“And that thief – is me,” a loud mocking voice said.

I felt goose bumps run through my back I turned around immediately following the voice, but there was nothing. I could feel him staring deeply. I looked at my brother and asked him, “Where is he bro, where is he hiding?”

“He’s right there,” Josh answered calmly as he pointed in the same direction.

“I can feel his presence I just don’t see him,” I said hesitating.

Then out of nowhere Josh started walking to the area the voice was coming from. As he stopped walking he reached out his arms and in mid-air he acted as if he opened two doors to a cabinet. I still saw nothing.

The voice, which sounded deep at times then high-pitched, began to speak.

“I’m glad to see you again, your brother has told me so much about you,” the voice said. He then continued, “Your brother Joshua or Burial as I have named him has been a great student, I am teaching him everything I know so that he can be just like me. He laughed – loudly and obnoxiously.

“Josh, what the fuck bro, is this true?” I said

“You know I’m the black sheep of the family Gibran, nobody cares for me. I am alone in this life. You have your family now - your son. My dad left because of me…” My brother said as he looked at me with a fierce look.

“That is bullshit bro, I love you – I begged my mother for you to be born. We all love you you’re our brother –you’re blood,” I was now yelling, I had lost my temper. “Regarding my father leaving – he left because of his own fucking issues bro – let him work through it. What you are saying is not fair,” I said.

“You let him down Gibran, you have not taken care of your brother. Getting him in fights, stealing, vandalizing the streets, drinking alcohol the list goes on. I’ll take care of him in a much better way.” The voice said instigating the situation.

“Is that what this is about Josh? You’re right; I could have been a better brother a better influence but I’m learning as I go. Trust me, if I knew how – I would of. All I’ve done is take care of you in the way I know how.” I pleaded

“We’ve heard enough, plus I am getting bored,” the voice said.

Then I felt as if I was going to faint, I could now see a dark, triangular shape figure behind my brother. My energy, my dreams – my creativity was being sucked out from my being. 


                                                                                                             Page 21

I walked into a cell. The door behind me closed. I saw my brother pacing back and forth paying no mind to my entrance. He was trapped. I ran to him and held him. For a moment he resisted and just as he was trapped physically, he was trapped mentally. He spoke gibberish under his breath and his eyes wandered everywhere.

I reached for my backpack and took out a bottle of window cleaner. Raising each of his arms one at a time, I sprayed a nice amount on each armpit. Maybe the spontaneous sensation and the smell of the window cleaner brought my brother back to sanity. He looked at me and just laughed – we laughed. We wept and held each other without a word to say. I looked at him and his eyes were round tired of crying. It felt good to see him and hold him, just like when I met him at his birth.

Our father was always in and out of jail, at times, he would tell me how there were grown men that did not know how to spend time in jail. He said he would see grown men crying their eyes out from the stress and frustration of being in a small and dark compacted space that equated a jail cell.

If a jail cell environment could bring a grown man to act like a mindless child, what could be expected of a child in a jail cell?

My ten-year-old brother who was the bravest person I’ve ever encountered was now broken down to almost loosing his mind. “I know that shadow-like entity is the one responsible for this, I know he kept you here by force,” I said breaking the silence.

“How could our grandmother not have helped get you out of here,” I complained as I held my brother.

I reached for my backpack and took out a bottle of water and a peanut butter sandwich I had packed at home.

“Here, drink and eat this,” I said as I handed them to my brother.

My mind raced with ways to hurt or completely delete the entity. My brother was in dire distress and pain due to the entity’s actions.

“It wasn’t the entity that kept me here, Gibri, he’s a protector – he’s a good guy,” Josh said with a full mouth. “I chose to stay with the entity, he is many projected in one. Their name is…”

“Wait you stayed with him by choice?” I exclaimed. “Why? Well wait, why then are you here” Who put you here?” Now my mind was racing and it felt like I was loosing it.

“I figured out what is stealing everybody’s creativity – not only in Earth but in all realms. Before I could tell the Sacred Letters of what is going on, the thief of creativity put me in this cell,” Josh answered. 

                                                             ∞


                                                                                                             Page 20

Concept Art for The Crow's Aura.

That sounded like something my father would have said, but the person I was looking at was a homeless man who was looking out the window.

I took out a spray-can from my backpack and figured I’d hit him in the head with it. “It must be an under cover cop,” I thought.

“No need for violence,” he said. “You’ll only be hurting yourself.”

I realized this person was hearing my thoughts, which was not unusual because three of my aunts could do that. But this person spoke like my father and heard me like my aunts. As I got closer to him, his energy felt inviting like my mother’s.

His curls dreaded in certain areas and his face aged depending on the light it received. In the shadows, he looked and acted like an infant, in the light, he looked and acted like ancient wise man.

