Start with 1, 2, 3, the way you’ve been taught, and keep going. Something shows up, a picture. Of the house you live in or a birthday cake or a car. The numbers which follow are the numbers you know should follow but somehow your pencil zigzags. In this memory you’re only four or five, your hand a bit unsteady. Things are going on in your head which are not neatly numbered, no straight lines, and the teacher asks What’s this? And you say A tree. Then you say It’s me. The teacher looks at the picture again. There are no numbers any more, just lines joining the dots and no matter how you look at it, the picture is jagged, on fire. The teacher asks about home, what shows up there, and you tell her one thing after another, dot to dot, how yell is yellow and blue is bruise.

Start again with 1, 2, 3 and keep going until something takes shape from when you were a child. A pebble, a shard of glass, a secret memory, but find it, join the dots and see. It’s a birthday cake with candles and little flames, it’s the lit-up face of your older brother, who was Mom’s favourite, and his teeth always smiled. It’s Mom’s blue mouth that time you asked her who she loved best. You both, of course, she replied, and your heart rattled with pebbles. Join the dots for emptiness. You grew and grew up, and one night your brother smiled at you, all teeth, took the car keys and you both got in. There were no more numbers, just dots, a crash in the dark, shards, a tree aflame, a burnt field. Finally you see the picture, and when the therapist asks Who was driving? you say I don’t remember and then she asks Who’s this, you say It’s me, then you say My brother. But that was twenty years ago, when your brother was, twenty years ago, your brother.

Nora Nadjarian is an author from Cyprus. Her short fiction has been published in various journals including Milk Candy Review, Ghost Parachute, Fractured Lit, CRAFT and was chosen for Wigleaf‘s Top 50 Very Short Fictions of 2022 (selected by Kathy Fish). She placed third in the Welkin Writing Prize in 2025. She is also a widely published poet and her latest poetry collection Iktsuarpok is available from Broken Sleep Books.