“Did you know anything about her?”
“No, she was just the kid who lived next door. She kept to herself, the whole family did. I mean they were nice enough, just not real friendly.”
“Is there anything else you’d like to say?”
“You’re not going to use my name for this thing, right? I don’t want my name used.”
“No, sir. As I said before, I won’t use your name.”
* * *
Jessie and I started to drift apart the summer she turned eleven, about a year after her mom remarried. I’d ask her to come over and catch fireflies, and she’d say no. I’d invite her to spend the night. She’d say no. I spent countless nights crying, trying to figure out what I’d done wrong, because best friends didn’t stop talking to each other unless something was wrong.
My mother said, “Tracy, honey, that’s what happens with friends sometimes. Don’t worry. Maybe she’s just going through a phase. You are becoming young women, you know.”
I know she was only trying to help, but I wanted everything to go back to the way it had been, not the way it was.
* * *
Video footage, dated August 2, 2002:
Video opens with a scene of a back yard, complete with a hot tub, a fire pit, and tables and chairs set up for a party. There’s a break in the video; when it returns, the sky is full dark and a party is in full swing. No children are present. The camera captures several people saying hello to the cameraman, there’s a break in the filming, and when it returns, the camera is stationary, capturing a wide view of the partygoers.
5 minutes, 06 seconds: A pale blotch can be seen in the far left corner, above a row of well-trimmed hedges.
5 minutes, 08 seconds: The pale blotch is larger, the shape completely visible over the hedge.
5 minutes, 10 seconds: While the partygoers continue to drink and laugh, the blotch continues to rise.
Video editing enhancement of the last few seconds before the blotch disappears from the film clearly shows a young girl in her early teens, her face solemn, rising up through the air.
[Note: Records state the video was taken by Jack Stevenson of Denver, Colorado. Repeated attempts to contact Mr. Stevenson have been unsuccessful.]
* * *
By the time I was twelve, the drift between Jessie and I had become a crevasse. We weren’t even on speaking terms. She was just a girl I used to know. As kids do, I’d made new friends and sure, her rejection of our friendship hurt and sometimes I’d look over the fence to see if she was outside, but I was a kid, just a stupid kid.
How was I supposed to know?
* * *
Photograph A: Photo shows a baobab tree and a girl beside it. On closer inspection, the girl’s feet are hovering about a foot from the ground. The girl is looking away from the camera. The back of the photograph reads August 2, Shurugwi, Zimbabwe.
[Note: Photograph provided by one of the girl’s family members, who asked to remain anonymous. For that reason, the name of the girl is also withheld.]
Photograph B: The central image is the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France. On the far right of the photo, a girl is suspended in the air, her arms held in the distinct way described by many others, her face serene. Using the tower as a point of measure, she is approximately 1,050 feet in the air.
[Note: Image found on a website claiming it was manipulated digitally, however, no evidence of alteration can be found in the image itself. The girl in the photograph has not yet been identified.]
Photograph C: Photo of Trakai Castle, south of Vilnius, Lithuania, taken by Algimantas Serunis of Chicago, Illinois, while on vacation. A girl’s head and shoulders are visible above the westernmost tower of the castle.
[Note: The girl has been tentatively identified as Ruta Gremaila. Attempts to contact her family have been unsuccessful.]
* * *
When I was fourteen, Jessie showed up at the back door one night. I was blaring music and eating the last of the mint chocolate chip ice cream, knowing my dad would pretend to make a big deal about the empty container and my mom would roll her eyes at the both of us. My parents weren’t home, and yes, I’ve wondered more than once if it would’ve made a difference.
“Yeah?” I remember saying.
“I was wondering if maybe you’d want to hang out for a little bit?” she asked, her voice whisper-thin, her eyes all red, like she’d been crying. Behind the red, though, there was a strange emptiness, a hollow where laughter had once lived.
I remember being surprised, more at her request than her eyes. Although I’d made new friends, she hadn’t. She skulked through the halls at school like a ghost. She sat alone in the cafeteria at lunchtime and with her shoulders hunched in class. She wore baggy clothing and kept her head down so her hair almost covered her face. After school, she walked home alone.
“I can’t, sorry. I have a math test tomorrow I have to study for.”
“Oh, okay.” She stood for a minute, toeing the doormat with the tip of her shoe. “See you around then?”
“Sure.”
But I lied. There was no math test. I just didn’t want to talk to her.
* * *
Video footage of interview with Sheriff Joseph Miller, Brookhaven, Pennsylvania, September 9, 2008:
“No, none of it’s true. I have no idea why you’d even want to talk about it.”
“So why do you think everyone reported the same thing?”
“I don’t have an answer to that.”
“Maybe it’s because it really happened.”
[He glares into the camera.]
“Look, it didn’t happen. A bunch of kids ran away, a bunch more people got upset and invented some story about floating.”
“But didn’t three girls from your own town vanish?”
[His expression changes, and he crosses his arms over his chest.]
“Yeah.”
“Don’t you think that’s suspect?”