As we walked through a hallway he said, “Use the tools and the skills you possess to open your own pathways, your own doorways to get where you need to go,” he then continued, “you do that by listening to the sound of opportunity”

He blended into shadows and disappeared. “But there’s a lot of doors here, couldn’t I just go through one of these?” I asked. I stood in stillness knowing I wouldn’t get a verbal response.

I held the spray-can I’d been carrying from earlier that night. The smell of moisture came back strong and I started to hear a droplet of water every other second. I ran my left hand onto my right arm feeling my skin getting wet. The sound of the water dripping started to get louder and the yellowish light was now clearly in front of me. “The sound and sight of opportunity is beautiful,” I said. I remembered what the homeless man said. I also remembered that I had envisioned myself falling – and what I envisioned was then manifested into reality. I now envisioned my brother and I talking and going back home. 

In between two doorways, there was a seven-foot wall space. I approached the wall, I used my right arm as a compass and spray-painted a large circle onto the wall. I created my own pathway to my brother’s exact location.

                                                              ∞


                                                                                                             Page 19

Concept Art for The Crow's Aura. 

“Or maybe, I’m in the black canary’s aura,” I said as I came back to the present moment.

I ran through the alleyway and headed towards the main street. I took a left onto the sidewalk. At the corner, I crossed the street and decided to look back at my work. I followed my view three stories high and found it.

“I could of written the message larger,” I thought.

Then from the corner of my eye, I noticed a yellow light flash inside the far right window of the building in the seventh floor. I hesitated, “What if it’s the police? They might be looking for me” I started to change my focus from creativity to worry – to fear. I caught myself and promptly asked a question to the universe. “If that’s a sign for me to go inside, please reaffirm,” I asked openly.

No more than two seconds later, a crow somewhere in the near distance cawed. I’ve never heard that happen in the past. “Crows like many birds are silent at night,” I thought. I was making an uneducated decision because I truly did not know if my statement was true but it felt true to me.

I readjusted my backpack and ran towards the building I had exited moments earlier.

I scaled the wall using the exterior ventilation pipe for a good fifteen feet. I grabbed onto the ladder that interjects with a staircase and ran up in a zigzag formation all the way to the top of the building. On the rooftop there were countless windows and doors – one of them was broken. Wasting no time, I ran inside the building. Inside, the only light came in from the moon that permeated through the windows, the smell of moisture and old furniture surrounded the space.

As I ran across the seventh floor, I looked around for the yellowish light. I was so nervous I was shaking. Something inside of me, both mental and physical, brought me to a complete stop. My head turned in all forward directions, there were no signs of anything. It’s when I looked down that I saw I was at the very edge of a massive hole on the floor, its depth ended on the first floor.

The yellowish light was now by the third floor. I considered somehow scaling down the hole, there had to be a way. “I figured it out,” I said to myself.

The trusses between each floor could serve as a ladder for me to go down at least the initial three to five feet then I could hang from the bottom of the truss and I’ll be dangling a good eight feet from the next floor down. “That’s nothing,” I thought. I’ll make my way down one floor at a time.

Maybe all the comic book reading I've done in my life mixed with the high dose of adrenaline that pumped through my body, I decided to undertake this outrageous plan of action.


                                                                                                             Page 17

No more than a couple of minutes into my plan of thought – a vision came into my mind. In the vision, I fell and hit the first floor – I stood up and walked away unharmed. “That is ridiculous,” I thought interjecting my mental image. I grabbed on even tighter to the truss and slowly moved my body downward so I could hang from it. I don’t know what happened but it happened, my body just took a dive into the hole. I was grabbing on tight to the truss the next thing I know was – my back is to the floor. It happened so fast that not a single thought crossed my mind.

Completely motionless I started to take a mental account of my body, sensing if everything was in its proper place. “Can I walk?” I wondered. For a moment, I thought I couldn’t walk, my thoughts said my back was probably broken. Then, just like the vision I had moments earlier, I stood up and walked away unharmed.

“Wouldn’t it have been just easier if I came in the front door of the first floor,” I thought in disbelief.

“No, you would have missed the entire experience of the journey,” A man’s voice said.

                                                               ∞


                                                                                                             Page 18

“Hey mom, are there black canaries?” I asked while I listened to them singing. My mother had cages spread throughout our 1-bedroom home, full of colorful canaries. Some, including the red-orange canary I was observing, would come out of their cage and fly around. You can imagine, several birds circling inside a small living room, yes it was a beautiful sight especially for an 11-year old boy that would wake up to their singing everyday.

“Oh yes, son, although you must go into the depths of a forest to find them. They are very hard to access. As it is, the man I buy my birds from said that he’s traveled through the forests and islands and has only seen their aura. He said the black canary is so magical that when they fly off their presence still lingers,” she answered.

