Memory 3602
She sits on the floor, delicately etching the pencil back and forth on the thin paper, transfixed on the bird in the window. She returns the pencil to its tin. Takes out a softer one. Presses harder. She's had them a week but already each of the 12 pencils in the Packer half their size. She presses a little too hard, breaks the lead.
Beyond the door she hears her father's voice, raised. A common refrain during his harder weeks. Unperturbed she hatches Anne contours the stark image on her writing pad.
...Spoiling the kids...
She sharpens the pencil, considers saying she's sick again. Skipping dinner, to stay in her room drawing. She knows they will stop yelling once she's in the room period the quiet is worse. Folks scraping plates. Teeth scraping forks. No words.
...prepare them for the real world...
She focuses on the eye. Imagines a point of light. Imagines how the light would bounce and play across the pupil.
...real work...
A door slams. Carmina's body shudders, just a bit, and the pencil goes straight through the paper. Through the eye. She inhales, flips to the next page of her pad.
Quietly, the door to her room opens. Her mother.
“How are you, dear?”
“I'm fine.”
Her mother takes the pad from her, grabs her backpack. “It's OK. I'll get you more pencils. But for now let's pack these things up.”
“What for? Are we going on a trip?”
“We might be... Carmina, what are you drawing?” Her mother squints at the pitch black bird on the sheet.
“It's a crow. I saw one outside my window today.”
“I've never seen a bird like this here... Are you sure you didn't see it in one of your father's books? Or maybe in a dream?”
“No, mother. It was just here—”
She points to the window. Nothing is there.
Memory 3655
“Mina. I don’t know this word.”
Carmina loosens her seat belt, leans over to Matias. He points to one of the longer words in his book. Murciélago. She starts to say it, one syllable at a time, before her father interrupts.
“Don't help him.”
She pauses, glares at her father. Tears well up in Matias’s eyes as he struggles to work his way through the word.
Carmina's gaze drops to her lap. She quickly starts whipping her pencil across the corner of her notepad closest to Matias. He blinks back the tears as she watches the image form in front of him: The fuzzy torso, the membranous wings, the little ears.
“Ahh… Murciélago.”
He says it too quickly. Carmina's eyes dart up to the mirror again. Her father's eyebrows shoot up in surprise for a moment, he reaches back, snatches the notepad from her lap, throws it in front of the empty passenger seat.
“Let him learn for himself.”
Carmina quietly puts the pencil back in her pocket. The last one from her set, the 5H, the one she hated using most, now all she had left from the most perfect gift she ever received.
Matias Reaches for her hand and squeezes it. They ride in silence.
Memory 3661
Rain hammers against the windshield of the old car ask Carmina’s mother drives down the local dirt road. The car's headlights struggle to provide any illumination, as ineffectual as the slim crescent moon above. Matias gently cries, part scared, part tired.
“It's OK, Mati. We’ll find somewhere to sleep soon.”
The car lurches left and right as her mother struggles to keep it in control. From the opposite direction, a pair of headlights slide into view. She exhales slowly, lets off the gas. Loosens her grip on the wheel.
The car passes, she exhales again. She reaches back, hands a sandwich to Mati.
Carmina squints her eyes as a light flashes against the back of the seat in front of her. The car has turned around.
“Mom…?”
“Shh, Mina. Everything will be okay.”
Her mother leans on the gas again. A terrible grinding sound makes Matias start crying again as she awkwardly attempts to switch gear. The headlights get closer, and another pair, and another pair.
“Mina,” her mother says. Her voice is different. Direct. Like she is speaking to her as an adult.
“They will try to break you. Don’t let them.”
It is not long before the car is overtaken. The first one Rams them and they immediately lose traction, spin into the ditch. Everything is quiet for a moment as the three hold their breath, bracing for impact.
The quiet doesn't last long. Carmina’s window shatters. A hand reaches in, unlocks the door. Drags her out. Carmina screams and reaches for her brother. She grabs at air as her abductor pulls her from the wreck. She watches as Matias is thrown in the back of one of the trucks. She is thrown into another.
Her mother's tail lights blinked to life, and her car starts to barrel backwards towards them. Just as soon as it starts, though, it stops, as the third truck crashes into it. Her abductor starts his engine, turns back towards her home.
“It’s time to go home to your father, Carmina Mora.”
Memory 3709
Carmina sits alone on the rugged coast and stares out onto the bay. A cool wind whips and whistles around the rocks as the gulls chuckle. She closes her eyes. Takes in a breath of the salty air, lies back on the grass. She lets thoughts of her mother leaving, of her father staying, leave her mind. Focuses on the softness of the grass in her hands.
The gentle chattering of the gulls subsides, and a new, less familiar call assaults her ears. A guttural, urgent shouting. She opens her eyes, and for a moment, she cannot see clearly, as if she had floated into the clouds above. She sits up and rubs her eyes and the world comes into view.
Gone are the lazily floating gulls. In their place, jagged, pitch-black birds. Just like the ones she was sure she had seen outside her house. They shout with an unnerving urgency. She shoots her neck to her left, her right. Hundreds of them, standing all around her, flapping their wings, relentless.
Overwhelmed, she grabs her backpack and begins sprinting to her house. She runs and runs until their calls sink under the crashing of the water and the shrieking of the wind.
