• Maria looked at the wall behind her. The spots of blood were always there, even where they weren't. Maybe she had looked at them too much, and they'd gotten burned into her eyes, and she now had a scar shaped like them inside her eyes. She'd known a boy, years ago, that stared at the sun for too long and was seeing purple blotches wherever he looked at for a year afterwards.
    But it wasn't the time to talk about those memories. Memories were like algae. She didn't go swimming anymore in the lake because of algae; this one time, when she was younger and her father was still alive, her feet had gotten tangled in between them. Nobody had been there to help her, and she would have died if she had panicked. She didn't. She never panicked.
    "Maria?" echoed a voice, coming from the corridor. "Maria, will you come help me with them kids? I can't make them be quiet, and someone's gonna hear them."
    Maria dropped the pencil and the paper at the sound of her mother's voice. Looking around, the tried to find somewhere to hide them; her mother didn't like her to draw. She was right; drawing was useless for someone like her. She should have been working. And everything she drew was nothing but rubbish.
    "Yes, Mother," she said, her crystal voice thumping down the hall. "I am coming."
    She hid the pencil and paper under the door, the only piece of furniture in her room. Her mother had burned the bed the day she'd fallen asleep and had been late for school.
    "You'd better be. This one I've got here is tough."
    When Maria got to the room, she had to close her eyes so tightly little triangles and glowing mosquitoes appeared behind her eyelids. She'd done this so many times, yet she knew she could never be like her mother and walk right into the room with no feelings and get the work done.
    "What is it you want me to do, Mother?"
    The woman raised her wrinkled, sulphur-coloured face to glance at her daughter. She opened her mouth in a half-toothless, filthy grimace that could never have been mistaken for a smile.
    "Silence them. Here you got the knife. And be careful, that one bites."
    Maria nodded, putting on her gloves, and approached one of the children. She did her best not to look at her face, but she couldn't fight it, and caught a glimpse of his skinny, skeleton-like face, bulging dark eyes and messy, broken red hair.
    "Open wide," Maria said, trying not to drop the knife.
    Come on, she thought. You've done this countless times. You always do the same thing. This is for the best. If not for these kids, you'd be dead already.
    "Open wide," she repeated, this time pulling the knife close to his skin. "It will hurt more if your lips come out, too."
    It happened quickly. In less than a minute, there was a splat of blood on the floor, next to her leg, and a finger-shaped tongue floating on it. By then, Maria had already moved to the next child.