A Flicker in the Dark

by Stacy Willingham

And in that moment, the moment of the crash, it made me realize that monsters don’t hide in the woods; they aren’t shadows in the trees or invisible things lurking in darkened corners. No, the real monsters move in plain sight.

But she didn’t turn up. And three weeks later, another girl went missing. Four weeks after that, another. By the end of the summer, six girls had disappeared.

Maybe this is karma, I wonder. I got a shitty family, so now I get a perfect husband.

I understand the way the brain can fundamentally fuck with every other aspect of your body; the way your emotions can distort things—emotions you didn’t even know you had. The way those emotions can make it impossible to see clearly, think clearly, do anything clearly. The way they can make you hurt from your head down to your fingertips, a dull, throbbing, constant pain that never goes away.

the last thing you want to find in a search party is a body, or worse: pieces of one.

It’s the realization of how many hidden bodies could be buried beneath my feet at any point in time, the world above them completely oblivious to their existence.