Confessions Of A Complicated Nature, For The Thanksgiving Table | 5/5.

Poured all of my energy into making the guests feel welcome and desired.

Misplaced things sometimes get found again. That’s why people drag lakes when someone goes missing.

Storied session musician and traveling pianist Brooks Tipton disappeared from his father’s house in Lonoke, Arkansas on the morning of 18 May, 2001. In only a few days it will have been ten years.

I pulled you closer to where I was by holding on to your dress. In the dark, in the water, it was hard to make out anything but the white parts of your eyes. You were blinking rapidly and that’s how I found you without having to say anything out loud; both of us were too frantic to speak anyway. Up on the porch above another gunshot exploded out in the flood night, so close to where we were underneath him that my skull rang like a bell, felt like it would burst. It wouldn’t end until he’d killed all of us. Me and you huddled in the rising water under the porch as the storm covered up the sound of our father’s shotgun. Crouching down, the water was up to our shoulders now. I kissed you on your damp cheek and tasted soil and garbage from the flood water tearing up our street.

Two distinct scars underneath the chin were dusted for evidence, while in the next room, the hands were dusted for fingerprints pressed into the fingerprints. Downstairs in the den, which had been ravaged by fire but put out long before paramedics arrived, the whole room was swept up and oiled down and covered in glass wax, to preserve the damage.

A pocket like a small rectangular box had been carved into one of the large encyclopedias on the shelf and inside the carved out pocket we found photographs of our grandmother’s crushed body taken from the side of the highway while the paramedics were wrapping her up. I barely remember anything from that day because I had been running a fever so extraordinary, I was laid out flat on the floor in the backseat and everybody had to sit with their feet up to avoid kicking at me when the car slipped across the bends in the road, in the rain.

Abductions have been known to altar the lives of family members permanently. Entire families damaged beyond repair by the mysterious disappearance of just one person. The crumbling sense of connection becomes viral. It spreads through the genes like love did at one time, before the abduction.