Dr. Makeda works with younger patients. Kids who are neglected, abused, witness to unspeakable violence. Most of the children have difficulty articulating what they've seen or what has been done to them in their affluent suburban homes or low income high-rises.
Evil doesn't care where it lays its head.
Some of Dr. Makeda's patients simply refuse to speak. Such is the case with Dar. No one knows her name but scars never lie. Jane Doe, or "single-occupant crash victim," or Dar is a girl whose ID is carved into her skin.
This girl is older than Dr. Makeda's other patients. Not really a girl at all, but since she does not speak… Wounds heal slowly.
She laughs in her sleep.
With the children, Dr. Makeda knows crayons work when the tongue does not. The doctor makes a notation in the patient's chart that she can't keep enough red ones on hand. Dar spends hours getting her shades of red just right. What she then goes on to draw is another matter. The pictures, which are quite good and Dr. Makeda makes another note to find nicer art supplies, almost always include a rendering of an empty field studded with posts. The posts are covered and dripping with red, but she knows it isn't paint. A towering white backdrop, like a giant billboard, completes the landscape. Dr. Makeda scrawls on her notepad: Why is the picture within the picture always left blank?
The picture within the picture leaves the patient irritable and distraught. It always comes to this. Art hour is over. Pencils and paper and crayons are put away, and the patient uses a walker to cross the room to take a seat by the window.
Semi-Daily Scribbles 
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