—I WROTE A LETTER TO THE KID ON THE SUN

 

The Missing Boy

 

She fell in love with the missing boy. Found a faded poster clinging to a pole by its last rusted staple. He’d be about her age now, 14, she figured. And though he’d been gone half her lifetime, the boy bloomed at once in maturity before her eyes. He looked like no one she’d ever met or seen, sure not her brothers who forced her to keep their dark secrets. Couldn’t love be a secret, too, she wondered, a good one? And so she tucked the flyer inside her sock, happy to feel it brushing up her ankle when she walked, though halfway down the road to her house, she went left instead, and decided to skip.