If I Disappear by Eliza Jane Brazier

Author:Eliza Jane Brazier [Brazier, Eliza Jane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2021-01-26T00:00:00+00:00

Episode 45:

The Queen of the Flies

The compound was stationed close to the PCT, on the border of California and Oregon. At the height of the summer, the cult members would drive out to the trailhead and wait for hikers to pass by, exhausted and half crazed with hunger. They wouldn’t take just anyone. They targeted women, women who traveled alone. They drove them to the compound, where they offered them a feast. They let them eat their fill and then they feasted on their flesh.

As I walk back to my cabin, my stomach roils with your mother’s food, which is like nothing I have ever tasted before, like she invented a new cuisine. I tell myself there is no reason to believe it’s going to make me sick, that I’m not the only one who ate it, but then I think of the bottles lined up in the greenhouse: the reeds like hair, the white slices of fish bones. Surely your mother would know better than to put something like that in her food?

I wander through the ranch with the lights out, so the guest cabins cower, the horses move like phantoms in the shadows. I feel like I am running out of time, like I am an hourglass with a hole at the bottom, emptying, with no chance of turning it all around. It’s not a feeling that is specific to you, although this time you are at the heart of it.

It’s the first night I have noticed the stars, and I gaze up as I walk slowly toward my cabin. There is a blanket of them, wildly flecked, like paint splatters across the sky, and I regret that I didn’t see them before.

I wonder how I got here. How I’m over thirty and, instead of living, I’m disappearing. The idea of life has always been, I thought, that as you got older, your life multiplied, that you became bigger and bigger, more and more, not less. But I think about you (Missing? Murdered? Conspiracy?) and I realize the place I thought I was going, the place I thought we were all going, has scattered like the stars away from us.

I walk along the duck pond; I can see the rough battle of Jed’s feet, diving in and out of the water. I observe the thin layer of surface, and I fantasize about finding your skull, wish so hard I can almost see it glimmer, see your crystal bones. Like the bones of Lynn Messer found in an open field two years after she went missing. Lying out in a cow pasture, and nobody saw her, search parties and police dogs, even her own family—for years. And her husband remarried and her kids’ heads spun and her body was out there with the cows, drying in the sun, rotting in the dark, and no one noticed. I won’t let that happen to you. I won’t leave your bones waiting.

My stomach lurches. You are out here somewhere. Are you drowning

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