Chapter 1
You Won’t Ever Let Anything Eat Me Up… Will You?
Their boundless energy carried them through the blue-green fields without a care in the world. The sky was cloudless. The earth beneath their feet, soft and constant. The two sisters, six years apart in age, owned the land and everything in it with impunity. It was their world, free of danger, and responsibility, and time.
“You better run, munchkin,” the older one called, chasing the younger one up a gentle incline. “Don’t let me catch you, because if you do,” the older sister growled. “I’m gonna eat you up!”
“No!” The little one squealed. “You said I was the princess this time, Bearhug. The princess doesn’t get eaten!”
“You may be the princess,” the bigger one said, grabbing at the smaller one’s sundress as they parted the tall grass. “But even a princess needs to mind herself. You never know what might be sitting in the shadows, waiting for you.”
“There are no shadows here, Bearhug,” the little one stopped running, her hands at her hips, defiantly gazing over the field as a light breeze sent ripples through the grass. “This place is perfect. I don’t ever want it to change.”
The bigger girl came up to the smaller one and wrapped her arms around her from behind. Besides the difference in size, and the slight difference in proportion, they might as well have been copies of one-another. ‘Bearhug’, as she was now known, was a bit longer, a bit skinnier. The one who had recently adopted the handle ‘Munchkin’ was shorter, plumper; her arms and her legs thicker and stubbier. Munchkin woke up every morning waiting to become more like Bearhug. Bearhug was usually already awake, ready to spend another day explaining things to Munchkin.
There was one other distinction: The older sister had a scar the width of a pencil running from her wrist to the inside of her elbow – a little reminder of an incident with a broken window when she was five.
“You won’t ever let anything eat me up, will you, Bearhug?”
“Are you kidding me? What do you think mom and dad would do to me if that happened?”
“They’d probably eat you up!”
“At the very least.”
The little pulled away, breaking her older sister’s hold. She only made it three steps. “Owwwww!” She screamed, falling forward, grasping her foot. “It bit me! It bit me!”
“Let me see that!” The older sister said, lowering herself down to the grass and taking the little foot into her hand. “Oh god, Munchkin… what did you do? You stepped on a rock is what you did. And you cut your little foot because your skin is as soft as a ripe peach’s! This is why mom doesn’t let you walk around barefoot outside.”
“It stings!”
Bearhug knew it was just a scratch, because that’s all it was. Just a scratch. But judging by the look on Munchkin’s face, it was much more. Fear and pain mixed together on the face of a child. It didn’t belong there, that look. In the real world, sure, but not here. Not in this place.
“Okay, well, let me make it better then,” Bearhug said to her little sister. She brought the little foot up to her lips, and kissed the part of her big toe where a drop of blood had formed. “See? Isn’t that all better?” Bearhug said, tasting a bit of gooey saltiness on her tongue. “The sting is gone for good.”
“Do you promise?”
“I promise, Munchkin. I promise that from now on, you’ll always be safe here. This place was made for us, you know. All of our dreams, this is where they’ll come true.”
“Wow!” Munchkin shouted, pointing her finger at Bearhug’s forearm. “Look at your scar, Bearhug!”
Bearhug looked down at her forearm. “What… the?” She gasped, watching as the ugly old scar deflated and melted back into the surrounding skin.
“Your scar is going away!” Munchkin yelled. “You kissed my boo-boo and now look at you! I healed you!”
Bearhug got up to her feet, and took her little sister’s hand. “Come on Munchkin, we’d best be getting home.” She said, pulling her little sister from the grass.
A few hundred paces away, right where the lazy incline crested, a rocky outcropping rose from the landscape. A stone’s throw away from the tiny mountain, a grove of impossibly tall trees stretched all the way to the sky.
“I love you, Bearhug,” the little one said.
Bearhug ran her tongue over her top lip. “I know you do, Munchkin.”
Next Time Pick On Somebody Your Own Size
Half-hypnotized shoppers sauntered up and down the aisle, oblivious to the battle being waged in the last aisle of the athletic department.
“Stop it! Give her back to me! I’m gonna tell mom!” The little girl cried, jumping as high as she could, and coming up desperately short. The bigger, taller boy held his hand high in the air, clutching a doll with a fuzzy purple mane. “Give her back, Shawn! I’m telling, I swear to god!”
