The Paper Bag (story by Jill inspired by Jennifer's photo)

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Jennifer gave me this photo as my prompt on August 22, 2021. I loved the image! That looks like such a great playground, surrounded by the overgrown grass. I tried to decide whether I should write about the playground in its prime or how it is in the photo. Then I started to imagine what might be hiding in the tall grass, and I came up with this ...

The Paper Bag

It wasn’t until I was sitting on the curb breathing into a paper bag with police, detectives, and medical professionals rushing around me that I remembered the headlines from about a month or so ago. 

The national news had mentioned Mariah Cunningham pretty much nightly for a couple weeks until her story just sort of got overshadowed by other, more recent, events. I remembered taking notice of the headlines because of how close to home it was on some level—about 100 miles or so, maybe just a two-hour drive away.

I had felt sorry for Mariah, a three-year-old girl snatched out of her fenced-in backyard when her mom had stepped inside for a couple seconds to grab her phone. And I had felt sorry for her mom too—even though I appeared to be in the minority. She had seemed so desperate, wild on some level, in the footage they kept replaying of her. The media was making Mariah’s mom out to be a monster, but, really, we’ve all done stupid stuff that could have ended very horribly but didn’t. We got lucky. That was the only difference. I wasn’t a mom, but I imagined that Mariah’s mom’s feelings of guilt for stepping inside would be hard to get over, and I hoped they would find Mariah as much for her mom’s sake as for hers.

And as I sat on the curb, breathing into a paper bag, remembering the news stories, I kept picturing that mother’s face and wondering how she must be feeling … now—as I was sure that she would be contacted very soon if not already.

The remains were the right size for a three year old. And the clothes … I remembered hearing again and again on the news, “Mint green hoodie … black rain boots.” I’m sure there had been other items of clothing mentioned but those were the two that stood out to me because they were what I had almost just stepped on, a bloody mint green sweatshirt and one shiny black rain boot. Also the face, or what should have been the face in the hood of the hoodie. That kept haunting me. That was the reason why every time I stopped breathing into this paper bag that I had to immediately start again. 

And as I sat there on the curb with chaos rushing around me, I worried about Mariah’s mom. And if I was this much of a mess after finding this stranger in the tall grass of an abandoned playground, how was her mom going to take the news?

I put the paper bag up to my face and started to breathe into it again.


—Jill Cullen (written on August 25, 2021)



 

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