Niara had gone missing in the middle of January. I heard about it at school the day after, in the middle of my senior year. She had graduated the year before and was working nights at a gas station just down the street. She was apparently taking a year off before going to school in “the big city.” I found this comical at the time, as the city in question had a whopping population of about 35,000 people. But that was about 34,000 more residents than our town had! So anyway, you could say that when she went missing, everybody and their sister, momma, and rescue dog knew. At school the next day, we had an assembly about it. There was law enforcement there, undoubtedly to surveil the student body for any suspicious persons. During the assembly, we were told about all of the ways we could help look for Niara. It didn’t really click with me how gorgeous she was until I saw her picture on the projector. And then, it clicked with me that I was basically hitting on a missing person.
Not fucking cool, dude.
That night, which would have been almost two days since she was last seen, most of the townsfolk gathered up in groups of around twenty and fanned out to search the nearby woods and fields. My pessimistic brain figured they’d find Niara’s frozen corpse, assuming she hadn’t skipped town with a burnout named Chase that has four DUIs and a restraining order. But to everyone’s relief, Niara was found alive!
Apparently, she was curled up at the base of a pine tree. She had been walking to work when a few guys tried to pull her into a car. Niara pepper-sprayed them and ran off into the woods, her phone getting lost in the scuffle. She was in critical condition due to hypothermia, but she somehow survived. When Niara returned home from the hospital, the town hung a banner through Main Street which read, “Welcome Home Niara!” Niara was not taken on this route to get home, and she apparently never got to see the banner.
Bummer.
Now, a few months later I was out hunting with my dad. It wasn’t a productive day, as neither of us even fired a fucking shot. But after crunching our way through frozen leaves for three hours, I got my shoe stuck in a log. A really colorful log. A really colorful, sticky log? When I tugged my boot out, a stringy liquid stretched out of the “log” and stayed connected to my foot. My dad bent down and brushed the leaves off, finding Niara’s naked, mutilated body. I had accidentally stepped on her chest, which had shattered under my weight. Her skin was every color of a really fucked-up rainbow, except the actual color of human skin. Her eyes were grey and frozen, staring up to the sky for salvation that never came. The only injury visible was on her bottom jaw. Or rather, was her entire bottom jaw, which was removed, and sat in the leaves next to her. Her front teeth were shattered and strewn about the immediate area. One of her breasts hung down, connected by a few strings of flesh.
As I rode back into town with my dad, we saw the glowing red and blue lights. My dad quickly navigated toward the lights. They were outside Niara’s house. A small crowd had gathered. My dad parked a block down from the scene, and as I got out, I saw there were bloody streaks on the sidewalk. Leading away from Niara’s house. We began approaching the house. As we got closer, the bloody streaks turned to chunks of hair…
and then a few fingernails…
two eyeballs sat on the sidewalk…
As we pushed our way to the front of the crowd, we heard vomiting. And then we saw it. A pile of flesh and skin sat on the ground, surrounded by blood. It was still steaming. It was “Niara’s” skin. Niara’s mother was sobbing and vomiting just a few feet away. She wailed–
“It was paper white!”
“And its eyes! Those beady little-”
She fell and crawled to the heap of flesh.
“Niaraaa!”