It was on page nine, Metro section, tucked below the fold like something shameful. A boy—thirteen—had gone missing. “Misprocessed,” the paper said, as if he were a faulty upload or a form with a smudge. He vanished somewhere between West 4th and a place no one would name, like the city had swallowed him in a yawn it didn’t even notice.
He didn’t speak, they said. He drew rivers. In the classroom, on his worksheets, on the inside of his jeans with a ballpoint pen. In the hallway, he was seen tracing something with his finger on the linoleum: a shape like a curl. Or a hook. Or a question mark. That was the part that stuck with me. That and what they found later.
His backpack turned up near the subway station, half-hidden behind a mailbox. Inside were three items: a map of the city with all the streets carefully erased; a school photo, eyes scratched out with something metallic; and a torn scrap of lined paper bearing four words in smeared pencil: She’s curling again.
The agent laughed. The social worker shook her head and wrote NFS—No Further Significance—at the bottom of her notes. But someone else read the story. A woman in an office uptown. She stood too quickly when she saw it, checked the lock on her door, drew the blinds, and made a call she hadn’t made in years.
Later that same day, two neighborhoods over, a man in a snake mask sped through traffic on a motorbike, slicing throats at random. No motive, no pattern. Just panic and blood and heat. Witnesses said he was shouting something over and over, something that sounded like a name—but no one could agree on what it was.
Minetta doesn’t rise because the world is mad. She rises when the madness becomes background noise. When the unacceptable gets processed and filed. When forgetting becomes policy. She stirs when the world is humming along in its error, unbothered, unblinking.
You won’t see her coming. You’ll see her wake.
