Missing Iris (Pt. 1)

It was a hot day in August the day Iris went missing. I was thirteen, so was Iris. She was my best friend. We had spent that whole summer together, chasing each other in leg races around town. Iris wanted us to join the cross country team when school started up again. She had the idea that she was the fastest girl in our grade, or she could be if she trained hard enough. I wasn’t much of a runner, but I would have done anything for or with Iris. We matched each other's energy, so I knew she would do the same for me.

We were racing the day she went missing. All summer long we’d be walking, then Iris would look at me and say “Race you to the end of the street”, “Race you to the edge of the creek”, “Race you to the library”. She wanted to race even though she knew she would win. I’d always be close on her heels, but I never could outrun her. If I started to pull ahead, she would access some kind of stored power to pull herself ahead of me. No matter how fast I was running, Iris was running faster. But I never lost sight of her when we were running, not even on the day she went missing, which is what made her disappearance such a strange occurrence in our small town.

No one believed me when I told them what happened that day. I don’t know if I would have believed me if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. The memory for me now is so clear; it’s almost like I’ve lived it over and over again in a dream. The sun was high and the sky was bluer than I had ever remembered seeing it. We were walking through the woods behind my house after a day spent by the creek. It was too hot not to spend the day in the water, but the local pool cost money that neither of our mother’s were willing to spend. We were dripping with creek water and our hair was matted and tangled from the mud. My socks slipped and sloshed in my shoes as we walked through the trees.

“Lets race!” Iris said, smirking in the mischievous way she did.

“Where’s the finish line?” I asked.

“How about the big dead tree behind your house?” she proposed.

“Alright, you’re on,” I agreed, then we both stopped walking and lined up our tennis shoes in the grass. Our toes were even as if an imaginary line had been drawn right in front of our feet. We both took a moment to get our stance, to feel the adrenaline that would power the muscles in our legs. Iris leaned into her run, positioning her head directly over her toes.Her arms were already in proper running formation, as soon as she took off her arms would start pumping like a machine. Her eyes were determined, staring straight forward and nowhere else. I watched her, knowing I wouldn’t beat her, and not necessarily wanting to.

“Ready?” she asked, still focusing her eyes in the direction of the dead tree.

“Ready,” I answered, focusing my attention straight ahead of me.

“Go,” she said, almost like a shot.

We took off in a sprint. The heat of the sun bore down on us like a spotlight. Iris had pulled ahead of me and I watched as her denim shorts and purple swimsuit twisted around her body like her clothes were just moving parts in the dance she was choreographing. Her wet hair bounced against her back and beads of water flew off her as she bounded through the trees. I needed to go faster. Iris was already so far ahead of me, but I needed to give her a little bit of competition. Iris had the goal of being the fastest runner in our grade, but I at least wanted to do well when we tried out for cross country. I could run faster, and I knew it.

I sucked in a deep breath and worked my arms harder. My legs started carrying me faster and the trees started whipping past in a flash of green and brown. Running made me feel powerful; I understood why Iris wanted to be so good at it. The hunger and need to move so fast, it feels like flying away.

My heart pumped in my chest. I was on Iris’s heels. She looked back at me with a wide and wicked smile as the tree came closer and closer. I laughed and pushed myself harder, getting a little closer to passing my friend. She noticed and did the same. My favorite part of the race was always the last stitch effort to cross the finish line first. There was always the twist in my stomach as I put everything I could into the last steps, not slowing down until the finish line was crossed and there was a clear determined winner.

The dead tree that stood lifelessly right behind the gate of my backyard was only a few feet away, and I charged toward it like a cannonball. There was no time to think about Iris or look back at her again to share another wicked smile. My feet just carried me, my legs pumping and my heart thudding. I passed the tree on the left side and watched out of my peripheral vision as Iris passed the tree on the right just a half second before I did. She had won, and I wasn’t surprised. Our races were always close, but Iris always won.

