Brooklyn, NY Jan 7 2083 3:30 PM

Carmen

I’m Mari Carmen Morales, and this was the day when my life completely changed.  I was a pretty happy kid. I had a mother and a father who loved me, which was a rarity in those days.  I was seven.  Only seven.

I was coming home from school, mad at my mom because she didn’t come to pick me up at the bus stop on time.  So I stomped my way up the stairs of our brownstone stoop.  It was cold outside and I was mad.

I didn’t think that the door being unlocked was too strange seeing as how three other people lived in the brownstone with us. So I went inside and called out for my mother.  “Mami!” I said, then I stopped.  The house was dead silent, and that was strange.  So I went down to the basement where my mother had her studio and dark room.  She was a photographer and I figured she had gotten so carried away in her work that she had forgotten to get me.

The safe light in the dark room was on so I waited in the studio for a few minutes thinking maybe she would soon remember she had to come get me and be out of there.  But after a few minutes she didn’t come out.  So I opened the outside door and called for her. “Mami?”

Then I closed the outside door and opened the inside door then closed it. I stood at the door a moment to get my bearings straight.  I saw mami bent over the water tray.  I touched her arm and she fell over to the floor.  I screamed a silent scream and cried next to her. She had been shot in the head, I find out later, by one of my father’s associates.  My dad may not have been an honorable man, but he was my dad.  I stayed with my mother in the basement.

I looked at what she had been working on.  They were pictures of my dad and me.  I finished running them through the fluids like she had taught me.  They were starting to fall apart as I moved them but I finished them and hung them up to dry then I lay down next to her on the floor.