I liked what she was telling me and that inspired another question.

“Mom, you know how my aunts are into magic and reading the tarot cards,” I asked. “How come I never see you do that, I feel like you have so much to give, do you do it when we’re not around?”

My mother was cleaning the birdcages all the while the birds flew and sang freely around the house. She stopped cleaning and said, “I don’t have those gifts like my sisters do.”

“How did they know they had those gifts?” I asked while now having my full attention on her.

“Since they were little girls, they would have episodes of clairvoyance and other things like that. One day your aunt Raquel was introduced to the tarot cards and since then, she’s used them as a guide,” my mother explained.

“I know you’re the main sorceress, you can tell me. Go on, tell me the truth, you’re magical, huh mom,” I said teasingly. The other side of me though really felt it was true.

She laughed. “What makes you say that son?”

“It’s your aura. I can feel it even when you’re not around, it is so strong yet soothing. Are you the black canary?” I asked while holding my laughter.

She just smiled and her eyes looked deeply into mine.

                                                           ∞

Concept Art for The Crow's Aura.

I measured the space mentally. A grid appeared in my mind and the angles and curves presented themselves to me. I slouched towards the left and began to spray the paint onto the wall from the bottom left to the upper right in a circular motion. Everything else fell into its place. Each letter had the proper distance from each other. Each letter was legible. On the side of my piece I wrote a note, it read:

I have found myself, off to find my brother.

The piece – the letters spelled out the name I had given to myself at thirteen years of age, CROW. My parents had divorced at that time and one night out of sheer boredom mixed with rebellion, I went out to paint. It felt so good that I kept on doing it. By this random act of vandalism, I found something truly powerful, raw expression of self and creativity in forward action. Each piece would multiply by the minute. It filled a gap within me – a void that I needed to be filled with purpose of existence. The negativity, confusion, and heavy heart were gone from my mind – at least for that moment - I was too busy painting. Only creativity and manifestation of ideas occupied my thoughts.

I slowly scaled down the backside of the rooftop I painted. I grabbed onto an exterior ventilation pipe and used it to leverage myself.

Now, I understood that while being in a state of creativity, I could see and experience other realms – other realities that are hiding in plain sight but do exist. The only drawback to my creativity was that it is indeed, illegal. But I was leaving that for another time to figure out. At this moment it was time to find my brother.

I looked around my environment. I knew I was in. I had dove into the bird-like shadow.

“I’m inside the crow’s aura,” I said smiling.

                                                               ∞


                                                                                                             Page 15

I ran to the closet were I kept all the spray-paint. I loaded up my backpack with blacks, silvers and reds. I realized that the way for me to find my brother was to go into my creative state of mind, even if it was an act of vandalism. At the moment, that was my only channel to find him.

As I stepped out of the apartment, I saw my father walking up the hill. He staggered left to right while he maintained the grocery bag he carried (full of beers) in somewhat of a balance.

I had lost track of time. It was already the weekend and he kept his promise of showing up to continue our previous dialogue we had outside my grandmother’s home in Juarez. I just didn’t account for the possibility that he would show up drunk at this very moment.

“Hey, hey, Gibran, I’m upset at you,” he said as his whole body wavered. His face showed irritation and his right hand’s pointing finger was in my face. “Your brother, has told me that you’re out in the streets painting illegally,” he continued. “Why? You are going to get yourself in trouble and as a result of that, you are going to create a problem for me, because I will not stand to see you in jail son,” he said.

“No dad, I’m not doing that, but wait you talked to Josh,” I asked while lying at the same time. I was so fired up to go paint, and now I had to put that intensity to a halt. On the other hand, hearing my father say that he spoke to my brother brought me a sense of tranquility. I wanted to press my father for answers of Josh’s whereabouts, but I knew I had to pry those answers slowly from him.

“Yes, I spoke to him and he told me that you’re hanging from buildings and rooftops. I didn’t believe him so I went to go look. I walked all around downtown and sure enough, Crow on the roof, Crow on the windows, Crow on the walls, Crow, Crow, Crow. What’s wrong with you son, what are you looking for?” he asked. “You’re destroying other people’s things.”

He began to weep. “If you go to jail, then what son?” He questioned with his face down while his hands covered his eyes.

“Look dad, I won’t do that anymore. I’m stopping now, especially now that my son Isaias was born. I want to take care of him and raise him good,” I said

Then I tried to be smooth and re-direct the conversation to my brother’s whereabouts.

“Dad, when and where did you see Josh?” I asked him

He sat down by the dumpster, while keeping his head down, he began to swerve his head side to side. Right as he was going to say something, he fell asleep.

A surge of mix feelings went through me. I was starting to feel like the bag my father carried – my foundation was a wavering balance and inside of me I carried my own poison.