“Sometimes kids, especially girls, run away together. It happens.”
“And what if I told you those girls weren’t even friends, didn’t even go to the same schools?”
[He sighs heavily, looks at some spot in the distance, and shakes his head in dismissal.]
“We’re done here. Some of us have real work to do.”
* * *
On August 2, 2002, the summer Jessie and I were fifteen, I was in the back yard on a blanket, staring at the stars, waiting for one to fall so I could make a wish. My parents were out at the movies, and other than the crickets chirping, the neighborhood was quiet.
Jessie’s kitchen door opened – it had a funny little squeak that all the oil in the world wouldn’t fix – and Jessie walked out into the yard. All the lights in her house were off, and she was little more than a shadow flitting across the grass.
I hunched down on the blanket and watched through the hedges. She stood still in the middle of her yard for several minutes with her head down, her hands fisted at her sides. I thought about calling her name – I know I did – but then her hands relaxed, her arms extended slightly, and she lifted her chin to stare straight ahead. And then she lifted off the ground.
She was a foot in the air before I realized it wasn’t an illusion, before I was able to do anything other than blink. I scrambled to my feet, told her to stop, and raced through the hedges, scratching my upper arms all to hell in the process. I shouted her name and called out for my parents, for her parents, for anyone.
Jessie never looked down, not once. I stood right underneath her, waving my arms and yelling at her to come back, until my legs couldn’t hold me up anymore and my throat was too thick to speak.
My parents found me in the back yard when they got home. I was on the blanket, sitting with my grass-stained knees up to my chin, crying. I told them how Jessie just floated and kept floatin
g until I couldn’t see her anymore, until she was gone.
I saw the disbelief in their eyes. My father went over to Jessie’s house, knocked on the door, and came back shrugging his shoulders after no one answered. My mom pressed her hand against my forehead, proclaimed I had a fever, and sent me to bed. I stayed there for three days.
Jessie’s parents told the police she ran away.
* * *
Video footage of an attempted interview on August 18, 2011 with John Gelvin from Brawley, California, whose daughter, Rosie, age thirteen, is still listed as missing. Documents show she was reported as a floating girl. Other documents show that Child Protective Services had been called on at least one occasion before Rosie’s disappearance, but no further action from CPS can be found.
“Sir, you said you saw Rosie float.”
“No. I didn’t. Sorry. You’re the one who’s mistaken. She ran away.”
“But I have a report here, a police report, that says –”
“Leave me alone. Just leave me alone.”
* * *
I tried to tell people the truth. My parents continued to blame the fever. When I told Jessie’s parents, her mother’s eyes filled with tears, the silent, terrifying kind; her stepfather told me to leave their house and never come back. They moved away a few months later and didn’t tell anyone where they were going.
People at school thought I was crazy, even after the other reports came out. Jessie was just another troubled kid who ran away. It happened every day. No big deal.
If I’d been an adult, if I hadn’t see Jessie float away, I wonder if I would’ve been as dismissive. Possibly. Probably.
I tried to tell the truth so many times, but no one would listen.
* * *
Graffiti on the side of a building in Rapid City, South Dakota, June 8, 2013, in the section of the city known as Art Alley:
SILENCE IS ITS OWN FORM OF HELIUM
[Note: According to a local artist, who asked not to be named, the graffiti was originally written on the building in September of 2002, and she’s been repainting it as needed ever since. When asked if she knew the identity of the original artist or thought that the statement was related to the floating girls, she declined to answer.]
* * *
Eventually I stopped talking about it, about Jessie. I didn’t forget her, but it was too hard to keep trying to explain what I saw to people who refused to believe it. I finished high school, moved out of state for college, dropped out in my second year, and came back home.
When my parents decided to sell their house and move to Florida, I found a box of photos in the attic, pictures of me and Jessie when we were young, pictures of us holding our firefly jars, grinning crazy kid smiles, those smiles that scream innocence. Our eyes were filled with laughter and happiness and hope.
And I remembered her eyes the night she came over, the night I turned her away. We all have a secret spot, a tiny light, inside us, and it doesn’t take much to make that light go out. It doesn’t take much to extinguish that light forever.
As I carried the photos out to my car, I decided to do something. I’m not sure if I decided to do it for Jessie or for the others or for me, but I don’t think it matters.
I’m not a fifteen year old girl anymore, and I’ve spent years digging for proof, searching for the truth. Maybe now people will listen, and maybe they’ll start talking.
* * *
Excerpt from ‘A Study into the Phenomenon of the Floating Girls’, dated November 2002, author not cited:
Given a lack of concrete evidence to the phenomenon, and with evidence that a percentage of the girls were from troubled homes and had a history of running away, we can only conclude there was no phenomenon, only a strange set of coincidental circumstances.
It is also noted that there was a heavy incident of fog in the northwestern states, which may explain the visual oddities noted there.
Reports from other countries are sketchy at best with most being reported well after the disappearances in the United States, leading this researcher to determine that they were copying the phenomenon, perhaps in hope of cashing in on the notoriety. More research is needed.
