They all think that I’m gone.
The police think that I’ve been taken.
Snatched from the side of the road.
Rough hands grabbing my arm, covering my mouth.
My feet scrambling for purchase in the dry dust.
Dragged backwards into a sinister looking car.
Taken from a loving Mother and Father,
Missed by distraught siblings.
Mother believes I am lost or late or something.
Soon she will see me coming up the track as she looks through the kitchen window doing dishes.
So she continues to look.
Father knows that I have run.
His guilt tells him so.
I hear them shuffling, chairs scraping.
Through the looking glass crack of the pantry door, I see father’s eyes.
Preoccupied, he’s searching for ghosts.
I see his seething, a tide of crimson rising up from his collar line.
With clenched fists he paces.
Frenzied by the presence of outsiders, he is curt in his responses.
With eyes down cast, my sisters huddle.
It is not our father that they see
But fury stitched into a suit.
There was no sympathy for the potentially dead. Even less for the disobedient.
They all wish me dead.
A detective lays a comforting hand on my Mothers shoulder.
She writhes as if touched by death.
But she is good at this, and the man is unaware that her insides are shriveling.
Silence ticks like a metronome.
We await the stranger’s departure, then the family’s real search will begin.
Father will strip the house bare till he finds me.
He knows my disdain, has seen contempt in my gaze.
I am not sure of my plan.
I am only 12 after all.
But I know strangers will be no help.
Crouched in my space, I listen for the screen doors shriek.
The mumbling reassurances of men tell me Father has ushered them all into the front yard.
I imagine his hand raised in farewell, as the car’s dust plumes blow a insolent raspberry.
The steps of the back porch bow and complain.
But my time there is brief.
Through the yard, and towards the fence
Dried old tufts of grass whip my legs.
They won’t stop me, I’m nearly there.
Freedom pumps through me like a rushing of blood as I pause at the fence line.
A drum beat pounds from within.
The bottom stringer sags under the weight of my foot, as I prepare to swing on over, to fly.
As mean, cruel fingers bite into my arm, and I am yanked to the ground.
The breath of relief knocks out of me. So to the life imagined in a millisecond.
He stands over me, sneering.
Beady crow’s eyes are on me,
With vulpine lips parted, he breaths close to me.
With cunning, he takes his time.
There was no stepping back from the edge.
This time, Father was walking right off
And he was taking me with him.
wow. liked it. bubbled up from the darkside did it?
I started writing this piece months ago. It was going to be a quirky little jaunt, but when I revisited it again, it just metamorphosized. Nothing to do with me really. Some writing takes on a life of its own. That’s what this did!