                                                              ∞


                                                                                                             Page 14

Concept Art for The Crow's Aura. 

I woke up in my mother’s apartment home in El Paso. I looked around for any signs of my brother but to no avail.

“You’ll find him Gibri,” I told myself. Gibri, was a name that my family would call me to show endearment. At that moment, I was giving it to myself. I needed to maintain clear of my mind going into a mental disarray. My father would always tell us to not think if its hurting us. I never understood what he meant by that, until now.

One other thing that he taught me as a child was to diagram my situation and take notes just as if I was reading a book with the aim of creating a book report for school. “You must understand the characters, their environments and their writer. The writer is splitting himself to create the characters and give them life, which represent his different perspectives in his own story – his own book” he would say. “Any given situation in life is the same, you are creating your own story your own path by the choices you make in life”  

I took out a piece of paper and a pen from my backpack. I started to diagram my immediate story:

Characters:

1. Gibran, Josh, Grandmother’s spirit, Father, Mother, Son, Aunt Raquel, Don Tomas, Shadow-like Entity.

Situation:

My brother is missing.

Retrace steps:

1.    At the park painting illegally

2.    Something was looking at us

3.    Went into the hills to che…

“I got it,” I exclaimed. I stopped writing. It was not someone looking at us; it was some-thing. The entity had been following me. He had been the one pulling at me to go visit my father. He wanted that so I could encounter and re-connect with my grandmother’s spirit.

My grandmother was indeed looking at me when my brother Josh asked her why we were there. I’ve had the answer all along within me. It is that which links us all together – the source of creativity. I am that encaged bird that Don Tomas brought out from my being. In order for me to be in a state of creativity, I must summon it.

“Time to paint,” I exclaimed with excitement. 


                                                                                                             Page 13

Concept Art for The Crow's Aura. 

“Wake up, we’re here,” my mother said.

We were in the mountains of Juarez. We had arrived to Don Tomas’ home.

A woman wearing a white dress and no shoes greeted us. “Come in,” she said, “he is expecting you.”

As she turned around for us to follow her, I noticed her braided hair. I don’t know why but I found it very intriguing. I maintained my focus on her braid as we proceeded up the path, noticing how it swayed back and forth along to the rhythm of her body movements.

Upon entering the home, I noticed that the dirt path from the exterior continued into the interior of the space. The difference was, inside, I caught the smell of wet dirt. An old couch occupied an area to the far left of the room. At the center of the space, Don Tomas stood surrounded by a circle he had created with rocks and other natural elements. He did not greet us or acknowledge us. My mother and I stood outside the circle of elements and observed him.

He then poured gasoline all around the perimeter of the circle and with a match he lit it on fire. The flames intensified as he chanted, within seconds the entire circle was filled with fire, including Don Tomas. He held his hand out towards me and waved for me to go in. I thought of my brother’s bravery and I thought of my own desperation to find him. I walked in. My mother tried to hold me back but I signaled to her that it was fine. Inside there was no fire. It was just Don Tomas and I. I could see the flames that guarded the circle but we ourselves were standing on wet dirt. He picked up one of the stones that was on the floor and rubbed it all around my being focusing on my head and on my chest. He then held it in front of me and cracked it as if it was an egg. A bird like shadow came out and flew intensely within the circle as if it wanted to escape, it couldn’t the flames were blocking it.

“Get in, that’s your way into the realm were you can find your brother,” Don Tomas exclaimed.

I saw it, then I felt it - I dove in.

                                                              ∞


                                                                                                             Page 12

Concept Art for The Crow's Aura. 

“We can’t go to the police sister, Gibran has been vandalizing the streets of El Paso, they’ve been looking for him,” my mother explained. “Plus, you and I well know that this is something else. We need to figure something out now. Josh is nowhere to be found. If Gibran is telling the truth, we need to go to Don Tomas for help,” my mother said as she fought to stay calm.

I hid in my cousin’s room with all the lights shut off, as my aunt explained to my mother the entire situation. I could hear everything they were saying. I didn’t know what to do. Out of sheer frustration, I began to weep and badger myself for not taking care of my brother.

Did the crow-like entity hold my brother hostage or did my brother stay by choice? Questions and more questions came to mind and assumptions ran at a fast pace as well.

“I grew up with my dad, yes it was crazy at times but at-least I saw my dad. Maybe Josh decided to stay and grow with a father-like figure,” I said to myself.

“But if he’s meant to be my brother in this time and space, why would he stay?”

“Why didn’t my grandmother do something, although my grandmother Antonia died four years ago, so if I was talking with her spirit, was I then in spirit form?”

“What the fuck!”

In that darkness and mental breakdown, I fell asleep praying for answers.

                                                             ∞


                                                                                                             Page 11

Concept Art for the Crow's Aura.