Little Girl Lost

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The headline made me sit down when I read it, that and the picture next to it and the article that spilled out over two columns underneath.

After I finished, I spread the paper out on the table, flattened it down with both hands, and stared at the photo. I wasn’t reading, not any more, just watching the girl in the photo stare back at me, a big smile on her face, all her teeth showing, her eyes squinting against the photographer’s flash, blond bangs hanging down under the peak of her mortarboard cap. That was one of two photos the paper had run; the other was on page nineteen, where the article continued. I didn’t turn to page nineteen, not again, just stood up, bearing down on the table, leaning on my fists, and looked at her. The strangest thought came to me then: I thought about the bird.

It was made of styrofoam, with a yellow-and-red coating on it meant to look like feathers, a black plastic beak, and wire feet twisted into claws at the ends. I found it in the incinerator room at the end of the hall, in a balsa wood cage balanced on the rim of the slop sink. I’d come out to throw out the kitchen garbage for my mother, so I went ahead and dragged the door to the incinerator open and let the knotted plastic bag slide down the chute. But my eyes were on the bird, the shoddy styrofoam bird in its shoddy wooden cage.

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