“Go on,” the boy replied, rising to his tippy toes to put a few more inches of distance between the girl and her doll. “Go on and tell her! You know who tells their mommies? Little babies do, that’s who. Is that what you are, Tiff? A little baby?” He said, lowering his arm just a bit.
“Give! Her! Back!” The little girl shouted. She jumped higher, and come closer than ever to reaching her goal. Her blue dress billowed as the air caught it on the way down. She tried two times, three times, and each time, as the prize was almost within reach, he raised hand just a little more. “You’re nothing but a big bully, Shawn.” She said, folding her arms in front of her and puffing out her lower lip. “Just one big bully who picks on little girls. Big boys are supposed to be nice to little girls. They’re not supposed to pick on them!” She said, her little blue eyes narrowing to a pair of slits. She relaxed her arms, and lowered her hands to her hips. “That’s why nobody likes you at school, Shawn. Because you’re just a big, mean little boy!”
Twenty feet away, behind a rack of bicycles, stood a lone observer, her dark brown eyes focused, unblinking, on the unfolding drama. She teased her wavy, shoulder length hair with her index finger, while her left hand braced against the spokes of a Schwinn mountain bike’s front wheel. Katie Hope, herself no stranger to big, mean little boys, smiled, her round cheeks swelling as the little girl’s words hung in the air like a dark cloud. She knew a kindred spirit when she saw one.
The smile on the boy’s face vanished under the power of the stare, and his arms slowly fell limp to his sides. “That’s why nobody likes me?” He said in a hollow voice.
“Give her back to me, Shawn! You have your own toys.”
“I’ll give her back to you,” he seethed. He brought the doll up to eye level on the little girl and with a single, twisting motion, pulled it into two parts.
“No!”
“There!“ He said, his face in a reddened grimace. “There’s your stupid doll, Tiff! Now you have two toys you can play with!” He added, throwing the purple-topped head down the aisle, and the body in the opposite direction.
“I hate you!” The little girl shouted, tears streaming down her cheeks. “I hate you Shawn!” She hung her head for a few seconds, then turned around and stomped off in the direction where the head had flown.
Katie stepped out from behind the bicycle display to get a better look at the doll murderer. He was seven or eight years old, with straight dirty blonde hair and blue eyes, just like his sister’s. Only those blue eyes were sunken deep into his puffy face. And that plump, reddened face set the tone for the rest of him. A big head, sitting atop a pudgy body, held up by a pair of short, fat legs, with a pair of equally short arms, ending in short, fat fingers. In that instant, Katie saw all she needed to see to know what the kids at school called him. His was a life of torment.
But it was no excuse.
She had seen kids teased for being fat before. She had seen them teased for being tall, or wearing glasses, or for this, or for that, and not all of them ended up like this kid. A big, mean little boy who tore heads off dolls and made little girls cry.
The boy stood beside a giant metal hopper that stretched halfway to the store ceiling. It held within it a ten foot column of rubber balls of all variety. Basketballs, soccer balls, volleyballs, and the all-time favorite, those big, red rubber spheres brilliantly engineered for the all-important game of kickball. Close to the bottom of the hopper was an angled opening where shoppers could remove the balls one by one until the supply was exhausted. This one had been recently refilled, as the vertical collection mounded dramatically at the top of the hopper. One good shake would have sent some of them over the edge.
Katie focused on the mound. Specifically, on a shiny, blue and white soccer ball sitting precariously on the pile’s surface. In her mind’s eye, the ball dislodged from the heap and rolled towards the edge.
“Hey!” The little misfit shouted, as a blue and white soccer ball bounced off the top of his head.
Katie smirked, watching him rub his head while twisting his neck to look upwards. Not enough. Next came a basketball.
“Ouch!” He shouted as it thudded off his forehead and went bouncing down the aisle. He moved two steps away from the hopper, grimacing and grinding his teeth together while his hand massaged lightly assaulted dome.
No, still not enough. This little tyrant needed a lesson. A memorable one. Katie kept her eyes fixed on the mound, visualizing a giant spring compressing at the bottom of the hopper. She took a deep breath and peered intently into the metal cage, imagining the spring suddenly decompressing, and the balls flying towards the ceiling in a geyser of multicolored rubber.
