15 September 2023
It was a normal day, I think.
At that point, I was just a student in art college, doing the same things I did every morning. Wake up. Brush my teeth. Wash my face. Get dressed. Run for the bus because somehow, even after doing the same routine for years, I still never left the house on time. Maybe that was not the exact order. Memory is unreliable like that. It is like a painting left in a damp room. The colours run by time, they face, the faces blur and are indistinguishable . When someone tries to restore it years later and calls the damage meaning.
The village was small enough that everybody knew everybody, or at least pretended to. Every morning, the same people waited at the same bus stop, wearing the same tired expressions. Students with backpacks. Office workers with coffee cups. Old people going into town for appointments they had complained about for three weeks already. I got on the bus and took my usual seat near the back, where Rory was already sitting with one earbud in and the other hanging loose against his hoodie.
“You look dead,” he said.
“Good morning to you too.”
“I mean more than usual.” he added. Rory had a talent for saying things that were technically insults but somehow too stupid to be offensive. He was the kind of person who could forget what day it was while holding a timetable in his hand. We were friends, kind of... Just two people who had taken the same bus for long enough that silence would have felt rude.
A few stops later, Patricia got on. She sat across from us and nodded. “Morning.”
Rory lifted two fingers in a lazy salute. “Patricia.”
The bus took about thirty minutes to reach the stop where we changed for the Luas. Most mornings passed in the same half-awake blur: engine noise, damp windows, people scrolling through phones, Rory complaining about assignments he had not started, Patricia pretending not to listen while absolutely listening. That morning was no different.
At the Luas stop, the crowd split apart. Some people crossed the road. Some stayed behind. Some disappeared into coffee shops or office buildings. Eventually, it was just me, Rory, and Patricia standing under the shelter while rain tapped against the glass. Rory looked at the sky and sighed. “I swear this country has three types of weather,” he said. “Rain, almost rain, and emotional damage.”
Patricia snorted. “That’s the first smart thing you’ve said all week.”
He looked genuinely pleased. “I’ll write it down.”
“You should. You might never do it again.”
I laughed, then the advertisement screen across the tracks went black. Only for a second. When it came back on, the perfume ad was gone and in its place was a plain white background with black text.
NO CAUSE FOR CONCERN.
I blinked and the screen changed back to the perfume bottle. Patricia was looking directly at the advertising screen with a furrowed brow. I was sure she had seen it as well. "Have you seen that?"I asked her.
"See what?"
" Never mind, " I mumbled, probably I had imagined the whole thing. A glitch... Still, I kept looking at the screen until the Luas arrived. It came in with its usual metallic screech, and we got on with the rest of the morning crowd. Patricia stood near the doors because her school was only a few stops away while Rory leaned against the pole and immediately started talking about some video he had watched the night before, something about a man trying to build an underground bunker in his garden. “Imagine having bunker money,” Rory said.
“Imagine having garden money,” I said.
Patricia looked out the window. “Imagine needing a bunker.”
I remember that part clearly now, although I probably did not think anything of it then. In 2023, people joked about the end of the world all the time. Climate change, wars, pandemics, AI, housing, money, loneliness. Everything felt like a crisis, but also somehow like background noise. The world was always ending somewhere.
Just not here.
Not to us.
Not yet.
Patricia got off first. “See you,” she said. Rory gave another lazy salute. I nodded. The doors closed, and she disappeared into the crowd of students moving toward the school gates.
A few stops later, Rory and I got off near the college. The art college building looked the same as always: concrete, glass, posters peeling from noticeboards, students smoking near the entrance, someone carrying a portfolio almost bigger than themselves. Inside, the heating was too high, the corridors smelled faintly of paint and coffee, and everyone looked like they were either about to create something brilliant or collapse from sleep deprivation.
My first class was History of Art and I went straight there, because if I stopped for coffee I knew I would be late, and if I was late again, Ms. Byrne would do that thing where she paused mid-sentence just long enough for everyone to turn and look at me.
The classroom was already half full. I took my seat near the middle, opened my notebook, and wrote the date at the top of the page.
