Kyle woke to a cold, rainy spring morning. His fiancée, Seraphina, was still asleep beside him. Her long, dark hair was strewn across the pillow, looking like a failed cosmetology experiment after a night of restless tossing. The quiet flashes of lightning outside briefly illuminated her dark brown skin, sending a jolt of warmth through him. He felt lighter knowing that next year, she would be Mrs. Rainer.
Kyle rolled slowly and carefully out of bed, attempting not to wake his one-day bride. It was Saturday, and they both worked weekdays. Kyle was an online journalist, running his operation from an office desk set up for filming. He didn't have enough followers yet, but soon, he hoped to expand, maybe even move to a bigger place where he could hire an editor to cut his media. That would let him focus entirely on story development and investigations, giving him more time to spend with Sera.
He did work weekends occasionally, but only when a major national or global event broke. In those rare situations, Sera never complained; she became as invested in the story as he was.
Kyle sat down at his desk to check the climate of the American news cycle and review comments or emails. He noticed a message questioning his inaccuracy on a previous story, prompting him to get up and head to the closet where he stored hard-copy information he hadn't managed to digitize.
As he shifted things around, he accidentally pulled down a photo album. Its thick, puffy cover was faded and worn by time. He bent the spine back, forcing his mind three decades into the past. Everything he had been focused on—his job, his fiancée—dissolved.
He was sitting in the small kitchen of his parents' house, perhaps on a weekend or a summer break, waiting for his twin sister, Kara, to join him for breakfast. He could hear her rushing through the halls, eager to eat quickly so they could go play outside or hit their video games.
Then, the album shifted his focus to a younger man, Kyle, sitting in the same spot, at the same table. He was still waiting for his sister. At that time, Kara was in college, and while she'd usually come home after Friday classes, sometimes she'd arrive later, or occasionally, she wouldn't make it home at all—a rarity she always called ahead to explain, usually citing a paper or a cram session with friends.
He remembered that particular weekend was when she had vanished. He checked his phone. He woke his parents, who confirmed they hadn't heard from her. Kyle desperately called everyone he knew who was connected to Kara, but there was nothing. He immediately drove the hour to her college, thinking perhaps she had passed out in her dorm with a dead phone. No need to panic, he told himself. There were dozens of simple reasons this could have happened.
Kara's Obsession
Kara had finished all her core business classes years prior, but she had developed a strange obsession with death and dead people. Not with the sick, but with those who had already passed on. She claimed she felt there was a secret world—a subterranean reality under, or maybe even inside, death—that she needed to be closer to. After getting her Associate's degree, she had enrolled in funerary arts.
She had recently started meeting new people, and to Kyle, this felt deeply strange—branching out into such new, dark acquaintances so close to graduating. He worried she was about to do something reckless. She had never indulged the typical youthful urge to make mistakes. He was terrified she'd meet some guy who would get her hooked on drugs or, metaphorically or literally, drive them both off a cliff. He couldn't bear to lose his twin sister over some foolish misadventure.
Once he reached the school, he headed for residence life. He climbed the stairs, looking for her room or the resident assistant. He found her room first; the door was cracked open. He pushed his way inside, careful to touch as few things as possible in case fingerprints would matter later. Her roommate was also absent.
Kyle prowled the dorm halls, searching for the R.A. like a bloodhound on the scent.
A tall, skinny boy stood in the opening of one room. "Can I help you find something?"
"Kara," Kyle said. "She stays just down the hall. Have you seen her or know where she may have gone?"
The narrow, shirtless boy began, "I saw her early last night. She said she was going out with some new people she had met; she seemed excited and in a hurry."
"Is there anything else you can remember that might help me find her?" Kyle asked, clinging to the hope of tracking her down.
Kyle thanked the boy and pulled out his flip phone to call the police. The stupid automated response system seemed intentionally designed to delay getting him to a real person. He finally connected with an operator just as he reached the dean's office. He explained the issue.
The lady on the other end responded with zero empathy. In his raw state, she sounded almost glad he was going through this. "Sir, she has to be missing for forty-eight hours before we can do anything. Besides, she is over eighteen. I doubt the police would do anything anyway. Girls ditch school every day and start another life with some guy they just met, or drugs, or…"
"My sister does not do drugs!" he yelled back.
