Invisible Ink

[CONTENT WARNING: severe brain injury, aphasia, and implied death.]:

There was a kind of beauty in drawing, I had always thought, because a picture didn’t have to say anything.

My eyes watched as a piece of black charcoal slowly swiped across the parchment. In its wake was a think line of flaking carbon, of which decorated the face of the square parchment sitting at my fingertips. Rich marks intersected one another, drawing the eye in a circular pattern from left to right, like a timeline. Road signs for a wanderer’s mind.

Almost like a sentence, I mused to myself. Yet, unlike written language, I could hear no meaning from the dark symbols sketched across the page. My mind remained fuzzy and quiet no matter how many times I looked for words within the quaint shapes in front of me.

I sighed, my cheek sinking further into my palm as I stared at my work. I let my fingers twirl the short, greasy locks of hair that fell around my ears as the quiet settle around me again as though made of dust. There was a kind of beauty in drawing, I thought, because a picture didn’t have to say anything — but I needed it to.

I tentatively rose from the wooden table, trying not to cringe from the sound of the bare wooden legs scrapping across the floorboards. Pinched between two fingers on either side, I held up the drawing so that it was backlit by the conservative rays of sunlight that came from the open window at the other end of the kitchen table, and searched one final time for some hidden message to arrange itself on the paper in front of me.

"I read something interesting in the paper this morning," I held up the picture for a second more before finally lowering it. "I thought you might find it to be neat. You were always interested in the war efforts."

I turned to walk to my sister with a small smile - not the kind of smile that encoded happiness or mirth, but one of sadness. Funny, I noted, how even facial expressions could express irony. I would have to test if that extended to pictures later.

She was sitting at the far end of the dinner table as usual, out of the sun to prevent her from developing burns whilst not subjecting her to sit in the relative darkness of the inner living room down the hall. In the mornings I would help her move from her bed to the table by looping my arms under her armpits and placing her feet atop of mine, and then back to her room in the evenings the same way.

I had had to fight with our mother to afford my sister even this small luxury, as mother would have prefered Kara to stay in her room and out of sight so that she didn't have to constantly face the sight of what had become of her only daughter. As a result, mother didn't spend much time at home anymore. Neither of us minded this.

Scattered all around the kitchen and centring on Kara were countless pieces of parchment with crude drawings of everyday objects on them. I learnt up against the table and placed the new square on top of the pile in front of her.

"There was a story circulating about a British woman who held some documents up to a flame in her study to try and read them after-dark. As the paper warmed up, words started appearing all over the documents. As it turns out, there was a population of German spies within the British embassy who were writing to each other in invisible ink."

I bent down so that I could look her in the eyes, and tried not to mind that she wasn't looking back despite our sightlines being locked.

"And you would not believe what they made the invisible ink out of: lemon juice." I pointed a finger to the drawing of a lemon that I had just deposited in front of her. "Isn't that something?.. I wonder how the Germans figured out they could do that."

The loose strands of Kara's rich, brown hair which escaped from the sides of her intricatly-plaited hairdo caught the sunlight as she leant forwards. Her eyes - one of which's pupil was blown out and hadn't changed since the incident - shifted, refocused, and finally centred on my face. It reminded me of how the lenses of a telescope moved and rotated into the perfect position. It was as though she had to manually adjust her eyes to see a metre in front of her. 

I watched. Waited. Her eyes landed on the drawing for a few long, quiet moments. When she met my eyes again, her mouth was open yet unmoving. God, how it pained me to witness how slowly she moved. That fire that used to light her up from the inside-out seemed to have been snuffed down to nothing more than an ember. But, just like an ember, every once-in-a-while a gust of wind stoked it, and along with that breeze came the hope that the fire might catch once more.

"I... uhm- it," she fumbled, weakly frowning as she so often did when no words came out. I grimaced with her. A pressure built up in the back of my throat as I watched her open and close her mouth in search of a word, any word, to express whatever thought she'd clung onto in her mind. These days, that feeling of frustration made up the bulk of her waking hours. I could tell, for reasons that I couldn't even begin to identify, that she knew what she wanted to say. Her mouth traced the form of words, but they never appeared.

I could hear her breathing getting heavier with emotion by the time she closed her mouth in resignation. A small, unsteady hand came up to idly rub along the length of the cloth plastered to the left side of her head. I gently moved it away, lacing our fingers together and tracing my thumb in a figure-eight pattern against her knuckle. She watched it for a few moments. Then, using her free hand she pointed at the drawing of the lemon in front of her on the table.

I nodded. "Lemon?"

She didn't look back at me. Instead, at half the pace of an ordinary person, she started shuffling through the papers in front of her. In my excitement I had stood up to get a better look when I saw her eye catch on another slip of parchment that had the picture of a campfire on its face. The charcoal of the flame was smudged, but it was nonetheless a fire that she pointed to.

"Yes, that's correct!" I looked at her with wide eyes. "Lemon juice heated by a flame, that's what they used to communicate in secret."

