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Between the waves of panic and shock, some questions arose that could not be answered: How did it happen? How could she not have immediately noticed his absence? How would they ever fucking get through this?

It was devastatingly straightforward: Her youngest child Jamie had been beside her at the fairground and then he wasn’t. Over his almost-four years on the planet, they had rarely been more than the length of his shadow apart, and now he was nowhere and she was broiling in a hell that she never knew existed.

 

It was the end days of the Christmas break, the Sunday evening before the Tuesday return to normality. The Ferris wheel, the Waltzers, the Dodgems and the rigged games all arranged in a loose oval on the fringe of an industrial estate. Pitch black skies, bitterly cold, neon lights partially reflected in the puddles of soupy grey that sloshed up on shoes and ankles with every step.

Her husband Dave had been trailing behind her with the two girls, and when they’d looked at each other at that moment their eyes bulged as their jaws hung loose, both immediately knowing he wasn’t with the other as though some primal communication had passed between them. A minute earlier, she’d been cursing herself for wearing her boxfresh Adidas Gazelles in the worsening rain. Her life had been that small, her worries and fears so tiny and trifling. Every recent trial in her life instantly evaporated: the expired gift voucher, the toothpaste on the mirror, the grandparents sugar-spoiling the kids, the raised voices between herself and Dave over she couldn’t remember what on the journey there, these minor irritations and nothing feuds that burnt up so much energy.

He’ll show up in a second, a middle-aged woman who offers to mind the two girls says without conviction, and Angela sprints here and there, reversing back and across on her progress all the time. She still can’t fully think the darkest thoughts, but they’re steadily forming an impatient queue on the edge of consciousness. All the half-remembered details, the people she doesn’t want to think about. The two lads in North Face leaning against a barrier near the entrance, vaping and loitering. The fairground operators with their signet rings, faded neck tattoos and vodka breaths sullenly locking people into the rickety rides. The woman with the empty buggy who stared at her by the Tea Cups. The well-dressed older man by the popcorn stand she assumed was a grandparent but then why had he been on his own? Christ. Christ. Christ. For a moment she wishes she could stop thinking.

To make things even worse, Jamie had shown no interest in going there that evening. The same with his two older sisters. It had been herself and Dave’s thing, their own well-worn seasonal ritual, and they’d playfully but relentlessly taunted the kids for being unadventurous when they hadn’t immediately jumped at the opportunity. The truth was, she had needed to leave the house. She would have cracked up otherwise, her nerves beyond frayed from cabin fever, the dying days of the holidays soundtracked by the almost constant bickering of the kids, long-since bored of Santa’s gifts, only the Quality Street varieties that nobody liked remaining – toffee penny, orange crème – everybody in dire need of the structure of school, creche and work despite the contradictory dread of this impending return to routine.

And Dave still being too polite in the awful present, asking everybody if they’d seen Jamie in a voice too low, but when he suddenly cracks and starts shouting he’s possibly even more useless as nobody can fully understand him, they probably think he’s suffering a psychotic episode, hurtling around like he doesn’t have full control of his limbs, clattering into people and roaring incomprehensibly into the fogged-up windows of the ticket kiosks.

She asks the teenage Waltzers operator if the gate to the carpark can be closed so that nobody can leave. He shrugs and mutters something from under his hood that she can’t even hear, but even this half-communication makes it clear that her problem is not his. She turns away from the little prick. But what if it’s already too late and Jamie’s in some backseat or the don’t say it, Jesus Christ, don’t say it. She tries not to think if there were any vans in the car park; she tries not to think a lot of things.

So much stabbing at her senses. The glare of the lights, the thrum of generators, the repetitive music and the screeches of the rides, the coins raining onto the gravel from the pockets of the screaming kids spinning in cars on mechanical arms high above. But whatever happens, she will be forever haunted by the sickly waft of candy floss, the sugary emptiness that you could almost bite out of the air, that horrible, horrible sweetness.

And yet something must finally have leaked through to whoever might be in charge because they stop the Dodgems and the Wipeout and turn the volume down on the 2 Unlimited and Vengaboys songs booming from the muffled speakers of the sound system. She can now hear people saying things like kid missing, parents can’t find him, but there’s absolutely no comfort in this and of course there isn’t a Garda in sight and she can’t remember if he was wearing the Nike runners or the New Balance ones though he definitely had the blue parka on, the one his nan bought him for his birthday.

