Brought Home (Complete)

As the sun burned the early morning fog away, a crouching figure loped through the knee-high grass of a neglected lawn and came to rest on the bottom step of a rotting porch. Attached to it was a little white house with dark blue shutters and windows frosted with grime; a house much smaller and uglier than every other house on the street. Weathered rolls of peeled paint and moldy roof shingles littered the porch and the screen door hung out by its bottom hinge, wedged in place by a stack of soggy newspapers. Faded flyers covered the front window, from which several small circles of glass had been punched out.

The porch breathed with every gust of wind, a creaking wheeze that built harmoniously with the whimpers of the figure resting on its steps. Its torn pajama pants were faded and stained dark brown and red, and only reached halfway down its shins. A shrunken, once-pink sweatshirt fell about the thing’s shoulders, a smiling cartoon cat printed on the chest. It wore socks of mud and blood and grass, and its hair fell like greased rope to its midsection, decorated with bows of burrs and the skeletons of insects. Its eyes were squinted tight, wary of the sun, and covering its face was a crust of oily dirt. It was a girl, or had once been, before being left to grow up in the dark of some sick man’s dungeon, sibling to the mice and spiders that had kept her company. She was more it than she now, more animal than human; the only thing attaching her to this world a memory of a place, a beautiful happy place.

The hanging screen door clattered against the newspapers and the thing in little girls’ clothing whimpered again. Idly it grasped at a soggy piece of paper and squinted at it, and perhaps it recognized the image in the faded box, and perhaps it read the block letters below that spelled out “BRING OUR JENNY HOME.” But perhaps it didn’t, as it just as quickly discarded the paper and grabbed up a shingle. Cars passed by on the road, some slowing as their drivers gawked, some pulling telephones from their pockets and purses, and amid whimpers the girl thing snarled at them.

The house began creaking with a hesitant rhythm as something moved inside. Stairs groaned and into a dusty living room stepped an old woman with white striped hair and a limp. When she stepped forward to peer out through the broken window caked with grime, she saw something more than a dark figure masquerading as a girl. She saw a daughter she’d lost years ago, and as the first sirens broke the morning silence, we might imagine that instead of snarling at the old woman and darting away into the tall grass, the girl fell into her mother’s waiting arms and began to sob.