The missing girl : the one no one could explain

Never mind the time and place, never mind the hour of the day, never mind the why’s or the how’s…you could ask a million questions of the kind and each and every one of them would be useless, a mere routine expected to be over with after something of the kind. Nothing you’ll ever say will change what happened, no, nothing, no matter what. Oh, did I forget to mention what was it that happened? Excuse my rudeness; let me tell you about it.  

It all started the day her mouth was sown shut. The stitches were so carefully woven that none could undo them. Everything was tried, they bought the best scissors, but scissors couldn’t do the job. They asked for the sharpest knife people talked about, the one grandpa kept in the attic, but it wasn’t enough. After that, they went to see the doctor, but he, too, failed to cut and undo the stitches. After a couple of months, everyone was tired of trying. If they had only seen how close they were to figuring it out…

They decided they would give her a sketchbook and a pencil, so she could put in paper whatever it was she could no longer say. The sketchbook sat in the night table for entire days and nights until one day, when they opened the door to her room early in the morning, there were papers everywhere. Throughout the entire floor, over the sofa, on top of the piano, tangled between the curtains, flying out the window, caught in the branches of a nearby tree. Every single one of them had written one word, the exact same word. Rumors to what the word was are wide. I, for sure, can’t tell you what it was. What I know is that after that, everything changed dramatically.

For instance, the windows were bared with wooden boards, and the door carefully locked. Though the boards I could occasionally see her. She did nothing but stare. Next I knew, she had given up cloths. From the window you could see a mixture of skin and red long hair, both intertwined covering places some would’ve wished were not covered. I don’t think she covered herself on purpose, I think it was a mere coincidence.

The days passed and with each day everyone in town acted more and more normal. People seemed normal in a terrifying way. It’s hard to explain…it was almost as if they had tried so hard to ignore what was going on with her, that they had finally achieved it. I couldn’t believe it.

No one talked about her anymore. I noticed she was getting thinner and her beauty was diminishing. They had stopped feeding her regularly. Bread and water was all she ate twice a week. I felt sorry for her, but still did nothing. Time in town seemed to pass us by without even noticing. Work was hard and it had to be done with. It was getting harder for us to stop to say hello and goodbye’s came out in a more natural way each time. I no longer recognized a sunny day from one full of rain. Was it winter already or was it still autumn?  Downtown was deserted soon and the Town Hall announced another building would be built in its place. The art gallery closed its doors because no one bothered anymore in stopping by, and the radio station changed music for political and religious speeches and for propaganda about domestic articles people could easily live without but still wanted to buy. I’m guessing she somehow knew what was going on, for the last time I saw her the flame in her eyes was gone. Deep sad eyes were all I saw.    

Maybe she knew all along this would happen, maybe her silence was a sort of warning…

Whatever it was, no one will ever know. Three days after, she disappeared, vanished into thin air. The door remained locked, the windows remained bared, no holes through the floor, through the ceiling or through the walls. The room remained in perfect order. There was no explanation to how she had escaped.

People asked questions, people looked everywhere, but she was nowhere to be found…rumors circled the town for a week or two. Then, everything went back to the exact same way it all used to be.