April

Issue 31

During the Spring of 1974–a Spring deemed the Vanishing Spring by the residents of my hometown in Herlong, Florida—nine people, including my baby brother, disappeared.

For a town the size of Herlong, population ten thousand, that was an awful lot of people to suddenly turn up missing. The FBI was called in, as the police feared it was the work of a mass murderer or a serial killer. Except, no bodies had been found, and the only trait all the victims shared in common was the fact that they were missing. All different types of people just up and disappeared, at various times of the day, in all parts of town.

A retired man disappeared from his backyard while picking grapefruit. A woman disappeared from the grocery store after she had purchased groceries but before she made it to her car. (The car was found in the grocery store’s parking lot, but there was no trace of her, save for her cart full of groceries waiting to be loaded into the trunk.) There was the little girl who rode her bike to meet the ice cream truck–an ice cream truck the other children in the neighborhood swore they heard but never saw that fateful day. The only evidence of the little girl was two quarters found on the pavement four houses down from hers. Those were the more bizarre cases. Another woman never came back from her morning run. A man left for work one day but made it to the office nor did he come home from work that night. A teenage boy never made it home after dropping off his date for the evening.

And then of course there was Will, my baby brother, who had disappeared from his hospital room–a room where he’d been laying in a coma for the past four days.