It took me a moment to stop; my brain knew it was time to stop before my legs were able. I hit the fence to my backyard, hard, then fell onto the grass. I laughed as I brushed the dirt and grass off my knees. I looked over where I thought Iris would be, where I thought she was sitting and laughing with me, but she wasn’t there. I looked around, wanting to meet Iris’ eyes and rub-in what could have been my win if I had just pushed myself a little harder. “Iris?” I called, out of breath. I walked back around the dead tree, hoping she had stopped and sat down beneath its stooping branches. “Iris?” I called out again, a little louder, hoping she had just wandered around. There was no response, not a single sound out of place in the summer breeze.

I looked around for her for a while, shouting her name, then eventually sobbing and screaming when there was no response. My older brothers heard my screaming and crying; they jumped our back fence to come to my rescue and help me look for my missing friend. Hours passed and the sun began to set before we gave up and decided to call the police.

My mom went and picked up Iris’ mom from work. The two women sat at our kitchen table crying and chain smoking cigarettes while the police searched for my missing friend. Everyone asked me a million questions, but the answer was simple: I didn’t know what happened to Iris. The police asked when I’d seen her last and I told them that she had crossed the finish line, that we had finished racing about the same time. I told them everything I knew, but it didn’t seem like enough. Our whole family sat around the kitchen all night while people in the neighborhood and the police scoured the woods behind our house in desperate hope to find any sign of Iris. My dad had coffee brewed and we all sat with mugs cooling in our hands.

Iris’ mom, Peggy, was a troubled woman. Her husband had abandoned her and Iris only a year prior. Rumor had it he was living in a town not even an hour away with a new wife and a baby on the way. He hadn’t even bothered to call Iris on her birthday. That night she had dark circles around her eyes, the pack of cigarettes she was making her way through never sat more than an inch from her hands. “You know this isn’t your fault, Ashlyn. I know you would never do anything to my beautiful Iris. I know you didn’t kill her,” Peggy said, staring blankly at the kitchen wall. I hung my head; my mother didn’t say anything. There was suspicion in her silence that no one contradicted.

They never found Iris’ body, they never found evidence of murder or struggle. It was as if she had just disappeared into thin air, which of course, I knew that she had. There was a funeral for her almost a year after she had disappeared. It was a choice her mom had made to get some kind of closure. There was no proof that Iris had died, but there wasn’t any proof that she hadn’t. Everyone in the community came out for her funeral. I sat in that big church praying for my friend’s soul, hoping, wherever she was, that she was okay.

**

My mom asked me to quit talking about Iris when I was a Sophomore in high school. She didn’t like that I talked about her as if she were still alive. “It’s just weird, Ash. She’s been dead for years and you just sit under that dead tree out there like you’re waiting for her to come back. It’s just not normal,” mom griped.

“But mom, I’ve told you, she isn’t dead. I saw what I saw,” I reasoned.

“And you didn’t see anything. No one disappears into thin air,” she said, brushing me off for the millionth time over the years.

“But I know what I saw,” I said.

“And you saw wrong,” her voice shook my bones. For the first time, I began to question what had really happened that day we were racing. I was so certain that she was running next to me the whole time, but I hadn’t considered that maybe she wasn’t. Maybe I had made up the whole thing in my head. Maybe she had never even left the creek. “It’s time to grow up, Ashlyn. Iris has been dead for years. She’s not coming back. Stop with the conspiracy theories and move on,” she cautioned.

Perhaps it was because I was getting older or because I was pretty sure I would get into serious trouble if I mentioned it again, but I quit believing that my friend was out there somewhere. Wherever she was, it was clear she wasn’t coming back. She could have been dead for all I knew. Once she disappeared anything could have happened to her. The only thing I knew for sure was that she was gone, and my mom was right, it was time to start accepting that she wasn’t coming back.