Mina?
Matias looks up at her from the floor, confused.
Do you hear them, Mati? Those… birds?
Matias looks at her, then down at his cars. I didn’t hear anything.
Memory 3720
Her house sits silent. It has sat silent since Matias passed. Carmina goes to school, her father goes to work. Carmina gets home, she eats, locks herself in her room. Her father gets home late at night and goes straight to bed. When they do speak, he demonstrates cruelty unlike anything from before.
It’s the anniversary of Matias’s death, and she has called in sick to school. The crows in the tree left that day. Back when it would sit on her windowsill, it scared her, but now that it was gone, she feels more alone than ever. She stares at a blank pad, her last pencil behind her ear, a cheap black pen in her hand, but nothing comes out.
Completely bereft of ideas, Carmina goes to the backyard. Breaks the pen, smears it over the tree’s bark. Presses the paper against the tree. Squeezes it until her knuckles start to ache. Removes the crumpled sheet. Almost none of the ink transfers. The smear on her paper is barely recognisable.
As she walks back to the house, she hears a car pull up in front. She ducks, knowing she’ll have to talk to him, and likely get yelled at, if he sees her here in the morning. Listens through the window.
She hears her father’s boots clomp into the house. And another pair of feet.
Yes, she’s stopped drawing entirely.
This is indeed a setback.
I’ve still gathered the rest of the data, as requested.
Fine. Keep applying pressure to her. And let me know if you notice any changes.
The door closes, and the house falls silent again. Carmina sneaks around the side of the house, peers around the corner. Her father and a man in a black suit get into a black truck—a black truck just like the one from that night—and peel out of the drive. She sits outside for what seems like an hour, hugging the wall, frozen. Were they talking about… her? Her drawings? Her… data?
All this time that she had felt alone… this was worse than alone. This is no way to live.
Memory 3778
The night she had gone to the bridge changed everything. At her lowest, the bird from the tree came back. So did the others. They screamed, like they had on the coast, but she felt no fear. She felt seen. Not observed, just… seen.
Escaping to the city was surprisingly easy. Her father expected nothing. She walked right past the school that day, to the port, stowed away on a small cargo vessel. She would have been terrified, before; of her father, of the ship workers, of the men in the black trucks; none of it scared her now. She was not alone. Perhaps Matias sent the birds.
As the boat arrives in the city, she remembers her mother speaking of a school here, an art school. She marches straight into that school, finds the art faculty, walks into the first open office she sees. Starts taking out her latest works, ink on parchment, out of her faded childhood backpack.
Pia…?
For the first time in ages, she freezes. Her mother’s name. Excuse me?
She looks up at the desk. A man in his seventies, with a thick beard and a dusty tweed jacket stares back at her.
Ah, I’m sorry. You just look… so much like an old student of mine.
…
While she is too young to enrol in the school, Dr Figueroa has put aside time to mentor Carmina. He tells her of her mother, whose own undeniable artistic talent could have changed the nation. Of her mother’s disappearance from the art scene twenty years ago. He tells her of the last time he heard from her, a disturbing letter where she admitted she was pregnant, and she was terrified what “they” would do to her child.
'She learns some formal artistic rules from him, some art history, but she notices he goes out of his way not to instruct her, to let her explore her talent freely. Art like this, he says, could heal the world.
Each time he tells her a little more of her mother, of her mother’s fears, of how her mother admitted that she “saw” what she was painting as if it were real. Carmina never tells him what she sees. Crows. Fog. Claws reaching from the ground. He never asks… she supposes he doesn’t need to.
She meets with him once a month, and lives with a group of radical performance and visual artists south of the school. Some were students, or recent graduates, or other runaways. While it wasn’t always perfect — the personalities were intense — she was thrilled to learn from them, to live in a space where she was respected, understood. Especially Flores, a poet of growing renown. She took Carmina under her wing, helped her expand her practice into words and performance, to assert herself.
As spring begins to blossom, the house begins to plan a multidisciplinary show: one that looks to a bright and modern future.
But as spring arrives, everything changes.
Memory 3791
Dr Figueroa went missing that day. A lot of people did. Carmina knows she’ll never hear from him again. Everyone knows.
Her new family begins to atomise in front of her eyes. Retreating into their individual rooms, their individual practices. Everyone is afraid to express themselves. She desperately tries to reach out to them, first individually, then collectively. The last thing she wants is another quiet home.
She organises a house meeting in the salon. Even Flores slouches in her chair.
I want to talk about the show.
Tomas, the textile artist and dressmaker, snorts. Mina, you cannot be serious. Flores tells him not to speak to her like that. The two start shouting at each other. Luis, another painter, tries to get in between them, but only makes things worse.
Carmina remembers her parents fighting. The icy silences that followed. That would last for days, weeks. The loneliness she felt.
She looks out the large window in front of the house. The trees are blacker than normal.
Crows.
They begin to caw as well, frantically, rivalling the clamour inside. Louder, more frenetic, like the day on the coast.
ENOUGH!
Her housemates freeze. She too freezes, shocked by the authority in her own voice. The crows immediately stop their racket, and she feels their hundreds of eyes peer intently at her.
I spent enough of my life in fear. I won’t go back there again.
