Just Another Missing Person

by Gillian McAllister

Cut Julia, and she bleeds curiosity for those she cares about, which is everyone.

But, the thing is, she wouldn’t love anything else. Not like she loves this. And nobody can have a balanced relationship with something they love.

Julia looks into her eyes and thinks that nobody is truly missing, not to themselves. Only to those left behind.

There are things you don’t just know because you’re police: you know them because you’re a woman.

Is it not one of life’s truisms that anybody who feels the need to play devil’s advocate is seriously in need of a stiff gin and a shag?

“Never once does the inner monologue stop,”

A pedant, a person who reads literary fiction on the toilet—Art is indeed often right, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt.

Julia had wanted suddenly to just trade in that whole past year for something better.

As soon as her phone stops, she feels it. A presence. Or, rather, a lack of absence. A notion that she isn’t alone.

They’re all tea drinkers. I recently suggested once again that we buy a coffee machine, and they acted as if I had said I wanted to take a shit in the kettle.

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

champagne socialist,

You being missing is a problem to be riddled out, to be quickly fixed. A mistake.

She can’t become corrupt.

If she helped her daughter cover up and get away with a murder, she’s already corrupt.

Julia is either hyperfocused, or not interested at all.

She can hear the sea beyond the windows. The tide’s out. It ruffles like a taffeta dress. In and out, in and out, a ballroom dancer of an ocean.

Good lord, where are the editors?? why was this paragraph included?? it should have been thrown out completely. it is absolute trash.

ABC: Assume nothing, Believe nothing, Challenge everything. One of the most important rules of being a detective.

You were totally, utterly you. Ranting about ableism, about the unfairness of the housing market, reading out Taylor Swift lyrics to me.

How can you be here, concrete, in my hands, in my wallet, but nowhere else?

Cold air, hot sun, freezing rain. Weather that doesn’t know what to do with itself, like us.

He turns to her and smiles in surprise at the black humor, at the throwback to how they once were. And there it is. That smile. One side, then the other, a row of straight, white teeth, a little syllable of a wry laugh, beating down on her like a sunbeam. Julia stares directly at it, and after a second averts her eyes. It’s painful to stare at the sun.

This is what happens when you grow up poor: whenever you let your guard down, you think everything is going to be taken from you.

I stare at you as you say it. Suspicion starts to creep up my body like a stealthy tide coming in.

They head together into a McDonald’s, laughing, arm in arm, and I feel a dart of jealousy so strong it’s like an arrow hitting me out of nowhere, fired straight at my back.

It’s taken me a full day to decide what to do, and it’s one o’clock in the morning when I do, as it often is. At night, you can acknowledge things to yourself that you can’t in the daytime.

sometimes, parenthood isn’t an internal argument, assessing and reassessing your child. Sometimes, it is action.

How can you be so vivid but so . . . nowhere?

Can we only be truly honest with ourselves when things are going well?

I stare at the place where the sun went down. The sky is bleached white. The sun is gone, it’s an optical illusion, but it’s still there, out there somewhere, somehow, like rainbows, like sun flares, like souls.