The Trap

by Catherine Ryan Howard

She didn’t need to be on the other side of Garda training to know that most missing women were not off enjoying another life of nature and open sky and peace. They were broken bones caught in scraps of ripped, rotting clothes, or bloated, decaying, fluid-leaking bodies that would be bones soon enough. They were hastily buried in shallow, unmarked graves in forgotten places, or hiding under new foundations in busy ones, or trapped leagues under the surface of whatever body of water their killer had dumped them in. They were fierce family secrets or suspicions too vague ever to act upon or the dark heart beating beside some other woman in a marital bed, who was still pretending she didn’t feel it. They were the premature ends of dreams and plans and generations. They were unfinished bridges jutting off the edges of cliffs, ending in mid-air, no further on for the love to go. They were faces frozen in time, in their official photos. They were dead. The woman who was here wasn’t missing. That was the only reason they were