Something new: A story in six sentences for the Six Sentence Story on Girlie on the Edge’s Blog

Something old: This story first appeared on my now defunct blog ….whypaisley???? in 2008 in a somewhat different format.

The only way, that no one would have recalled seeing the little boy with the bloody nose sitting alone in the shopping cart, outside the public restroom at the busy farmers market- was if he was never really there..

They found his blood under her fingernails, on her tee shirt, embedded in the dirt on the bottom of her shoes-  they found outstanding arrest warrants, previous convictions, drug and prostitution charges- but what they never found- was her boy…

They dissected her childhood in intimate detail,  resurrected a most distasteful history of physical and sexual abuse, scrutinized her subsequent descent into the slick underbelly of prostitution and drug addiction, where they stripped her naked and paraded her thru every living room in America three- times- a day…

So convinced were they that she had killed him,, that they never even looked- for her boy…

Instead, they formed huge morally outraged search parties who combed the fields, the woods, the warehouses- looking for his body-  and loudly protested her sentence to life without parole- with righteously indignant cries for an eye for an eye- but no one, ever even looked- for her boy..

And had he not freed himself from the wreckage of the old root cellar,, beneath the tornado damaged farmhouse, not two miles away, from the site of the old farmers market,, (some five years after she exhaled her last  at the wrong end of a knotted bed sheet) no one would ever have found- her boy….