Missing…Last Seen

On the evening news, her photo: Blonde hair. Blue eyes. 5’4” tall. The blonde-haired, blue-eyed newscaster cannot stop talking about her. It’s been 27 hours since this beautiful, college-bound girl has been seen. We must do all we can to find her now.

Now. Now.

On a street corner, a lone woman hands out grainy Xeroxed flyers: Have you seen this girl? Black hair. Brown eyes. 5’4” tall. Last seen 2 years ago. We love her. We miss her. She is important. She is important. She is important, too.

No Ones Child

Her father says no son of mine, and she says but that's not me, and her mother mourns the boy who isn’t: I don’t understand, and she can only say but I’m right here.

Second Thoughts

I've changed my mind, he says, looking past her skirts, noticing a bit of grime on the hems that never move. You sure? she asks, distracted, her arm weary from the weight of the torch, that damn crown slipping again. We've still got some good stuff left. He turns away with an apologetic smile and she shrugs, pushes the crown from her brow.

In the Car at Night

Don’t run the heater too long. She remembers a bedroom, hers, with a door she could close. We’ll have to turn the engine off soon, hon. She worries that her clothes will smell again tomorrow, at school with the others, the ones with house keys and doors they can close. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

Moss-Man

All are welcome at our springs—the infirm, the crippled, even the mentally damaged come here in hopes that the sulfurous, almost-too-hot water will heal their bodies, their souls. When the man arrived at the same time as a busload of seniors from Rapid City, it didn’t occur to us that he wasn’t actually with them. Suddenly he was just there, in a corner of the big pool we let the pilgrims use, and we noticed that he was still there after the Rapid City oldsters left. He somehow got in the pool before anyone saw him and stayed all day. No one ever saw him leave, and if one of us went looking for him to suggest he might five the spring a rest from time to time, that it wasn’t really healthy to be in the water nonstop, he couldn’t be found. Be later there he’d be, right were we’d seen him before.

It was around this time that we noticed that he was turning green, that he was mossing over. Because we are a tolerant people, we left him to his soak. Still. We could not help but discuss the strangeness of the Moss-Man.

But then Sally Jenkins, bless her heart, found him floating face down in the small pool, the one where we go to avoid the misery and misfortune of the pilgrims. She found him slowly turning in the bubbling water, his moss-covered back rising like a verdant island, and our tolerance came to an end.