observation #6

Girl Missing

There were signs posted up all over the park of the girl, missing. On the side of the slide, the lamp post, the rubbish bin… The girl’s face smiled back. I didn’t catch her name or any of the details on the poster, just her face – pale with black hair pulled into braids – and the thick red lettering of MISSING. M-I-S-S-I-N-G. How strange that a sign so upsetting could be pasted against the backdrop of a green suburban dream.

She could have been my sister or my friend but as it were, I had never seen her in my life.

Signs like this always scare me and force my senses to go on full alert. Is that a shadow of a man watching me over in that blue Honda? What are the group of boys over there doing? I fear abduction more than I fear anything else in the world. The notion that one minute I could be here and the next, gone. Missing.

Alien abduction. Is that real too?

‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’… How does one explain that incident?

Children were laughing in the distance.

My friend would be here soon to meet me but this girl on the poster would stay put until the rain washed her away or someone took the signs down.

FILM IDEA –

The film would begin on an empty rural road where a girl is trying to hitch a ride. A young boy offers her a lift and over the span of a night, they become close friends. He awakes in the morning to a letter from the girl explaining that she had to leave.