he was supposed to say – or, maybe, had suddenly become too afraid to say it.

A chill went down Katharine's spine. She thought of the missing Receiver-in-training, and how everyone in the Community had been so afraid for the future only a few months before; had something happened to bring that fear back?

She glanced at her Instructor, to see if she understood what was happening. The Instructor's brow was furrowed, and she was staring at the speaker in obvious puzzlement, but she didn't seem afraid, which relieved Katharine a bit. She admired her current Instructor a great deal – more, probably, than she admired any other adult except her parents – and, until she showed that she was worried, Katharine was prepared to assume that nothing was really wrong.

But she wished that the Speaker would finish his announcement. The silence was starting to unnerve her – and it seemed to be unnerving her classmates, as well. She saw Ranjith tapping his foot anxiously against the side of his chair, and Beatrice reverting to her old habit of chewing her fingernails. (In spite of the tension, Katharine smiled to herself; Beatrice had been doing very well with that lately, but the stern Childcare worker who checked her fingers every day probably wouldn't give her much credit for that.)

The tension continued to build for perhaps half a minute longer; then the Speaker spoke again, not in his usual, self-important voice, but in a tone of surprised, almost dreamy happiness. YES, he said. THIS IS A REMINDER.

There was a moment's pause, and then new words began to emerge from the speaker – words that were utterly unlike anything Katharine, or anyone else within hearing range of them, had ever heard or dreamed of before.

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd –
A host of golden daffodils
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay;
Ten thousand saw I, at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced, but they
Outdid the sparkling waves in glee;
A poet could not but be gay
In such a jocund company.
I gazed, and gazed, but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought…

Here, for a moment, the Speaker seemed to hesitate, as though he had suddenly realized what he was doing, and was unsure whether he dared to let the weird locution reach its end. But the thing, once begun, was not so easily ended; the words rang out once again, even more gladly loud than before:

For oft, when on my couch I lie,
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

And the speaker fell silent once again.

It was fully a minute before anyone in the classroom moved. Not that they expected there to be more; they knew, instinctively, that the last phrase had completed the Speaker's "reminder". But none of them trusted themselves to move. They felt as though they had suddenly been transported into a dream, and that, if they turned too suddenly or spoke too loudly, the entire Community would dissolve around them, and they would find themselves in some utterly different place. It was, for all of them, a terrifying feeling; for about half of them, it was also a delicious one; and for Katharine, though she didn't realize it at the time, it was the moment when she first ceased to be a Seven.

After a while, the Instructor cleared her throat, and her entire class jumped and turned to her almost in unison. "Well," she said, her voice as steady as ten years' training could make it, "I hope that that was helpful to whomever it was meant for. Now, shall we open our books and resume where we left off?"