The hopper jolted in place, sending a mild vibration through the floor.
“Aaaah!” the little boy cried, as a dozen balls came falling out of the sky, several of them rebounding off his head and his shoulders in a flurry of colors and patterns. He crumbled to the floor and covered himself with his arms as a few more landed on his ribs and his meaty flanks.
With her headless doll in her hand and balls rolling all over the place, the little girl walked over to her cowering brother. “What did you do?”
“Nothing!” He shouted from his protective kneel. “Where’s mom!”
“Serves you right,” Katie whispered. “Next time pick on somebody your own size.”
“Katie!” A voice called from a few aisles down. “Katie where are you!”
A few seconds later, she appeared with the shopping cart. Ellen Hope had Katie’s cheeks, and the same light, slender build, and lately, the same default look of brow-furrowed seriousness. “Come on sweetie, enough window shopping. It’s time to go home.”
“I’m ready,” Katie replied, turning her back on the mess.
***
Wandering the vastness of Walmart was something she remembered enjoying doing in her younger years, which was probably why her mom still insisted on taking her whenever she had to go load up on paper towels, or hand soap, or, as the case was today, air freshener and floor cleaners. Nowadays, there wasn’t much enjoyment from the merchandise-packed shelves. The toys were boring. The electronics were a waste of time. It all seemed so drab and depressing, like a giant zoo for humans. Katie tried to make as little eye contact as possible with those humans. Who knew what could happen if you caught one of them in the wrong mood. They were loud, and obnoxious and unpredictable as it was. Getting a doll head torn away from its body seemed like a borderline acceptable outcome, considering the possibilities.
Katie kept her head down as they walked towards the checkout, lifting it only to catch a glimpse of the magazine covers while she waited for the cashier to finish up. It wasn’t much for feeding her brain, but it was something. Where else, after all, could she learn about the most recent $500 million divorce of what’s his face and his wife, or how so-and-so was demanding a recount in the most recent Gubernatorial election.
Her mom paid and they were on the move again, this time, mercifully, towards the exit.
“I need to visit the bathroom, Katie. Stay and watch the cart for me, okay?”
“Sure, mom,” Katie replied, pulling the cart out of the middle of the gleaming linoleum runway and off to the side.
Something on the wall, right by the entrance to the one-hour eye center caught her attention. It was something she had seen before, and had always avoided looking at intentionally. This time, she couldn’t resist. She turned and faced it directly, instantly feeling the chills running up her spine.
Dozens of smiling portraits of children, school pictures, mostly… And directly underneath, the last day on which they were see. Her eyes scanned the rows of smiling faces, wondering where they were today, or if they were, at all. Some had been gone so long that computers had been used to create secondary images showing what they might look like today.
The most recent had vanished just a couple months earlier. The ones closer to the beginning of the list had been gone for decades. An image, a date, and a place. It was all that was left of these lost kids… as far as strangers knew, anyway. Behind each face there were parents, sisters, brothers, friends, relatives who, since that one specific date, had never stopped wondering.
For a split second, she wondered how her own mother would feel if her face appeared on that poster, but that thought dissolved as quickly as it had come. It was a selfish, self-centered thought. Her mom and her dad already knew how it felt to have a beloved face that only existed in photos, and so did Katie.
The therapist had told her not to let ‘the black hole of rumination,’ as he had called it, suck her in. Nothing good would ever come out of it. There were no answers at the bottom. There was just, more hole. But Katie’s eyes didn’t care what the therapist thought. They just kept scanning. Face by face, name by name, date by date.
“Hmmm… Weird,” she muttered out loud, as chills rushed up her spine for a second time. Something about the most recent disappearance dates didn’t make sense.
Or, more specifically, something made too much sense.
She looked at the dates again. Maybe it was a mistake? It had to be.
Her thoughts raced, making it impossible to confirm the math right then and there. She took out her phone and snapped a quick picture of the poster. As soon as the picture was saved, she closed the phone and put it away.
There was no way it was right, it must be my mind playing tricks on itself.
Coincidences like that didn’t exist in the real world.
“Ready to go?” Ellen’s voice brought Katie back into the here and now.
