"Your daughter is missing," they said, as the nurses inspected the room with the tied up patients, where the bed that Annabelle was in was gone, vaporized in a cloud of smoke. Her father asked them if they had any leads as to who took her, but the nurses were clueless. They only knew that she disappeared late last night, her bed seemingly missing. The Asylum had such high security that they wondered if anyone the little girl knew came and took her away, someone who knew how to get through the doors that locked when someone entered or left, someone who knew the hospital well enough to get through all the nurses with complete stealth. Her father knew of no one who wanted to take his sweet Annabelle Wayne away. He knew no one who wanted to take away her health and steal her to do God knows what (he feared sexual abuse, or becoming a sex slave, or a ransom). He told the nurses that they were awful guards to have something like this happen, that it would be all over the news, that they wouldn't live with themselves if this little girl was raped or murdered. He began to point his finger at every one of them, claiming that they should all be fired for this costly error, and that he will sue them for every penny this hospital made.

"I will find Annabelle! I will clean up the mess that you bitches made, and I will make sure she will get back home safely! My poor girl, trapped under this man's rule, a victim of child slavery, or even a murder! I will make sure this hospital will get sued! I will make sure all of you bitches will never get a job again because of this!"

Cassandra pulled him away, his tweed jacket nearly ripped from his back as he raved about how the nurses had very lazy eyes, their eyes always drooping to the floor to the point where they almost fall from their sockets, and this is why she was missing. He said that she will be safe once they find her, that the police were doing everything in their power to trace her down and keep her safe away from this man who threatened his sweet little dear Annabelle Wayne's life.

"You don't understand Cassie, these…these…bitches…these bitches!"

"Stop calling them bitches, Edward. These nurses helped our daughter before, and I'm sure they feel bad for their errors. We'll find her, don't worry. They couldn't have gone far."

"Of course they have! I know of criminals who take these children far away from here! Like, about three states away! She can't possibly be safe! I want her in my arms, right now, I want her safe, I want her secure, I want her to be with her father, and away from that godawful hospital and back home! I don't understand why she has to be in there again. You suggested it, and I put her in there, and now look at what these stupid bitches just did!"

"Her symptoms are not getting any better, Edward. She's still suffering from her schizophrenia. She's still having her little episodes. She needs to go back in there once we find her. She needs more help than ever, and they're not finding the right treatment for her. For God's sake Edward, they might even put her under ECT."

Cassandra could tell that his hands were beginning to shake, his entire body was hyperventilating. He couldn't imagine not having his daughter. She knew he loved her. Sometimes she thought he loved her too much. She knew if there wasn't a law between them he would've murdered all the nurses, murdered maybe even the loonies too, for keeping his daughter locked away, surrounded by men and women who didn't know her name, and possibly even abused by the pedophiles he knew these asylums had. The nurses never thought of separating them from his little girl. His little world that he had to keep safe and in harmony in his arms.

"She's six years old! She can't possibly have ECT at such a young age! Or even be in a hospital for so long…Cassie, I'm so worried about my daughter…she's still having these episodes, and she's gone and off to God knows where from some bastard who's probably asking for ransom money or something…I love her Cassie, I can't imagine her being gone from my grasp, being hurt again…I want her back."

She nodded, as the rain streamed on the windows, the smaller drops being devoured by the larger ones, like slugs with wide open mouths that swallowed the others whole.

"I know. But we can't just wish for her to come back. We have to find her, and we have to trust the police in what they're doing. I'm sure we can find her before anything bad happens to her. We can't keep worrying about this and imagine the worst has happened to our daughter. Maybe she's okay. Maybe someone who had no evil intentions at all picked her up. But the more we stress out and worry, the less we'll be able to find her."

"You're always so calm, Cassie. The hell is up with that."

He listened to the sounds of the raindrops smacking the screens, the sounds of the cars passing by with rainwater under their tires, the sound of the wind blowing, whistling the harmonies of the rain. He thought it was talking to him, singing a lullaby that sounded strangely like "Baa Baa Black Sheep".

