Haunted Organic (2014 Watty Award Winner)

Eleven: Blind

CHAPTER ELEVEN - Blind

Manhattan could barely breathe.

It wasn't that she had been running non-stop through the streets in her neighborhood, or that she had screamed his name 1,000 times into air that didn't answer her back. It wasn't the crush of reporters and police detectives who wanted her to sit with them in their bleak rooms and recount everything she knew.

It was the constricting feeling of having lost something essential to keeping her alive.

Manhattan loved her brother more than anyone. He was cinched to her by an invisible thread, so that even when they were apart, doing their own things, each of them felt the other, as if he was a ghost and always lingering behind her, and she was his shadow, under his feet.

And with him gone, she felt untethered, her insides just vapor, like she might simply float away, never to be seen again.

It was in this vaporous, directionless haze that she wandered the beaches, the streets, the shops, the skate parks looking for him.

The police had told her the boy down the street probably took Marty, and that he might be still alive, maybe in the same place where Trinket was.

"Might be still alive," that's what they said.

The words made her throat close up.

She had seen the video of the boy down the street fleeing school. All the kids had. It had popped up on their phones in unison. And all the kids stopped to text and comment on it.

He was always a little weird.

I had a feeling about him.

FREAK!

I hope they string him up and make him pay for hurting those kids.

Psychopath

Poor Marty & Trinket!

If I see him, I'll kill him, just rip him to shreds.

Guilty as hell.

Guilty.

Freak. Child killer.

Josie Brown, dangerous freak.

Poor Trinket and Marty....

Freakety FREAK.

Loser.

She had seen Josie in the neighborhood and around school. But she didn't need anyone who lived on Tamarama Street nosing around her house or showing up at her door, asking why her parents didn't live there, and who was taking care of her and Marty.

No. When you have secrets, it's easier not to be entangled.

But that meant she also didn't know who he was or what he was capable of doing. Did this kid hurt children? Why? Was Josie Brown some sort of psycho path? A serial killer living right down her block? And if he wasn't guilty, why did he run?

"People who run away are guilty," she heard herself say in her head.

If she found Josie Brown she decided she would wrap her fingers around his neck and squeeze until he told her where Marty was.

She was thinking all this and walking hard down the sidewalk on Tamarama Street, Bacon loping along behind her, sullen and drenched with her worry, the way dogs who are greatly loved, take on the feelings of their owners. And before she knew it, she and Bacon were standing in front of her house. Just standing there looking at the door, unsure of whether to go in, or whether they should go back out looking for Marty.