The little neighbor girl went missing on the same day the space shuttle Challenger exploded. There was smoke and then nothing. We watched it all at school, on a TV that our teacher wheeled into the classroom. We walked home from school the long way, imagining how it would feel to fall from the sky and slam into the ocean.

The week after the little girl went missing, our mothers began to watch from the porch whenever we rode our bikes in the street. Sometimes we tucked ourselves into small places and pretended we were astronauts rocketing toward a strew of stars. When our mothers called for us, we could hear the frantic in their voices rising like sirens.

A month after the little girl went missing, a poster with her picture—HAVE YOU SEEN ME?—showed up on phone poles and in the store on the corner where we stole strings of licorice and Tootsie Rolls. Police released a sketch of the suspect, a dad-aged man who could have been Mr. Marks from the blue house or Mr. Stephenson with his garage full of tools. Our mothers insisted that we play in the back yard where they could keep an eye out. We yearned to blast off and out of there.

Months after the little girl went missing, the remains of the Challenger astronauts were fished from the bottom of the ocean. The hedges hemming our yard grew up unruly, shrouding our view of the night sky and the neighbors, though sometimes on steamy evenings, when the windows were open, we could hear shouting and gunshots and screams from what might have been a television turned up too loud.

***

Sarah Freligh is the author of five books, including Sad Math, winner of the 2014 Moon City
Press Poetry Prize and the 2015 Whirling Prize from the University of Indianapolis, and the
recently-released A Brief Natural History of Women, from Harbor Editions. Sarah’s work has
appeared in the Cincinnati Review miCRo series, SmokeLong Quarterly, the Wigleaf 50, and in the anthologies New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction (Norton 2018), and Best Microfiction (2019-22). Among her awards are poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Saltonstall Foundation.