She’s sitting at her dinner table, looking out the window as the winter passes through. “I’ll take care of the snow in the morning.” It’s the last thing she remembers. It’s been a long time since she heard another person’s voice. Even so, it’s been a couple of weeks since she last heard her own. Work has been canceled of course. No one can get out of their houses and the radio, the one thing that grounds her, insists on airing interviews with the victims’ families, romanticizing the consequences of the storm. “Fuck that,” she says to herself every time she thinks about turning it on. She stops as she recalls the crying of a woman whose child didn’t arrive home on time before the lockdown. “I’ll take care of the snow in the morning, I promise. It’s just for one night, I’m sure it won’t block the door.” It’s 8:35 am, but she already knows how her day’s gonna turn out: she will finish her coffee, light half a cigarette (she only smokes by halves, it makes her think she’s smoking less, even though this next one will be her fifth half this morning), and she will go back to her room where an unfinished puzzle of Van Gogh’s “Blossoming Almond Branch” lies on the floor waiting to give her day a tiny sense of purpose. After that, the only thing that will be left to do is to call, one by one, the police stations on her list that she hasn’t called already, asking where’s the sister who promised to take the snow from her front door 45 days ago — the last day the radio gave a weather report for a town that still had a reason to go outside. Paula Srur Carcar is a composer, singer, and pianist from Buenos Aires, Argentina. She is currently majoring in Film and Media Scoring at Berklee College of Music in Boston. She’s a human rights activist and wants to compose and perform music that encourages the interconnection of cultures. From 2021 she has been working on the scores of a variety of audiovisual projects and continues to collaborate with composers and studios based in Buenos Aires and New York.Featured Artwork: Sandykayz,CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