It was lonely without my best friend to share my life with. It was even more lonely because I felt like she was there with me. I thought I heard her voice so many times over the years, calling my name, begging me to return to the tree. But after my conversation with my mom, I just couldn’t bring myself to go back. After a while, I quit hearing her voice and moved on. I fell in love, went to college, did all the things I was supposed to. I quit thinking about Iris every day, and without her voice in my head, it was quite easy to not think about her. Life was going good, great even considering the trauma in my childhood. In the blink of an eye, 20 years had passed since Iris had disappeared. I was living in a bigger city in an apartment of my own. I had a steady job designing running shoes. Things were lonely sometimes, but they were good. Then I got a call from my mother: “They’re doing a moment of silence for Iris next week if you want to come home for the anniversary,” she said over the phone, her voice rougher than it once had been.

“I can’t believe the town is even doing anything for it. It’s been so long and I didn’t think people cared that much,” I replied.

“Yeah, well, I think it’s a bit of a slow news day, personally. But Peggy has been pretty excited about it. It’s going to be on the local news,” mom explained.

“I’m sure Peggy is very excited to be in the spotlight again,” I said, rolling my eyes. After Iris had disappeared, Peggy went on tour to all the big news stations doing interviews and begging viewers to keep looking for her daughter because “she’s still out there,”.

“I think you should come. You haven’t been home in a while and I think it will be good for you to remember her,” mom said.

“You’re the one who told me to forget her,” I mumbled.

“I did not say that, Ash, and you know it. I am not having this conversation with you again. Please just come next week and show your face. You were her best friend, don’t be a dick,” mom said, then she hung up the phone quickly before I could say anything more.

The next week I was standing in a sea of people, all gathered somberly around Iris’s empty grave. People were holding candles and listening as some of Iris’s favorite songs played through an unseen speaker. It felt ridiculous to be mourning her in this way 20 years later. We had done something similar to this out by the tree where I’d last seen her a few months before her funeral. It felt like I had taken a step back in time and my mind started racing with memories of Iris. There was the big snowball fight we’d started with the boys in our class in 5th grade. Then I remembered our first school dance and how we spent the whole afternoon getting ready together in my upstairs bedroom, gossiping about boys we had crushes on and girls in our class we couldn’t stand. For the first time in years, Iris’s death felt like a looming cloud inside of me; it just didn’t feel real. There was a present aching in my stomach that I had felt so fervently as a child, but hadn’t felt for a very long time; Iris was alive, and she was out there somewhere.

After a few moments, Peggy stood up in front of the crowd, microphone in hand. She looked more alive than she had when her daughter was alive, younger in a way than I remembered from childhood. She had a new posh haircut and wore a t-shirt with Iris’s face on it, frozen at the age of thirteen.

“Thank you all for coming out to remember my dear Iris. It has been 20 years since her disappearance ripped a hole in this community. We buried her memory right here at this very spot a year after she went missing. Even though we never found evidence of her death, we thought it would be best for our family and the stirred community to lay her to rest. It is today that we remember 20 years without her light in this small town. I thank you all for coming out here to mourn with me on the anniversary of one of the worst days of my life. It feels good to have my community gather around and embrace me with open arms,” she said, choking up on her words.

People in the audience listened as Peggy gave her speech. Then when Peggy had evaporated back into the crowd, a tearful mess, the crowd began to disperse. I looked around and saw some familiar, grown faces; people Iris and I had gone to school with since second grade stood around, holding the hands of their own young children, remembering a girl none of us had spoken to in 20 years.

The whole memorial song and dance seemed a little ridiculous to me. When I looked around at the local news cameras set up and the faces of a community I’d long since abandoned, I realized that Iris’s disappearance meant more to this community than I’d remembered. They were scared; all of their faces were creased with worry and fear that a child went missing in this town and the circumstances have never been solved. What if their children are next? What if whoever or whatever took Iris is still out there, waiting for the next opportunity to strike? The crowd wasn’t there because they necessarily cared about Iris or her disappearance, but because they were afraid to forget her.

