Fiction
3 min
Have You Seen Me?
Kris Weller
It took him hours to choose one photo.
He sat on the carpet, every family album, school picture, and commemorative printout he could scrounge up fanned around him. He had to lean forward on one hand and stretch to reach the farthest ones. A few phones sat open to their camera rolls and he kept having to tap the screens to stop them from turning off.
Piles were already starting to emerge. They didn't need baby pictures, they needed recent pictures; so there was one pile topped with a photo of her squalling infant face poking out of a carrot costume. There was another pile of grade school-aged photos. He supposed he could have just piled all the non-recent photos together and moved on.
He didn't want to.
Yet another pile had pictures from her early teenage years. As he got closer and closer to the present, the piles dwindled. People don't really print out photos anymore... Most of the ones in this third pile were from some amusement park ride or photo booth with her friends. He set a few aside. There was one where she stood in the middle of the frame, hands on hips, her friends on their knees on either side of her and pretending like they were blinded by her glory.
His back hurt. Everything seemed oddly muffled. He had this pervasive feeling that his body had completely disappeared except for his eyes and hands.
He looked at the phones in front of him. Four phones, including his own. A shared cloud library where the rest of the family and friends had dumped every photo of her they could find. As he watched, someone uploaded a dozen more pictures. He'd texted every person he could think of, and they had all delivered. It seemed like there were hundreds of photos to go through.
"Did you see him eat earlier? He's been sitting there for a while." The sound of chair legs scooting against the linoleum. "I'm gonna heat something up."
"Shouldn't all of us pick the photo? Why is he doing this alone?"
Stainless steel tinked and scraped against dishes. "Between designing the posters, asking door-to-door, keeping everyone fed, and looking after the kids, when would the rest of us have time?"
The microwave hummed.
"We would make time. The police want it soon, right? It would go faster with more people."
"That's not the point and you know it." His brother sounded tired. The beep of the microwave sounded loud.
"Jesus Christ, his only kid is missing. Don't you think all this is too much?"
"Yeah, his only kid is missing. Don't you think doing nothing is too little?"
He started creating folders and sorting photos on his phone. Can't see her face clearly. Too young. Too many other people. He drank a glass of water when it was shoved at him. A few mouthfuls of rice was all his stomach could handle.
A picture of her playing video games with their 55-pound mutt in her lap, lit only by the TV. People will see it for three minutes on the news. A picture of her in the dress she'd sewn herself for some school costume contest years ago. Maybe 15 seconds on a flyer stapled to a utility pole. A picture of her scowling into the camera and covered in paint primer. They'll think about her and how sad it is for about ten minutes and then forget she ever existed. A picture of her posing on a tree branch above a creek.
It wasn't right. None of them were right. Happy, angry, serious, he swiped past the dozens and dozens and dozens of photos and none of them were right; he'd said he would pick out the photo, and it had to be the right one, he had to make the right choice, because maybe if he chose the right picture then someone would see it and remember something and call the number and the police would get a lead and they would find her before—
Hands touched his shoulders. "Hey, are you alright?"
His back hurt. His chest hurt. He couldn't see, he couldn't breathe—
"Slow down, you're breathing too fast—"
"What if I can't find the right—" a quiet wheeze, "—all they'll ever see is one picture—" another stifled gasp, "—how can I find a photo that's—what if I choose—" gripping the phone until his hand ached—couldn't tell where hyperventilation ended and choked sobbing began—heartbeat a rushing tide in his ears—he screamed in a whisper—
"How do I make them see her? My baby, oh god, my baby girl..."
Back and forth, back and forth. Being rocked in his brother's arms made him feel all of four years old instead of forty. "I don't know," his brother whispered. "God, I don't know."
On the local news that night, there was a three minute and twenty eight second segment about a missing child. Beneath her name was a single photo. It showed a nondescript teenaged girl with an awkward smile and her arm around a forty-something man.
No one called the hotline.
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