Part I A little over a week ago is when Kariann Rose Nathan went missing. In the photo they used on the flyers and the social media posts that the whole town is sharing, she’s holding a stuffed giraffe and smiling wide. They’re sharing that same picture on the news as well. It’s her most recent photo. The setting is the fair and the fair is still in town for another week.
They shone in the moonlight, scattered all directions on the sand. Glistening with the borrowed shine of distant stars. Some came in their slippers. The majority forged their way through the howling dark in socks or the bare feet they rose with. Abandoning their beds in the quiet dead of after-midnight, the hordes of somnambulists shuffled through the drifts of New Mexican desert sand, painted black by dark. From every compass point, the masses shared one destination.