Nika Curkovic was always a good Croatian girl. An obedient daughter never questioning her parents' decisions. She never uttered a word of critique of their decision to send her to an asylum, where they hoped the available medical treatments would help her get rid of the voices resounding in their unfortunate daughter's head, scaring her to death. The voices appeared all of a sudden when Nika hit puberty and she heard them only when other people were around. The only way she knew of to block those silent whispers she could hear in her head was isolating herself in her room, far from any living soul until she decided to tell her parents about the voices. She trusted them and was sure their decision to send her to a mental health center was the best in this situation. Nika didn't say "no" to them.

She also didn't say "no" to doctors who kept prescribing her pills after which she felt drowsy and tired although they didn't help much when it came to the voices. They didn't help her about this very issue. Not at all. Until she went to bed, feeling tipsy and strange. That's how the pills worked. You can't hear any voices, real or imagined, when you are asleep.

Nika never cast any doubts on the doctor's other methods either. They were desperate to help her by any means possible. This particular case of schizophrenia wasn't susceptible to any of the ways they tried. So they tried some more. The last one the doctors resorted to was electroshock therapy. It was an outdated form of therapy, but they hoped it would help.

That was twenty years ago. Nika came back home a long time ago. She spends whole days sitting on the front steps of her family house. She smiles sweetly to people passing by, waving to them and forgetting about their existence in the moment after she averts her eyes from them. The therapy destroyed her gift of telepathy before she managed to discover it, but that wasn't all it took from her; it also destroyed her brain.