The dogwood trees were blooming on my aunt’s block the week Kansas City lost a child it never learned to claim. I was nine. My aunt’s house off E 62nd Terrace was where everybody ended up on the weekend. Music loud enough to reach the street, meat on the grill, my cousins and I running between the kitchen and the porch and the front lawn, all of us sweating and laughing in the thick humidity of a gathering storm. A life that was not amazing, but was mine and was sweet enough.
A boogeyman arrived in Kansas City that spring, and he did not leave for four years.
The TV was on in the living room. I walked past it and caught the fragmented edge of a news anchor’s words. A child’s body. Some woods at 59th & Kensington…