Hieroglyph by Ed Finn Page B

of doing things. You would have thought that it would be the end of the world, and, indeed, it was a war of power and money that permeated the entire structure of society.
    It was the removal of mind-blindness. Literacy enhanced empathy, because it makes people able to experience what being someone else might feel like and stretches the range of emotions.
    I was there.
    I AM THERE.
    On the morning of the day that everything changed, I wake in my bedroom, my oasis, in early-morning dark, ready to brave the daily nightmare.
    No, that’s not right. I’m never ready.
    The night before had been very unpleasant. I lie there in the darkness and decide not to bother with going to school today.
    I hate to leave my room. I hate even to go into the living room. My two older brothers are always there, sprawled in front of the television—an old-fashioned screen-viewing device, where car crashes and murders pop out into the room in front of it—ready to say something nasty.
    When I was six, my parents gave me my room, and paints, all the paints I could want, a big shelf with gallons and quarts and pints of bright hardware-store paints and stiff hardware-store brushes, spray paints, an industrial-strength fan to vent the fumes, a laundry sink, and boxes of rags. It was an act of desperation for them. They gave me all that because it kept me happy. I had my own world.
    I repaint my room all the time. My bed is painted. My dresser is painted. My walls are painted. Layers of other years, other parts of me, peek through; it’s an archaeology of me. I paint patterns I see in my head, zigzags and dots, like that. I lie in bed, see a picture or colors in my head, jump up, and get started. Or I’m in school, and think of what I’m going to paint when I get home—what colors and brushes to use, how I’ll blend this or that.
    Sometimes I just get a rage on and start splashing paint around.
    When I try to paint people, they come out funny, their arms too long, their faces crazy, but that’s okay, I tell myself, and I tell myself that all the time. Sometimes I wrap my arms around my knees and put my head down and say it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.
    Last night I was screaming “It’s okay! It’s okay!” out loud and Dad ran into the room and said, “Melody, what’s going on?” And I saw that I had thrown the can at the wall and made a big yellow cartwheel of paint across the floor that he had run through, leaving yellow sockprints. He grabbed me and held me tight, and I stopped screaming and trembling. “Look!” He pried open a red can of paint and mixed to orange and made more footprints on the floor until we were both laughing.
    Then Mom opened the door and yelled, “I’m working two jobs for this?”
    My father’s face moved from laughing to fixed, like a statue, like he was a different person, in a blink. He said, “Come on out and do your homework now, you have to let that dry,” and I felt trapped. We opened the windows, left our painty socks on the floor, and closed the door on my kingdom.
    I sat at the dining room table with my tablet and pulled up my assignments. I looked at the wall of my mother’s books, all neatly arranged and never pilfered, never leaning into the gaps as they used to be: she had no time to read anymore. I closed my eyes and remembered myself nestled next to her, an open book spanning our laps, and she was trying to make me say the words on the page when one of her tears fell and shimmered, a delicate hemisphere magnifying one spoke of a wheel in a picture of a train.
    â€œMelody?” I opened my eyes. The homework words leaped around on the screen; I had an instant headache, a dark hole in the center of my chest, and a stomachache.
    â€œHoney,” said my father, who had pulled up a chair next to me. “What’s wrong?” He knew what was wrong. We both did.
    â€œI can’t read with