The Abduction of Mia

New piece I have written for the story, this one helps to explain the origin of Mia's violent nature and what leads her to kill.


Mia was eleven years old when she was kidnapped by two men outside the supermarket in her town. Her mother had gone back inside to collect some forgotten items from the shopping list, leaving Mia alone for just a few minutes. She doesn’t remember their exact words, but she will never forget the tall man’s toothy grin and the short man’s sweaty palms. By the time she realized they weren’t taking her home, it was far too late to call for help.
Night fell and Mia no longer recognized where they were. They had been driving into the heart of Montana for what seemed like hours and Mia was exhausted. The men pulled down a long stretch of dirt road and pulled up at a one level house, which looked more like a shack than a home. The windows had been boarded shut and sealed, broken shards of glass gathered in a pile underneath the window sill. The white paint was chipped away and showed the rotted brown guts of the wood underneath. Termites dined on the splinters and gnawed at the knots, leaving tiny craters in the walls and stairs leading into the house. Mia recalls the musty scent of mold and moisture emanating from the basement as she was carried down the stairs and placed into a small cot. The small light bulb offered little visibility as it swung gently in the middle of the room, moved occasionally by a small drift from the cracks in the wood. Each time they came downstairs, she would look only at the light through watery eyes, eventually weeping silently while her childhood ebbed away. The food they gave her afterwards was solely for their own benefit; skinny girls were not to their liking.
Days passed outside the windows but she couldn’t tell how many. The light bulb eventually died and Mia was cast into the Darkness. For almost four days she was held in total blackness, the visits became more sporadic and unorganized as time crawled on. They preferred coming in the dark, which left Mia all alone during the few hours of daylight. Each night the door opened, Mia’s heart hammered at her chest and her headed started to spin, vomit threatened at the back of her throat. She began to fight back, scratching at their faces and hands, biting whatever they put near her face. The more they came, the harder she fought. By the third day, she had used enough time and sunlight to fashion a jagged blade from a rusty piece of her cot, having ground the metal against the concrete floor. The short man came first, the tall man waited upstairs for his turn. In the pitch black room, there was no light to reflect off the metal; he never saw it coming. Instinct told her to kill him right away, but the Darkness made her wait. She felt his breaths get shorter and louder, and knew it was time to strike. Even with no light she could tell where his face was and stared up at him as she stabbed his neck over and over. Blood pooled around her and she pulled herself from underneath his lifeless body, tiptoeing up the stairwell to the first floor. At the top of the stairs she peeked through the open door and saw the tall man with his back to her, seated at a table and newspaper in hand. An axe rested on the wall behind him, within her reach. She crept out from the basement stairwell and gripped the axe with both hands, and raised it above his head before she brought it crashing down on his skull. The only identifying piece of his head were his teeth, spread across the kitchen table and floor. Mia was found walking down the highway, the dress she had been wearing when she was first caught was covered with blood. The officers said she was eerily calm.


Copyright Liam Feldstein © 2010