Chapter I: Disappear Politely
There was a town with one stoplight
and two churches that hated each other.
The first church tolled its bell louder.
The second buried its girls quieter.
It was the kind of place where grief
was passed down like heirloom silver:
polished, inherited, never touched—
except to prove they had it.
Where the girls learned early
how to disappear with grace.
They say the first one—Marlena—
just walked into the lake,
mouth full of wedding vows
no one had asked her to write,
and her prom dress still zipped.
The older preacher saw her go under—
didn’t move,
just turned the page in his sermon book.
Said later:
Girls like that always need a stage.
The parents told their daughters
not to cause trouble.
Told them to smile more,
leak less,
bloom quietly,
be good—
or
be gone.
Then cried when they vanished.
Then lit candles.
Then said things like
“God has a plan,”
to keep from imagining
what the plan required.
Chapter II: The Girls Who Spoke Wrong
A girl named Finch refused to sleep.
Said her dreams were trying to arrest her.
One morning they found her curled in the middle of Saint Street—
like a comma the sentence abandoned.
A knife in her boot,
daffodils blooming from her belt loops—
like she dressed for both war and funeral.
Finch was buried upright.
Because God forbid
a girl ever be horizontal
without permission.
The sheriff was mailed her journals
with no return address.
He read one page.
Paused.
Coughed once, like the truth had teeth.
Lit a match.
Said it wasn’t evidence—
said it was dangerous
for a girl to write things
no one asked her to say.
No one spoke at her funeral,
but every girl showed up
with one eye painted black
and the other wide open.
Not make-up.
Not bruise.
Just warning.
Chapter III: Half-Gone Girls & Other Ghosts
And then there was Kiernan.
Not missing. Not dead.
Just quieter than the story required.
She stuffed cotton in her ears at church—
said the hymns gave her splinters.
Talked to the mirror like it owed her something—
maybe a mouth,
maybe mercy.
She was the one who found Finch’s daffodils first.
Picked one. Pressed it in her journal.
It left a bruise that smelled like vinegar.
No one noticed
when she stopped raising her hand in class.
Her poems shrank to whispers,
signed with initials—
like she knew full names
made better gravestones.
Someone checked out Kiernan’s old library book last week.
All the margins were full of names.
None of them hers.
They say she’s still here.
Just not all the way.
A girl named Sunday
stopped speaking at eleven,
and was last seen barefoot
on the second church roof,
humming a song no one taught her.
Sunday didn’t leave a note.
She figured we’d write one for her anyway.
Some girls disappear all at once.
Others just run out of language.
Clementine left love letters in lockers
signed with other girls’ names.
Said she was trying to ‘redistribute the damage.’
She stood in for a girl during detention.
Another time, for a funeral.
Once, Clementine blew out candles
on a cake that wasn’t hers.
Said the girl didn’t want to age that year.
Said she’d hold the wish for her—
just in case.
She disappeared on picture day,
but her face showed up
in three other portraits—
blurry,
but unmistakable.
The town still isn’t sure who she was.
But the girls remember:
she took their worst days
and wore them like a uniform.
Chapter IV: Standing Room Only
They say
the town
got sick
of digging.
Said
it took
too much
space
to bury
the girls
properly.
So
they
stopped.
Started
placing
them
upright
in the
dirt,
palms
pressed
together,
like
they
were
praying
for
revenge.
Or maybe
just
patience.
The lake only takes
what’s already broken.
It’s polite like that.
It waits.
They renamed it Mirrorlake—
but no one looks in.
The daffodils grow back faster
when girls go missing—
brighter, almost smug,
petals too yellow
to mean joy anymore.
No one picks them.
No one dares.
The earth hums lullabies
in girls’ names,
soft as bone dust,
steady as sleep.
There’s never been enough room
for a girl to rest here—
just enough to pose her pretty.
They renamed the cemetery “Resthill,”
but every girl calls it
The Standing Room.
Chapter V: When the Dirt Starts Speaking
Someone said they saw Clementine
in the mirror at the gas station—
wearing someone else’s smile
and mouthing:
“wrong year.”
The school yearbook stopped printing senior quotes.
Too many girls used them wrong.
Too many girls turned them into prophecies.
Too many girls were never seniors.
They didn’t bury them standing up to honor them.
They just didn’t want to kneel.
The stoplight has started skipping green,
like the town doesn’t believe in Go anymore.
Just flickers yellow,
then red,
then red again.
A warning no one heeds.
A rhythm only the girls who are left
seem to follow.
Some nights,
the air smells like perfume
that doesn’t belong to anyone.
And the church bells ring without being touched.
Only once.
Always just once.
At 3:03 a.m.
Now no one says the word ‘daughter’
without spitting.
No one swims in the lake.
The pews sigh
when the mothers sit down.
Both preachers said:
“Trust God.
Some girls just love the dark.”
But some nights—
when the ground hums low
and the stoplight flickers
yellowyellowred—
you can hear a knocking under your feet,
steady as a metronome.
The ground is tired of being quiet.
The roots have run out of room.
The girls are knocking louder—
not begging.
Not asking.
Just letting us know:
they remember.
*And—
This piece is a myth, a ghost town, and a warning.
A holy elegy for girls who vanish too politely, and a reckoning for the places that let them.
