Local Woman Missing

by Mary Kubica

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.

“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.”

Piper cut out the picture of you in the newspaper. The Hanakas might be the only people in the world who still get the actual, physical newspaper. She sets both pictures side by side, the one some asshole photographer shot yesterday, and the one of you when you were six. They’re mostly similar—red hair, green eyes—except for that cleft chin. I never noticed before that you had a cleft chin. It’s not something that’s super obvious. It’s on the small side as cleft chins go, the kind of thing you might not notice unless someone else pointed it out for you. But now that I know it’s there, it sticks out like a sore thumb. Except that on the picture taken yesterday, there’s no cleft chin. None at all. Not even a small one.

compare the two pictures side by side. There are far more similarities than not. Most of the differences could be chalked up to time, like the way your nose has widened or your face narrowed. That happens as we grow up. Your hair is also darker. The sun lightens hair. Where you were at, there was no sun. But then there’s that cleft chin, also known by the internet as the incomplete fusion of the symphysis menti during fetal development. 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. I don’t know what to do with this information.