She went missing on her way home. She went missing on her way home and she was wearing dark jeans, a black coat and a distinctive red rucksack which might jolt the memories of passersby. She wasn’t in a relationship and she didn’t share her location. The walk from the friend’s house, where she enjoyed an evening drinking wine and eating crisps, was just twenty minutes across a park where the streetlights went out after midnight due to local authority spending cuts. She went missing after visiting a male friend, her dating profile lists her as ‘not looking for anything serious’. She went missing on her way home and she hadn’t had any arguments recently. The disappearance was uncharacteristic. She went missing on her way home and she had a history of mental health problems, she’d been to the GP six months before and filled out one of those forms that ask you to rate your pain on a scale of 1-10. Not wanting to seem dramatic she ticked 6. She went missing on her way home and while we were out looking, putting posters up, marching, signing petitions, echoing ‘text me when you get home’ like the chorus of a song we know all the words to, lacing our keys between our knuckles, seeing news stories of other women, staring into the mirror, we were folding like paper dolls into and over our heads, until the space we occupy is close to negative and soon we become solid and difficult to chew.
Emma Challis is a writer from Essex and graduated with a BA in Creative Writing from Brunel University. She has short stories in featured in The Imagination Project and It's Complicated anthologies and poetry in the chapbook, Skin. Her travel and lifestyle blog was featured in Mslexia issue 99.
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