Gasping for breaths and it feels like there isn’t enough air on the planet but she knows she has to keep it together but she simultaneously knows that she won’t be able to do so for too much longer.

 

She’d instinctively shouted at him that afternoon after he’d spilt his milk, her momentary harshness rather than the shattering of glass shocking him into silently-delivered tears that ran all the way down to the corners of his quivering mouth, and in the hellish present this flash of memory is a bladed cross to be carried across her back.

She’d laid down on the narrow bed beside him the night before, her arm a bracket around him so that he’d drift off and wouldn’t keep sneaking down the stairs, big green eyes rolling in his beautiful little head as sleep gradually fell on him, their mouths so close that they were sharing breaths and at that moment she’d never felt that love for anybody, because he was her youngest and she knew from the two girls how he would slowly but steadily move away from her from then on.

She’d read him a few fairy tales and was taken aback by the brutality of even the most well-known and seemingly benign. The abductions, the enforced imprisonment and isolation, the cruel tricks and betrayals, the forced hundred-year slumbers, the monsters, the giants and the evil deeds. The children ripped from their families, never to see them again. She’d had a smug, almost unconscious thought that their own life was like its own fairy tale without the bad stuff, and when sleep finally came, she lay there for another half hour just staring at him.

 

She bargains. Holy fucking God, does she bargain. Just bring him back and she’ll donate to charity, she’ll give blood, she’ll never scold him again. She’ll light candles, do novenas to obscure and forgotten saints, chant the words of every prayer that she’s long since forgotten. They’ll go to McDonalds on the way home and they can stay up until whenever they want and she’ll even extend the olive branch to her brother and the neighbours can park in front of their house she’ll finally print out the hundreds of family photos on her phone that she’s been meaning to put into real albums and she’ll bounce into the office on Tuesday and in every way her life will be bathed in a new light she never imagined could be so bright. But for now, it’s darkness and darkness only. Bring him back and she swears she’ll appreciate every dull blessing, every manageable hardship.

She sees the pale faces of herself and Dave at a press conference with smiling print-outs of him on the otherwise blank wall and oh Christ, please, please, please but has one of these sagas ever ended well and she knows what she thought of the parents on Sky News and in the newspapers, the parents of the children who were always and forever lost, who never aged and would be forever known by their first names, the lazy judgements she’d so easily, cruelly cast.

And in the relative quietness now, with the blinding floodlights switching on to replace the neon and the rides’ screeches silenced, she can feel the growing weight of eyes on herself and Dave, and while most want to help, her family is undoubtedly the living, cautionary tale that gives other parents a quietly ecstatic appreciation of everything they didn’t know they had, the tight hold they have on their own safe children suddenly something without a price. She knows this because she herself has been that selfish soldier. Sirens at the entrance and a squad car pulls in but instead of making things better she knows she can take little more of this. As useless as it feels, she continues to run and look in the same places, as it is all she can do.

 

Not thirty metres away, Jamie lies on his front under the painted wooden platform of the Skyglider. It’s dry there and he’s sheltered in a shadow that makes him invisible to anybody else. Looking at the amusements being prematurely shut down, he is amazed by his powers, like a hero from one of the fairy tales she sometimes reads him. From his vantage, he only sees the bottom half of bodies, an ever-moving forest of legs, but his eyes easily find and then follow her Adidas Gazelles, filthy now as she sprints around like she’s trying to escape from something, different voices asking if there’s anything they can do, what did he look like and what was he wearing and where did she last see him, and he’s just about to crawl out, to run towards her and into her arms, but all of this madness paints just how much they need him and love him, so for now he’ll stay here watching them. The Garda car’s flashing lights turn the shielding weeds in front of him blue for a moment at a time, and across the midway he watches the Ferris wheel turn in ever-slower revolutions, nobody left in its cars now because of him. He looks back again to find her busy legs, to savour her desperate love for him for just a little longer.

 

Conor Griffin is from Tralee in Co. Kerry in the west of Ireland and lives in Dublin. His short fiction has been published in the Irish Times, Irish Independent and in literary journals including The Four Faced Liar, The Waxed Lemon, Crannóg and The Belfast Review. His debut novel The Shackles will be published by Sandycove/Penguin in 2027.