I left the memorial early; I didn’t talk to Peggy or any of my old classmates. There was somewhere more important to me when it came to remembering Iris. I had spent so many hours out by the dead tree behind my house after she disappeared. At first, I would spend my time looking for her. Then I would sit under the tree and talk to the air as if she were in it, hoping she would apparate in the same way she had gone. That is where I felt her the strongest, and the further I was from the tree and this town, the weaker her presence became in my life. As I walked through my old backyard past the swingset Iris and I used to play on, and out through the back gate, I knew I didn’t come back to this town for the memorial. I came back to sit under the tree and feel her presence again.

The tree, though long dead, still stood tall and dark in the field behind my childhood home. Limb by limb it had fallen until it was just a hollow trunk sticking out of the ground. The sky above my head was darkening and the last bit of daylight was fading into a purple haze. Stars already speckled the night sky and a warm summer breeze caressed me as I walked toward the tree. I stood before it, small and out of place; I’d always felt that way when sitting out by the tree. I took a few steps back and sized it up, thinking about the day Iris had gone missing.

I had always been told that I was mistaken about where and how Iris had gone missing. My mom, the cops, my brothers, all of them had agreed that I had lived through something traumatic, but not anything that I remembered. They said there had to be someone or something, that a person couldn’t just evaporate in front of my eyes. Standing in front of that dead tree, I knew they were wrong. When Iris ran past the tree on that day 20 years prior, she had disappeared from the earth with no explanation of why or how, but I intended to find out.

I circled the tree, sizing it up, willing it to show me its secrets. Then I backed away from it; I found myself several feet away staring down the tree like I had 20 years ago. My heart began to race the way it had during my race with Iris; the first race I’d ever won against her. I leaned heavily onto my left leg; my adult body felt strange as it remembered the starting stance. My legs were longer than they were when I used to run and my arms were lankier; still, it all felt very much the same.

The wind blew through my hair and it smelled the same way it had 20 years prior, like creek water and magnolia trees. I inhaled, exhaled, then took off in a sprint. My legs carried me faster than I thought I’d ever move. I felt like a charging bull or a Mack truck tearing down the highway. I wasn’t sure how I was going to stop myself from hitting our back fence; the muscles in my legs resisted my attempts to slow them down. Panic began to set in as the tree and the fence quickly approached. I began wondering how I would explain the injuries to myself and the fence to my mother. She would most likely reprimand me for being so foolish and probably ask me what I was thinking. I wouldn’t know what to tell her, because I wasn’t even sure then. My body had taken over and I no longer felt in control.

As I ran past the tree, I closed my eyes, expecting the impact of the fence. Then my body came to a complete stop. I felt lighter, like the weight of 20 years had disappeared. I opened my eyes and stared at a bright purple sky. Long, blue grass waved back and forth where my childhood home had just been and music played quietly, keeping time with the breeze. I turned around to look where I had been, but it was just a vast field of blue grass swaying and a giant wisteria tree where the long dead tree had once been. The wisteria tree was in full bloom, its purple blossoms whirling gently in the breeze.

The next thing I thought to do was to make sure I had arrived, wherever I had arrived, all in one piece. I took stock of my limbs, the things in my pockets, and the clothes on my back. Nothing was missing, which was good news. The bad news was only beginning to sink in: I didn’t know how I got here, so I had no clue how to get back. Maybe I had actually hit the fence, hard, leading with the top of my head and sending myself into some kind of coma. For all I knew, my body could be crumpled up in the field behind my parent’s house, waiting for someone to find me.

“It happened again,” a voice said, distantly and I turned around. Standing by the Wisteria tree was a familiar young girl. Over the years, I had memorized her face- every freckle that dotted her skin, the curve of her juvenile smile.

“Iris,” I whispered, almost too afraid to say it any louder. She hadn’t aged a day and was still wearing her swimsuit and jean shorts she had been wearing that day. There was still a bruise on her knee from when she fell running away from Harrison Connors after we stole his bike for an hour one summer afternoon 20 years ago.

Iris stared at me with innocent eyes; she looked frightened. “Who are you?” she asked.