15 September 2023.
History of Art was quite possibly the only class that could make death look like something you were supposed to analyse. The room got dark and the projector was already humming, throwing a painting across the wall:
A man in a white shirt stood with his arms spread wide, facing a row of soldiers with rifles. Around him, bodies lay twisted in the dirt. Behind the soldiers, there were no faces, just uniforms and guns. The man in white looked terrified.
Ms. Byrne stood beside the projection with a coffee in one hand and the remote in the other. “Goya,” she said. “The Third of May 1808.” Ms. Byrne clicked the remote, though the image did not change. “This painting shows the execution of Spanish civilians by French troops after the uprising in Madrid against Napoleon’s occupation. But I don’t want you to only look at what it shows. I want you to ask why it exists.” Nobody answered, of course and that because it was usually the safest route.
“Art,” she continued, “is not always pure emotional expression. A lot of the time, art is commissioned. Paid for. Directed. Encouraged. Used. The thing is.. the Kings, churches, governments, empires — they all understood something people still forget.”
She pointed at the painting. “Images tell people what to remember and winners write the history.” Ms. Byrne moved closer to the projection. The light cut across her face. “In older battle paintings, war is often made noble. Generals on horses. Flags in the wind. Beautiful death. Organised violence. The kind of image that makes killing look like destiny.” She gestured toward the man in white. “But Goya does something else. He removes the glory. The soldiers are almost mechanical while the victims are human, they are afraid, messy, individual. The painting does not ask us to admire war. It asks us to witness it.”
Rory turned slightly and whispered, “Still looks like a bad night out.”
“Shut up, man” I whispered back. But I looked at the man in the white shirt again. His arms were open, almost like Christ on the cross, but there was nothing peaceful about him. His eyes were wide and his knees looked weak. He was caught in the second before death, which is probably the most honest portrait anyone can paint of a person.
Halfway through the lecture, the first phone buzzed. Then another. Then a synchronized chorus of vibrations rattled the wooden desks.Ms. Byrne trailed off mid-sentence, and for a breathless second, the only illumination came from the horrific brilliance of Goya’s execution scene projected on the wall, competing with the cold, ghostly glow of twenty smartphones held in trembling hands.
I checked my screen.
Unusual power outages reported across several European cities. Officials urge calm, stating there is no cause for concern.
No cause for concern. The phrase tasted like cement. Oh, god. Not again.
Ever since the pandemic, headlines had lost their power to shock, replaced by a dull, lingering dread. We all remembered how it went: the impossible began as a distant rumor, hardened into a headline, solidified into a restriction, and ultimately consumed our lives. For months, I had drowned the reality in video games, losing track of days while watching strangers argue online about whether the world was actually ending. Eventually, the lock gates opened and the world pretended to heal, and we all played along. The projector died all of a sudden with the lecture hall plunging into pitch blackness. Someone let out a sharp, nervous laugh to pierce the silence.
“Power outage,” Rory whispered beside me, his voice entirely too casual. “Spooky.”
Before I could answer, the machinery hummed back to life and the projector beam sliced through the darkness, throwing Goya’s canvas back onto the wall. The scene was identical. There was still the same helpless man in the white shirt, his arms outstretched in eternal terror above the bleeding corpses in the dirt. Except for one impossible detail at the bottom of the frame that It wasn't there a minute ago. Right beside the dead was a motorcycle helmet. Gloss black. Visor webbed with a violent spiderweb of cracks. I felt my anxiety raising and my stomach like a knot. I knew that helmet. I had seen it once before under the buzzing light of a hospital corridor. It had been cradled in my father’s hands like an object simultaneously holy and obscene. I remembered my mother reaching out to touch it, and the fierce, protective jerk of my father pulling it away. Suddenly, the lecture hall vanished. I wasn't a university student anymore; I was fourteen years old, suffocating under the weight of an old grief. Before my brain could register the impulse, my body reacted.
I bolted upright. My chair shrieked violently against the linoleum floor, the sound echoing like a gunshot in the quiet room. The entire class turned to look and I felt dozens of eyes that burned into me. Rory shifted halfway around in his seat, his brow furrowed in genuine concern. “You alright, Arden?”
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