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the feed, our situation in pr é cis:
    THE KRAVEN ISLAND MYSTERY
    Authorities Baffled— A Hundred Gone
    Information comes thick and fast: news clips of baffled authorities’ press conferences, interviews with mystified friends and strangers from the mainland and the outer islands, some of them in tears— they’re out there looking. Davy too?
    Then parents and friends and lovers of the missing— us!— plead with kidnappers, in case— wait! is this a ransom situation? — offering millions if whoever has us lets us go. In extreme closeup, the governor of South Carolina reports that the military, state police, local cops, supernumeraries, firefighters from three counties are blanketing the area. With an election coming up, he weeps. “And the sickening thing about this is that we’ve scoured the town and surrounding farmland, walked the perimeter of the island and dredged the channel and no living person is left behind on Kraven island to tell the tale.” Drama queen.
    â€œOur men found food cooking on the stove in some of those houses. Their pillows were still warm!”
    Cut to Miss Edna Massingale, Crocker County historian. “It’s as if they vanished from the face of the earth.”
    In the minutes— days?
    This is when I begin to wonder.
    In the weeks?
    In the unspecified time since our mysterious disappearance, our houses look the same: no broken glass or shattered doorframes, no excavations or bullet holes, no signs of violence like bodies or crude barricades, nothing to suggest that we’d made a valiant last stand before we vanished or fled or were forcibly removed.
    How long have we been here?
    The mayor of Charlton has the nerve to wonder if we were seized by mass hysteria, running ahead of natural disaster, or plague? He looks concerned, but, God!
    Viewers! What if there really is an epidemic? What if it threatened you, out there watching in your safe houses, snug among your pillows and panting for more? Bent on reassuring you, he blathers on, when all we want to know is that you’re looking for us.
    Worse. On our first day in this unknown, unknowable location, nobody knows, but everybody has a theory. Experts speculate at length, talking heads, huge and impotent, blathering on. Geologists, anthropologists, sociologists, show up on the giant screen; historians with graphs, sociologists with pie charts have opinions; officials and bounty hunters, mercenaries and earnest mainlanders air their views. A furious merchant claims we ran out on thousands in bad debts.
    Asshole, we were stolen.
    Meanwhile, even though Ray’s holding him down, Father— my father!— comes to a boil. I should have seen it coming but I’m crazy with looking for Davy down here in the plaza and up there on the screen, and Davy isn’t anywhere.
    Cameras compound our grief by picking up details specific to us. They’ve been inside our houses— Father’s cluttered kitchen, filthy dishes in the sink and in his bedroom, dirty clothes strewn on the floor. Close shot of his bedside table, that tin can with the fork standing upright in the baked beans. What happened, Neddy. What happened to Patrice? Shock cuts take us from Ray’s sprawling, beautiful Azalea House to Kara Maxwell’s cottage to the shack where Betsy Till and I played every day, wait, is this a documentary? Then …
    My teeth lock. Close shot of the bed where I growled goodnight to Davy, not knowing it was goodbye. The bastard, bastards dished out a long closeup of our bedroom, where my lover got up in the dark and without an explanation, left.
    It’s all up close and so personal that it reams me out, and I’m not the only one, people all around me struggle, anxious and twitching with distress. It’s all wrong, looking into the past we were yanked out of … how long ago?
    Back when we had lives, and that’s the issue.
    Nobody could collect and edit that much