Inside myself I debated what to say. Did she know how long she was gone? Perhaps she knew; maybe there was a way in this place, wherever this place was, where she could see us all living our lives while she was stuck here. While I was thinking about what to say, Iris grew impatient with my silence: “Hey, I asked you a question. Who the fuck are you?”.

I remember cursing with Iris when we were kids, or when I was a kid. We always checked over our shoulders to make sure an adult wasn’t in earshot, waiting to catch us in the act. She had changed, but I suppose I had as well. “I’m Ash,” I said, simply and plainly.

Recognition flashed across her face and along with it a deep sorrow, “Oh my god,” she gasped. Then she folded herself in half, her head hanging by her toes and tears dripping off her cheeks into the blue colored grass. I watched as she went through a flurry of anger and sadness. She ripped at the grass with her fists and screamed until her voice sounded like gravel. Then she looked at me with exhausted, wet eyes, “How long has it been?”

“Twenty years, exactly,” I responded. She cried some more; I was at a loss of what to say to her. There was nothing to be done to comfort her; how do you console someone who has lost 20 years of their life?

While she cried, I sat down in the tall blue grass and waited. After a while, she sat down across from me in the grass, shoulders slumped and face bright red from crying. “Tell me everything,” she demanded. So, I told her everything. I told her about the day she disappeared, I told her about the investigation, and her funeral. I told her about the girls who were nasty to me in high school, because they insisted I’d killed her. I told her about prom, going to college, and starting my career. Everything that happened to me since she’d evaporated, I told her about in as much detail as I could remember. She listened intently, not taking her eyes off me as I retold what was essentially my entire life story.

“So, I was at the 20 year anniversary memorial your mom was throwing-” I continued.

“My mom threw an anniversary memorial?” she asked.

“Yes, she did. I don’t want to sour you on your mom, but she’s really been milking your disappearance for all it’s worth,” I laughed.

“How embarrassing,” she giggled.

“Yeah, so I was at your memorial and I just wanted to go where I always felt closest to you, which was by the big tree where you disappeared. I don’t know what came over me, but I started running like we were on the day you went missing and then all of a sudden, I’m here, wherever this is,” I explained.

Iris sat for a moment staring at her hands in her lap. She was a small frail thing and it hurt to look at her for too long. There was a long moment of silence that passed between us, but I pressed on, “Tell me what happened that day,”.

Iris inhaled deeply, “I don’t even really know. Like you said, I was there one minute then here the next. There’s nothing here, no concept of time, no animals, no food, no other people; just blue grass and purple skies for miles and miles. I try not to go too far from the tree, in case I can’t find it again. I assume the tree has something to do with how I got here, so it has to also be the way to get back. I just haven’t found it,”.

“If there’s just grass and the sky, how do you stay alive?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I just won’t die, maybe I can’t die. I’ve even thought maybe I was dead for a while and that this is heaven, but I don’t think so anymore. Sometimes I hear you or my mom, sometimes even my dad, but I can’t reach any of you. I’ve been alone here for, you said 20 years? It’s been hell, not heaven. The loneliness is enough to make me wish I had died instead,” Iris said, hanging her head.

My heart broke for her. I had once thought my life was a living hell, missing my best friend everyday and knowing I would never see her again. I couldn’t have imagined what Iris was going through; she was in a living, breathing hell. She existed and she didn’t. I couldn’t fathom what that would be like.

“I heard you,” I muttered.

Iris turned to look at me, surprised and with tears in her eyes, “You did?”

“Almost every single day for years. My mom thought I was crazy. Then one day, it all just stopped,” I explained.

Iris laid down in the blue grass, “After a while I just gave up. It didn’t feel like anyone was ever going to answer, you know?”. I heard her sniffle and I could hear that she’d started crying again, “And now we’re both stuck here. Neither one of us will ever see our homes or our family again,” she sobbed, tears rolling down the sides of her face and into the grass.

