A girl goes missing in the woods. But you know that, don't you?
You’ve seen the stares. The whispers that stop when they see you.
A walking tragedy in chucks and band t-shirts.
The teachers refuse to meet your eyes —
they remember the search, those late nights knee deep in mud calling her name into the gaping maw of the night
they went to her school with her, sat with her in class, grew up with her in district halls,
before they left to this new school to try and escape her ghost.
and then you came here wearing her face. Her name. even the clothes she went missing in.
the only reason they don’t call the cops is because they know —
they know like they know how to breathe, how to spot a predator, that animal instinct inside them,
that you’re not really her.
A part of you is sorry, but not enough to go back through the portal.
A part of you wants to cry, mourn the girl this body remembers,
but you need to be careful in this new world.
A part of you regrets what happened,
what drove you into waking up in a nameless grave, already dead to the world.
But you refuse to go back on your word.
A girl goes missing in the woods. And you are the one that killed her.
one's company, two's a crowd
i.
A girl goes missing in the woods — we’ve all seen it before.
The posters. The milk cartons. The school assemblies on safety.
‘It’s a tragedy’, the parents whisper over dinner, their children’s shadows a bit longer.
‘So much to live for.’ they say but petition the way the school remembers her.
her locker becomes a living morgue, a sight of living graffiti and wilting dandelions for the girl they grew up with but never knew
disbursing, they’d claim. distracting.
‘but at least it isn’t my child.’
They move on as quickly as the sun sets, only pausing when it threatens their perfect suburban day to day.
ii.
The school never forgets her. But not without trying.
They worship the ghost of her name until that is all that is left of her.
Stitched in the tag of a leather jacket left in lost and found. The echoes of boots stomping the halls. The cackle that roams behind the school.
A cigarette dream smile hidden in yearbooks and club pictures.
They await her return, a kingdom left unclaimed, a teenaged messiah engraved on desks and thrown in notes.
The school bans any mention of her.
They drive any mention, any lingering presence of her ghost away,
like a deer driven miles and miles away, into a long white, salt flat, arrows locking up its joints, before they flay and skin everything about her away.
Doubling back to drain the blood too.
But still, she persists like a bad habit you can’t quit.
She haunts that school until it closes.
iii.
The cheerleaders. The geeks. The jocks. The skaters. They converge on her tomb, nails black with midnight soaked soil.
They kneel into the soft dirt, separating stones and roots like a flock of ravenous vultures picking apart fresh roadkill.
A nameless feeling, a colorless emotion, they leave those woods something else entirely.
Electricity connects them. That teenage girl magic.
Some will spend the rest of their lives chasing that energy, but only two unlucky sisters will ever know its true name.
iv.
No parents. No guardian. A slip between the government’s cracks.
But anyone in the town could have told you that.
The girl is declared dead to the world, dead to the parents, teachers, adults who try to shrink away their children from the sight of her graveless name
But they, the children; the girls who knew her, those who could be her, vow to bring her back, in spirit or in flesh.
They plan in hushed voices. In thrown notes and text messages.
They try spells torn out from the backs of magazines, boards that claim to speak to the dead, even go searching for the witch that every small town claims to have.
A phase. A craze. A blight on their perfect little town.
v.
The only one to see her resurrection is the princess — the new ruler — the girl beloved by all.
Few believe her tale of witnessing fluorescent white bathe the forest night.
Falling up into a rainbow mouthed vortex that mirrored Earth upside down.
Years later —
when she's grown into the same face that turned blind to the dead girl's plight
she will watch those same cherry-mouthed tears of reality consume the class under her care.
With the girl she left behind in those woods, in her own girlhood, in that damned town, now cackling in front of her.
vi.
Her sister — the outcast — self proclaimed teenage witch. the loner.
She took a camera into that black night and filmed the entire thing.
a jealous disciple, she let her anger control the scene —
the rigor mortis struck fists. The soundless clattering teeth. And the perfect green-blue eyes, printed black and white on her missing posters.
Always parts, but never the whole body.
(The sisters, the rulers of a new school, adult faced and weary, will witness their own undoing mimicking by the generation after them, and will be powerless to stop them.)
vii.
The facts are obscured, hidden, drowned under a mountain of prank phone calls and the curel fists of time,
rewritten for a headline and soundless, sleepful nights,
for years to come they, police, teachers, newspapers, and late night TV hosts, claim everything they can get reach too
a murderer in the woods, a man in a white van, an out of state boyfriend, the bump in the night that parents and TV shows warn you about
and with that the missing girl case is closed.
Her body is never found.
viii.
Twenty years later, hundreds of miles away in a sleepy rear-view-mirror town, a being appears, wearing Sunset Shimmer’s face the same as it was when she vanished.
