Local Woman Missing

by Mary Kubica

“the sitter told me only Leo was there. She said that Meredith had kept Delilah home for the day because she was running a fever. She said Meredith had called Delilah in sick to school, and had canceled her own classes.”

Shelby Tebow to consider, a young woman who went for a jog in our neighborhood ten nights ago and never returned.

glance down at the phone in my hand, expecting it’s my client with some conditioned reply. Thx. Instead: I know what you did. I hope you die.

That’s not to say I didn’t think about you. I thought about you a lot when you were gone, though all I ever knew was the absence of you.

But for as much as people think the internet knows everything, the one thing it doesn’t say is that the girl who came back isn’t the same one who disappeared.

Mom was found dead of a self-inflicted knife wound with a note: You’ll never find her. Don’t even try.

It’s not like she could know about her husband, Marty, and me. Unless he told her, but he wouldn’t do that. We’d agreed to keep things secret, for Cassandra’s and Josh’s sake.

“My mom, like, made me get rid of everything-Delilah after she disappeared. She didn’t think it was healthy to have it around. It sucked.

“It’s just that, I was, like, digging around on the internet, trying to figure out if cleft chins are one of those things that just goes away, you know? And they’re not.”

In layman’s terms: a butt chin. It’s rare. It’s genetic. It’s gone. You don’t have it anymore. It isn’t that you lost it. It’s that you are not my sister.