I shook my head. For a moment, I was caught up in the self pity. What if we couldn’t get home? Iris had been here twenty years and had never found a way back, she could be right. “No. No, that’s not going to happen,” I said, pushing myself up off the ground and beginning to pace.

Iris sat up and watched as the grass beneath my feet flattened and I wore a trail through its long blades. “Other than trying to reach someone and walking around this tree, what have you done to get back home?” I asked.

Iris pondered the question a moment, “I’ve walked several miles in all directions looking for help. There’s nothing out there,”.

“But there has to be a way back. There was a way here, afterall. There aren’t just portals to different worlds without a way to go back,” I stated.

“You’re the adult, I guess, you would know,” she said, shrugging.

It was the first time since I’d seen Iris that I remembered she was just a child. Looking at her, I knew it, but it just felt the way it always had when we were young; when I was young.

“Iris, I promise you, we’re going to get back home,” I said, simply. Iris nodded her head, I’m sure with doubt, but I intended to keep my word. I wasn’t going to let Iris spend another 20 years in this foreign world. We were going home, if it was the last thing I ever did.

I got up and walked around the Wisteria tree, bright and alive unlike its real-world counterpart. I tried to decide what that meant, to make sense of it, but nothing here seemed to make sense. I looked up through its branches at the purple sky. The lavender clouds were fading to a darker, rich purple; it was getting dark.

Iris stared up at the sky, “It’s only gotten dark one other time,” she said, then she looked at me with cold eyes, “Bad things happen in the dark,”. I was confused, then I heard a scream. Iris looked in the direction of the scream, then at me, this time something was different. Iris didn’t look like herself. Her mouth was larger and full of razor sharp teeth. Her eyes were solid black marbles glistening in the darkness. Iris wasn’t here after all, or maybe she was.

I took a step back; my body was becoming hot and my pores began to cry. “What happened to Iris,” I breathed.

The thing looked at me; it was hungry. There was another scream and we both looked in the direction of the scream again. The thing looked at me and smiled sinisterly. That was all the answer I needed.

I took off in a sprint toward the scream, my heart racing in my throat, my legs numb in the wind. I could feel it behind me, gnashing its teeth at me, waiting for the catch. This thing was a hunter; it knew how to bait and trap, and it knew how to kill. I wasn’t going to make it out where Iris was, wherever beyond the horizon that scream was coming from. I couldn’t keep running this fast that far; age and little practice had made me slower and lowered my stamina. There was no way that scream was Iris, no way they’d kept her alive, waiting for 20 years. But maybe they had. Maybe they had kept her alive to lure people here, waiting patiently for another victim to fall prey to their trap. It was a possibility; 20 years was a long time to hold someone captive, but time here didn’t seem to work the same as it did back home.

I was wearing down, I could feel the creature at my heels, eager. In a last minute decision, I made a 180 and started running back toward the Wisteria tree. The sky was a dark, inky black, much like the creature's eyes. It was impossible to see, but I managed to find the tree and pull myself up onto one of its low hanging branches. I stuck my arms out around me and felt for another. When I found it, I grasped it hard in my fist and pulled myself onto the next branch. I heard the branches cracking under my weight and prayed silently that they would hold on. I could still see the creature’s beady eyes looking up at me and could hear him snarling under my feet. I felt a sharp pain in my leg and screamed. Below me, the creature slurped the blood from my leg and laughed, but I kept moving. Branch after branch, I made my way to the very top of the tree, then I fell.

I hit the earth hard. For a moment, everything was brown and fuzzy, but then things began to come back into focus. The dry, green grass, a darkening blue sky speckled with yellow stars, the leaning trunk of the dead tree. I sat up and looked around me. The fence to my childhood home was less than 10 feet away; I made it home, if I had gone anywhere in the first place. There was a possibility I’d run into the fence and had knocked myself out. As soon as the thought entered my head, I looked down at my leg where I assumed the creature had bitten me. A chunk was missing, leaving a bloody, meaty void in my calf muscle. It was all real. I knew where Iris was, I knew how to get her home, but I would have to go back.