They Say a Girl Died Here
Chapter 1
The girl’s body lies face up on the arid earth.
The ground is hard and parched and has been for so long that cracks create scars so dark they might lead down to hell itself.
As night turns to day and a dawn breeze blows, a light coating of dust settles on the naked, pale skin that has been so carefully washed clean.
Her empty eyes, still staring upward in the echo of surprise, begin to dry out, and the small stain of crimson at the back of her skull, tinting the fan of her hair, is thickly tacky, the moisture already sucked into the greedy land before the air can claim it, hungry for anything that might once again help the crops grow.
Despite the slow, thirsty death claiming this small Midwest farming town, by the time the sun creeps up over the horizon, away from the body in the barren field, the noise of life is returning.
Trucks chug along the quiet roads and those residents who have remained, who have chained their short lives to this unpredictable place, stir and rise, pulling on their clothes and hoping for the scent of rain to finally hang in the air.
Soon, two things will happen at once. The first, a worried call to the sheriff’s office—a girl gone missing, not where she should be, she’s never done anything like this, she’s a good girl, all the things always said—will come through.
The second, a farmer, downbeat and already broken by one more year of a terrible harvest, the drought not letting up, will find the girl’s body among the dry scraps that should be wheat.
He won’t see the six-inch square on her lower back, her skin removed, red flesh and white bone now stuck to the land that’s like a leech or lamprey sucking what blood it can from her, but he will see the bruises from large hands around her neck, stagger backward, and shout out to his wife—who’s too far away to hear him, rummaging for any eggs the hens might have laid—to call the sheriff’s office, for all that’s holy, call the sheriff, and thus these two narrative strands will twine into a familiar story of horror, loss, and grief.
The town will come together, shocked and tearful. They will take each other’s hands.
They will look to the Lord for answers.
And they will pray.