[Note: There is no evidence that any further research was conducted.]
* * *
I live twenty minutes away from the house I grew up in. Kids still play in sandboxes, they still catch fireflies and run through sprinklers. At night, I stare at the sky and wonder if the girls are still floating. I think they are, and we just can’t see them.
I tell Jessie I’m sorry, but the words seem so fucking inadequate. I should’ve been there for her. I should’ve listened. And after, I should’ve kept talking. Hell, I should’ve screamed and shouted. But I didn’t.
No one did.
For Jessie
Tracy Richardson, Director
The Floating Girls Project
Baltimore, Maryland
2014
The Final One Percent
Desmond Warzel
“Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.”
Thomas Edison
In the room are two female personages: one, an ordinary woman; the other, something much more.
The woman fancies herself a playwright. A month ago, she was a poet; in the months preceding, a novelist, an essayist, a screenwriter. She suffers no shortage of ideas; half-filled pages litter the room in veritable snowdrifts, each bearing a few typed or handwritten lines as a memorial to an idea readily conceived but ultimately stillborn. Their strata, if excavated, would describe a sequential history of her short-lived literary obsessions, but taken as a whole, they are silent testament to her shortcomings: though not unintelligent, she is dismissive – a page, once set aside, will never be taken up again – and unreflective, abandoning each unsuccessful piece with no consideration of why it has failed.
Of late, her search for inspiration has her imitating her betters: she has begun this session with a spoken invocation of the Muses, cobbled together from Homer, Dante, Chaucer, and Shakespeare. Her fingertips have no sooner come to rest on the dusty keyboard when a sudden sensation of being watched suggests to her that this simple affectation has actually succeeded where other tactics – writing exercises, people-watching, meditation, drugs – have fallen short.
When she turns in her chair, the newcomer is there: a female form, perhaps the ideal female form, in a flowing garment of preternaturally pure white. She occupies the one bare place in the room, a roughly circular bit of wood floor showing through the carpet of papers. She does not speak, and her expression is unreadable.
This is a Muse in the divine flesh; of that, the woman is certain, even if she has no idea which one it is (the nine names and spheres of influence have fled her memory). But the mystery of the goddess’s identity is secondary to that of her presence in this place. The woman has always imagined the attentions of the Muses to manifest themselves indirectly: a stray sunbeam illuminating an ordinary object in an unusual way, say, or a snatch of peculiar conversation overheard by chance – intangible inspirations to be whimsically ascribed to a metaphorical deity. But this is no metaphor.
It may have been the woman’s invocation; perhaps she has accidentally hit upon the precise wording and tone to best attract the Muse’s notice and interest. It may be the mounds of discarded pages; perhaps the unfulfilled potential of all the false starts thereon inscribed, continually tugging at the edges of the Muse’s attention, has finally attained a critical mass that warrants direct intervention.
Whatever the cause, the perplexity that suddenly inhabits the Muse’s face, the cocked eyebrow forming a flawless arch, suggests that she is not accustomed to visibility in the eyes of mortals.
The woman springs to her feet, knocking over her chair. If there is protocol that applies here, she does not know it. All she can think to d
o is put forth her best work, on the notion that the Muse helps she who helps herself, and so she looks around desperately for a page to serve as the exemplar of her literary output. A few interminable seconds pass. Finally, with crushing regret at the negligence she has displayed toward her abandoned compositions, she gathers up an armload of papers at random and displays them before her visitor. It is a tentative gesture, part offering, part supplication.
The Muse has no need of it. Mediocrity pervades the room and everything in it like stale cigarette smoke, to a degree that offends her rarefied senses. That its author has laid eyes on her, by whatever agency, compounds the affront. The Muse will give her assessment with awful honesty.
In the past, the woman has placed her work before a parade of friends, colleagues, lovers, relations, the odd stranger. She has endured unconvincing flattery, polite dismissal, puzzled incredulity, and derisive laughter, and she has easily dismissed them all, if indeed she truly heard them.
But nothing can compare with the scorn of a genuine goddess. The Muse’s withering stare pins her against the worn lip of her desk, stripping away the barriers she has erected against the world’s mockery. It penetrates her to the core of her being, forces the breath from her body, scours the very thoughts from her mind. Her heart strains to beat against the pressure of that Olympian gaze. The pages she was holding drift to the floor.
The Muse’s dissection of her, the laying-out of her inadequacies before all the cosmos, continues for a full minute. It is the longest minute the woman will ever know.
The ordeal ends when the Muse withdraws her frightful attentions, not out of mercy but out of simple disdain. She has made her point.
In a minute or so, the burning in the woman’s chest grows insistent enough to penetrate the smothering emptiness inside her, and she remembers to breathe.
She pushes herself upward until she is standing once more, and – soaked in sweat, hands shaking, leaning on the desk for support – stares the Muse in the eye, at once bold and pathetic. The Muse’s lesson, it seems, has been wasted. Her contempt has receded, and it is the work of a moment for the woman to remake that which was swept away.
Supernatural Horror Short Stories Page 77