She nodded, minutely at first, then faster. She was nodding so adimately that I was momentarily worried that she was having another fit when she stopped and returned her attention back to the papers surrounding her. Though it might have just been my own desperation to perceive such, I could have sworn that the template of a grin made the corners of her mouth twitch upwards as she set to work looking for pictures. I was smiling too, internally celebrating that my idea had worked. The Egyptians used iconography to communicate, so why couldn't my sister?

I stood there in the dying light of the evening watching her slowly make progress in arranging a set of pictures in a row on the table. Her hands were too unsteady to have them line up, so instead she let them overlap on the sides. A jolt of electricity seemed to have shocked her into some sort of frenzy. She would not be stopped, now that she had a goal that she wanted to achieve. She didn't respond to my voice, but I didn't mind that.

In the end she layed out 6 pictures in two rows. When I looked back up at her, she was pointing across the table, her eyes unwavering on the object,

"You want my charcoal?" I said, my exasperation only intensifying. She did not move which was answer enough.

Each one of my foot steps echoed a distant, wooden boom as I went to retrieve the stub of charcoal left deposited on top of my dwindling pile of loose papers. I tried to keep my mind quiet and my expectations tempered, though it was hard to deny hope. She took the stub from my hand and, with shaking fingers, she brushed any loose pictograms from the table and set it down at the end of her string of words.

"Egg. Fire. Dinner... Lemon. Paper. Fire, & Charcoal?"

My heart sank. I read it aloud again, redoubling my efforts to find meaning in them, but nothing came to mind. Surely that wasn't all? She was hungry; she was reacting to stimuli, not forming thoughts. That fuzzy drone reappeared in my ears for there was an absence of anything for my mind to chew on or process.

When I finally noticed that she was looking at me expectantly, I swallowed back my disappointment and nodded.

"Very good, Kara. Very good. Of course I will make you an omlette for dinner tonight." 

Her face fell as she processed my reaction, and again, her mouth fell open in an attempt to speak, but by then I had already turned away to clean up the papers scattered all around the floor. My heart was beating heavily. That spark of hope that she might still be in there was dying in the darkness that was befalling the kitchen as the sun disappeared below the horizon. Somewhere in me, one last pulse of heat rose through my chest and I frowned,

"Maybe I'm going about this wrong. I suppose that it's wrong of me to try and force you to communicate. I just... I could have sworn that you were trying to."

I continued to avoid her face as I moved on into the kitchen to light some candles before the darkness full engulfed us.

"You know, when I sit at that table and draw... I want to believe it matters. That it can say something words can’t. But I look at what I’ve made, and it’s just noise — scribbles on a page that don’t mean a thing. I keep thinking if I try hard enough, I’ll get it. I’ll crack some sort of code and we can talk again. But all I find is... nothing?

Maybe that’s the catch, eh? Pictures are supposed to be simple — speak when words can’t — but I’m stuck. There's no nuance, or subtext, or- or thought in these shitty drawings.

I just... I miss knowing what’s in your head. I miss knowing you. I want to believe you're still in there, just trapped without a voice. But Kara... God, it’s getting so hard to hold onto that hope."

The air around me stilled uncomfortably once more. In my hand I clutched a candlestick, its flame calmly swaying atop the wax body.

I stole myself enough to look back at my sister. She was sitting in the dark, now, but I could tell that she'd slumped back against her chair. Her eyes were downcast to match the somewhat unreadable expression on her face.

Slowly, I walked back towards her, each step echoing louder than before in the calm dark. I gently set the candle down on a cleared-off space on the table in front of her.

"Do you remember how you used to draw pictures? Kara, they were beautiful. You could say more with a single stroke than I could express in a paragraph of words. I never understood. But I remember. And I miss it."

I picked up a piece of parchment with an abstract drawing of a book on it. Her eyes followed my hand as I held it above the flame. For a seconds, silence fell over all. It was oppressive and suffocating, only broken when a corner of he parchment suddenly caught alight.

In a whisper, I spoke, "I don't even know if you're listening to me. I don't know if you can. But maybe you still remember."

We watched the flame quickly blacken and curl the paper, and our eyes stayed glued to it in case something magically appeared on its face. I picked up another one, this time with a clock scribbled on it, and held it up as well until it caught fire and disintegrated in my hand.

I kept going, unable to stop. One after another I held up to the flame to see the heat denature the structure of the mill until all that was left was dark, flaky carbon. It wasn't until the table in front of us was clear of paper squares that I snatched the candle off the table. The wax had started to drip down the length of its uncovered barrel.

I glanced at her one final time. Her eyes were fixed to the candle flame, unmoving and unfocused. I sighed shakely, turning abruptly,

"I need air."

With that, I swept out of the room without waiting to see her response (if there was to be any) in order to find myself some space outside in the cool, breezy night.

Behind me, alone without a witness in the warmth and sudden darkness of the kitchen, in a broken whisper my sister would speak her final words:

"... I rem-ember."