Face Down in the Dirt

Chapter 1: Broken Letters

The first thing I noticed was the photograph.

It was lying face down in the dirt beside my friend Daniel’s mailbox, half-covered by wet leaves and mud. I almost walked past it. The house had always looked abandoned from the outside, even though someone lived there. The grass grew too high around the porch. The curtains stayed closed during the day. The old wooden mailbox leaned slightly to one side, as if it had grown tired of standing.

I picked up the photograph because I thought it might belong to him.

It was an old picture, faded around the edges. A family stood in front of the house that sat at the end of Daniel’s property. The same house. The same porch. The same trees behind it.

But there was one thing that bothered me.

There were four people in the photograph.

A man. A woman. A little girl.

And someone standing between the trees in the background.

Someone tall and completely blacked out, like the shape had been burned into the photograph.

I turned it over, expecting to find a date or a name.