Dawn Miller
Later, after the officer fishes the red hat out of the lake—adrift like flotsam on surface tension—after he notes the two small moles like an exclamation mark on the girl’s bloated cheek before the paramedics take her body away—the barista will say she was making a chai latte, extra milk, extra cinnamon, and didn’t notice the girl although had a hazy recollection of the hat: pilled, set askew like a French beret, a smudge of dirt along the edge. The barista will tell the officer the girl asked to use the bathroom—without buying anything!—but the girl’s face remained a blur, an amalgamation of nose, mouth, eyes—I mean isn’t everyone just a different arrangement? the barista will say, toothpicking a heart into frothy foam. And no, I didn’t give her the bathroom key.
The bakery owner won’t remember the girl either, only her scuffed runners, threadbare at the toes, that scraped through dirt he’d swept into a neat pile on the sidewalk—leftover debris from lingering blotches of snow—and how he muttered, What the hell? as she tramped by—like he was invisible, for Christ’s sake! Just another kid in black, he’ll tell the officer, another punk probably strung out on something—Lucy or Roxy or Molly—the way she kicked the pile across the cement like flour tossed across a breadboard. How she never even looked back once.
The salesclerk dressing the mannequin in the window display will say she only recalled the shadow of a dark figure—a tinge of scarlet? —fall across the dummy’s bone-pale frame as she eased its knit outfit off, ready to grab a sundress before the pack of teen boys loping down the sidewalk shouted rude comments through the plate-glass—because even a plastic woman with no nipples, no genitals was fodder for wolf-whistles and obscene gestures. The salesclerk slipped one garment off, one garment on—a practiced sleight of hand—not bothering to glance up at the face passing by—no time to wonder what else was wrong with the world because she had her own goddamned shit to worry about.
The social worker (brain cloudy from scotch the night before) who knocked shoulders with the girl as they rounded a corner, will say she had a hazy recollection of a muttered sorry, sorry—but the social worker was late for a meeting, and her boss would give her hell again even though she clocked more hours than most—no extra pay, no thanks, nothing to fill up the void that burrowed deeper every day like a worm in her chest, a pressure that made sleep impossible because of the revolving-door of need, of hopelessness, of anger! weaving through people’s lives—and how she couldn’t even walk down a fucking street without some nitwit slamming into her like she didn’t even exist.
Even the jogger—the last person to see the girl alive—who passed her on the bridge right there—right there! —on the CCTV camera video later aired in a loop on the local news—only remembered an indistinct presence as he adjusted his ear buds because the girl was simply another dark shape plodding along—a head, body, legs—a sob?
Figured it was probably just the squeak of my new runners, the jogger will tell the officer, (still clutching the red hat, dripping onto the sidewalk), and he was trying to make better time (a personal best!)—and there was nothing to signal trouble, nothing that shouted pay attention!—nothing that screamed anyone needed to get involved.
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Dawn Miller is the winner of the 2024 Forge Literary Magazine Flash Fiction Contest, 2024 winner of the Toronto Star Short Story Contest, Best Microfiction 2024 and 2025, and placed second in the 2025 Bath Flash Fiction Award contest. Her stories can be found in many journals and anthologies. She is the proud recipient of a 2025 Canada Council for the Arts grant and 2024 SmokeLong Quarterly Fellowship for Emerging Writers. She lives in Picton, Ontario, Canada. Learn more at www.dawnmillerwriter.com