Emma Phillips

The hardest part was staying put. When her mother beat dust from the blankets, Mirna felt pieces of her soul spill from the window and rise like butterflies they used to cup in their hands before the war. She remembered how their wings beat frantically against her palm in a bid to be free. These days, freedom was tenuous; no one except snipers ran in the hills and Mirna only saw the landscape in pictures. She drew her memories in notebooks and hid them under her mattress so that her brother couldn’t deface them with his rage.

Davor’s anger spilled out with the dust. He beat the cushions with so much force that her mother asked if he could fill the gaps in the stuffing with his frustration and if not, perhaps he could help her tear Papa’s shirts into pieces to give them more to lean on. Now, even paper was a commodity.

Mirna’s drawings became smaller. She sketched tiny dragonflies around the edges of old letters, drew the hawks which still circled the hilltops at dusk and practised painting the flowers her mother loved to pick from her grandmother’s garden until they were so realistic, she almost filled her empty vase. 

Once, when Davor was grounded for taking the gun he’d found in Mr Ahmetovic’s apartment, Mirna had drawn his portrait on the back of a poster she unfolded from his pocket. Davor was fast losing his boyish features and Mirna searched his face for signs of the man he’d become. When he was sleeping, Davor wasn’t angry. Then one day, after bringing the war to their apartment every day for months, he was gone. Mirna searched his room for clues, listened to the silence. On his mattress, Davor had left pencils.

This piece was first published by Reflex Fiction

Emma Phillips lives by the M5 in Devon, which sometimes lures her away in search of adventure. Her words have been placed in the Bath Flash Award, Best Micro fiction 2022 and appear in publications such as Gone Lawn, Riptide Journal and Northern Gravy.
She is currently Writer-in-Residence at Tiverton Museum, which takes her writing into all sorts of unusual directions.

Read more from Emma:
Literary Namjooning – ‘Alice Carries the Moon‘
Northern Gravy – ‘The Long Slow Taste of Disappointment‘