MISSING

I walked from sunset to sunrise in the post noon. Sol's rays of tough love stabbed and poked into my exposed flesh, warmed my head of hair that was needed-a-fucking-cut long. Sandals clapped on the asphalt walks that ran beside apartment blocks and the leaving-winter jaundiced lawns.

Most of the world was made visible through new and already scratched sunglasses. Muscles were wake-up weak and swung lazy. Some hand – not sure which, probably the wrong one – checked my pockets to make sure I didn't leave the mailbox key back in my apartment. My thumb rubbed against the dull teeth. I remembered that sometimes, I would lock myself out of my apartment.

I reached that little road intersection thing and stared down a car. It sagely chose to drive in a direction that was not where I was going to walk. The driver would have regretted that decision more than me.

Somehow. I didn't work out the details yet. Reserve your judgment.

I found the mailbox and the paper that broke the metal panel and hinge mosaic. On said paper was, in desperately huge, black bold font: “MISSING” followed by a picture, followed by “A------ A----------.”

And “14 YEARS OLD.”

And “LAST SEEN ON MARCH 19 2012 IF YOU HAVE SEEN HER, OR KNOW OF HER WHERE ABOUTS PLEASE CONTACT E-------- @ ###-###-####.”

Her black hair was wet but wavy from the neck to under her shoulders. She was looking straight into a held camera with eyes wide and set under broad but sleek brows. Her lips were concave up, her cheeks were round, taught with that nervous pride that says, 'you know, I think I'm actually fairly pretty.' Blossoming confidence, like a mushroom cloud rising over a city built out of billboards and fashion magazine ads starring cocaine courtesans and the un-eating.

I thought she was right.

I knew she would be found in a ditch flanking a highway, drained of her fluids and injected with someone else's. A very stupid someone else's.

Or she would be carrion in the hundreds of square kilometers of body disposal site that wrapped around every town in the Southwest. Coyotes, ants, vultures, ect. would strip her clean before Sol's angry stare got a non-existent god's eye view of her.

Or she OD'd in her kind-of sort-of friend's friend's trailer, with ooze out her nose and mouth and roaches nibbling on the whatever stuck under her fingernails. Her kind-of sort-of friend's friend's friends would be too busy compounding their own neural-chemical modifications to notice that her's had completely ceased.

My key disregards getting to know the mailbox and dives straight into intercourse. Just a turn to make it groan, open, and scream out a tree's worth of junk mail.

I got advertisements all over my hands, super gross. I sanitized myself by dumping it all in a garbage can.

She probably wouldn't even have needed chopping up if the body problem was countered with a municipal solution.