text: You hear about it all the time now, I mean, people just started disappearing. Kids first. Easy targets I guess. You'd hear stories about girls who disappeared in the woods of Maine. Inner-city kids, vanishing. All over the place. Just gone. We knew. I mean deep down, we did. Something in our psyche expressed it in our culture. Subtle shit, movies where children were possessed or disappear. Slenderman, I guess, was I guess the big one for a while, but that was years ago. Back before shit really started to get bad. My name is Ian. The reason I know about this stuff, about what's really going on, is because when my daughter was nine she was taken from me. Not by some monster, not by some disease or accident. If only she was so lucky. She was taken by the government. She was taken from me and experimented on and now, I don't even know. Okay, let me tell you how it all started. Actually, I can't really tell you how it started, the law books have been locked up a long time now, decades. But I can tell you what I think happened. You know those laws, the big ones, the long motherfuckers that nobody spends the time reading. Well. Shit started getting added in, bit by bit, stripping us of our rights. Nothing horrifying at first. No big jumps, nothing drastic, and like a bunch of frogs in hot water we just sat there and took it. Like we were the lucky ones in the Jacuzzi. She was eligible. That's the word they used: "Eligible." Like she was the luckiest kid in school because we were allowed to pay for healthcare. You know, she was never really all that sick. That's the fucking thing. Just a little cough, never bad, and she had really dry skin. God, she hated that, she just wanted to have nice skin. She'd see the pictures of these beautiful models, and she'd come home from school and tell me that one day that was going to be her. She wanted to look like that. She had the prettiest smile too. I'll never forget that, must have been pretty much the best damn thing in the world. But you don't know the stuff they do. You get there, and it's this beautiful facility and the people at the desk are exceptional. And they take your picture and you get this slick looking white card. On every one I've ever seen these people have these smiles. Like there isn't anything that could go wrong with the world. The kind of smile that says "Okay, I'm here. I made it. I finally made it." and we wait, and we wait, and we wait. and when they finally do see us they won't let her see the doctor with me in the room, because I wasn't "eligible." And she looked at me, with this little scared, sad smile. And gave me this little nod. Like it was all going to be okay, because she was going to be brave. And the door slid closed. And that's the last time I ever really saw my Anna.