Kyle told the receptionist about Kara. The lady took down his information, but the probability of them doing more than the police was slim. He might get a call the next time she showed up in class. Technically, she didn't even need to keep going; her grades were high enough, and the end of the semester was days away. She would graduate whether she attended class or not.
There was no telling what she may have done. Maybe she met a guy, found a new job, and planned to have her diploma mailed to her. Or perhaps she didn't even care. Maybe she met a wealthy guy and was spending the rest of her life sailing from port to port until he got tired of her and sold her into bondage to pay for a goat.
Over the next few days, Kyle collected what little information he could from her dorm mates. The same details kept repeating: she met new people that nobody seems to know or remember seeing. Nobody had bothered to ask where she was going or any follow-up questions. She was clearly an outsider among the self-centered, and she must have finally found someone, outside her family, who paid attention to what she said and who she really was. Someone who could see her inner self, the way he could, and who was able to transplant her—somewhere.
"Alive or dead, I will find you, Kara," he vowed. "We may not have been identical twins, but I still know you better than anyone you may have just met. I am not walking away from dead-end information. There has to be something missed. Maybe a person knows or saw something happen to my dear sister, and I am not going to rest until I find out what happened and where you are."
Two Decades Later
Weeks turned into months, then years. The cold trails Kyle pursued turned to ice. He began to lose hope and, like most people, started to move on. When one endeavor fails, we pick up another to keep going.
One morning, Kyle was rushing to get coffee at a local barista. In his haste, he spun and lunged forward without looking, slamming his coffee cup-first into one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen.
She was so attractive, in fact, that he momentarily forgot all about his sister the moment he looked into her huge, wide, white eyes. The deepness of her brown eyes only accentuated the rich color of her soft skin. He managed to absorb most of the splash-back, deciding it was better that he was the one dripping in magma-hot coffee. The Mocha Princess grabbed a handful of napkins to dry him off. She thought he looked like an adorable dumb-ass in his clumsy way.
He finally worked up enough courage to ask for her number before continuing with his original mission. Her giant, anime eyes echoed in his mind for the rest of the day, monopolizing his focus.
He called her the next day to set up a date. He wouldn't usually call so fast, but it had been a Thursday, and he couldn't wait a whole week to see her again; he'd get nothing done. Unaware that the date only intensified his condition, they eventually moved in together, and he asked for her hand in marriage.
He was in his office closet and stumbled across the picture of his sister. Everything that had been buried over time—the older memories, the pain of the search, the world's indifference to her disappearance—came crashing down. He stood frozen, shocked by his behavior over the past two decades.
His mind exploded. He raced to his car to pick up exactly where he'd dropped the investigation. Sera ceased to exist in his mind as he sped down the road like a NASCAR driver on meth. It was as if he had never met her. She still lay in bed, half-awake, wondering what the noise was as the door slammed shut behind him.
Kyle drove to the college's head office, just as he had twenty years ago, to see if they had any new, minor information they might have dismissed as useless. They had nothing.
He walked in the direction he'd been told Kara was last seen. There was only one main road heading that way, flanked by twenty or thirty smaller, asphalt-toothed combs breaking off the main artery. One by one, he drove three or four blocks down each side street until the streetlights came on.
He went door-to-door, like a frantic salesman, stopping at trap houses and knocking on doors of places that clearly wouldn't care if a girl went missing. In fact, there was a good chance that if she had walked down one of these streets to meet someone, one of these very houses was the reason she vanished. Homeless people, zombied-out drug addicts, gangsters, and pimps—no one had any information.
He drove back to the dead end by the school, got out of his car, and looked around. As he paced the college fence line, he looked like a wild dog sensing fresh meat just out of reach. He forced himself to stop looking and start seeing.
About 300 yards (0.27 km) away, he noticed a tree line he hadn't seen before. He walked the fence to the corner, turned, and followed the new tree line. He passed an empty field and a lot that looked like the former site of a housing project. After walking about 1200 yards (1.1 km) past the corner, he looked across the street to his right. There stood a hospital for people with chronic mental conditions—for those with no one, or whose issues were too big to manage alone.
Kyle saw an older man standing next to a chair in front of a big bay window, looking intensely curious about what was going on. Kyle walked up and knocked on the door. No answer. He knocked harder and louder.
Finally, a large Black man in teal scrubs rushed to the door. "What you want man, you getting these folks uppity now. You ain't the one gotta calm 'em back down; I do. Stop making all this damn noise out here!"
Kyle took half a step back. "Look man, I am sorry for the knocking, but I need to ask you people something!"
The orderly shook his head. "Man, ain't nobody here but me and Leon. Leon so high he ought to have a room himself. Come back tomorrow after the staff gets in. Say, ten o'clock. They should all be clocked in, with all the people straightened out by then. That's when all the people will be here to walk you through whatever you need. SAVVY?"
Kyle dropped his head. "Fine. Ten o'clock?"
"Ten-o'clock," the man stressed back.
Kyle began the long walk back to his car, wondering if it was still in one piece. "Shit!" he yelled to himself. He ran as fast as he could and found his car untouched.
I guess there's one good use for a college after all, he thought. Kept my car safe for a little while anyway. But I still think this creepy-ass school for the dead played some part in Kara going missing. Directly or indirectly.
"If this college was never here, my sister could have gotten some NORMAL job, working in a cubicle somewhere safe and sound. She could have met some boring guy she works with. They could get married. Have a couple of kids and vacation every year like normal jerk-off people. Why was that so crazy of an idea to her? She would rather be a weird old cat lady, she would say, than to ever be with someone that could not make her feel exactly how she needed to feel at any given moment. I know she was my sister, and I love her more than anything, but that is just crazy talk. Why should a person depend on someone else for emotional happiness? Maybe it's just because she never dated much when she was younger. All the girls I would talk to said they wanted a sensitive man or someone that understood them. I know when Sera tells me something, I hear what she tells me."
The Confrontation
Making his way back home, he found Sera in the kitchen.
"Hello baby, making something to eat?" Kyle asked casually.
Sera fired back, her voice tight with tension. "I am making something for ME to eat!"
With a bewildered look on his face, Kyle opened his mouth. Before he could process the situation, Sera snapped again. "I was not the one who left before I even woke up today. I am not the one who wouldn't answer his phone. I am not the one who had me wondering what the hell was going on with you! You say you want to get married, but you offer up no stability in your behavior. You give me no structure in how you are going to act day to day. Sometimes you have these emotional outbursts, or you blame me for things that I have no control over. I had really hoped that when we met, it revolved around your sister, and after some time passed, you would show a little more strength in how you approach this relationship. But after today, I am really starting to think I made the wrong choice when I said we could get married! You do NOT give me much to work with, Kyle!"
Kyle was more confused than when he had first walked in the door. A single tear began to roll down his cheek.
"Right there!" Sera screamed, pointing. "That is what I am talking about! What kind of a fucking man openly cries in front of a woman he intends to marry? Are you sure you're not gay or something?"
Kyle lashed out, his hand connecting with Sera's face before he could even register the action.
Sera looked back at him, her eyes the color and temperature of a frost giant. Nothing so cold had ever come into existence before this very night. She looked at him through her fingers, clutching the spot he had struck.
Through gritted teeth, she whispered, "I'm going to my mother's house. Don't fucking follow me!"
Kyle lowered his head like a beaten dog and walked into his office, trying to process the chaos. What was her deal? Just let her go. I'll call her in the morning, and everything will be back to normal again.
Sera grabbed a pre-packed bag from the side of the bed and reached for her overcoat.
"Did you have that made up already?" Kyle said, looking from his office to the bedroom.
"Yes, for when you do something like this. Like vanish when you promised we would go to lunch together. At my work! You remember the lunch you said you would take me to? Where I paralegal at."
Oh, shit, he thought to himself. I really fucked this up now.
He decided he should give her two days to cool off.
As Sera stormed out the door and pulled down the drive, Kyle cracked the seal on the forty-year-old bottle of whiskey his father had bought for him the day the twins were born. Kyle drank until he blacked out. He was truly going to have a bad day tomorrow.