"But you don't understand how serious this is. I'm one hundred percent sure that someone who picked her up did have evil intentions in mind. I really don't think it would be my father, her grandpa, who wanted to take her to his house, teach her all about how wonderful Catholics are…I'm sure if I met him again, he would do that. I'm sure he's going to tell me I'm not raising my daughter right. My father, he tries to be a good man but I know he just forces that on me. I never wanted to be Catholic. I never wanted to be religious. I just…wanted to live my life the way I want to. Protecting my daughter."

"Your father can't possibly have thought about picking Annabelle up, would he? I mean, he's all the way back in Minnesota…"

"I'm sure he would've, Cassie. I'm sure he would've wanted to save my children with the backhand of God. That bastard…I don't know if he did this, but if he did, I thought I was rid of him so long ago. I can't imagine seeing his face again."

He could imagine more of his hairs becoming gray, his teeth withering, his eyes becoming baby-like. Like his father. The look that he always hated. He wished he was like Dorian Gray, never having to age. Never worrying about being 80 at 30 years old.

He could feel the trigger to his pistol being squeezed lightly, as he thought of his father back in Minnesota, what seemed to be many eons ago…

"Son, do you know why Adam and Eve were ashamed of their naked bodies?"

He wasn't sure why.

He always looked at his naked body and never felt ashamed. In fact, he was proud of it. He even thought of having sex with a few women before, but he knew his father wouldn't like that, being a Catholic, believing all sperm was sacred. Believing that using condoms was a waste of time or evil.

"I don't know," he said.

His father grinned, almost seeming to be docile. "You don't know, hm?"

His reaction was simply just to grin back, to show him that he understood what he was saying, that his jokes were funny, that he agreed with him. But he knew in a moment, his father wasn't going to laugh anymore.

"Son, it's because Satan has influenced them to eat one of God's fruits, and that has caused sin and agony to appear. You're smiling now because you don't understand what that means. You're just trying to show me that you agree with me, when in actuality, you don't. You don't understand any of these things, no matter how much I try to teach you them, and you seem to be skipping on Bible school. Can you tell me why you are, Ed?"

He couldn't find a reasonable answer. But his smile was wiped away by the palm of his father's demeanor, and he thought now he had to tell him the truth, otherwise his father was going to try to smack the answer from him with his old, wrinkled hands with the blue veins riveted through his wrists, even if he was only about 36 years old.

"Because I find Bible school boring. I just want to hang out with my friends like most kids do. I don't really want to spend that time studying a book that is about thousands and thousands of years old. Its stuff probably doesn't apply to us anymore."

His father smiled again, that white bladed smile that he soon grew to abhor. "Ah, so you find Bible school boring, eh? It's what we did for many generations, son. We just studied our asses off and it got us to some pretty good places. I'm CEO of a very successful phone company, and I study my Bible every night and every morning. I want you to have some good values son, that's all I wanted. I just wanted you to be a good boy, to be a man any father can be proud of."

"I don't want to be," he stated, his voice flat, monotone. "I just want to be…want to be…want to be…"

"What the Sam Hell do you want to be, boy?"

"Just me!" he pierced. "I just want to have my own life, my own kids, my own girlfriend and wife, without you telling me what I can't be and what I can be! I don't want to be involved in this high, fancy life you have! Your wonderful life that I don't want! I don't want to be the average American with the white picket fence and a dog and all that, I just want to be who I want to be, without you constantly watching over me! I'm sick of it! I don't want to study some book that doesn't apply to our life anymore and go through all these hoops and leaps just to please you! Just…please don't force me into these roles you want me to be anymore when they don't apply to me. I just want to be what I always wanted to be, which is just a regular person working at a regular 9 to 5 job, having a regular kid and a regular wife. You know why? Because I don't want your fancy-shmancy life. I don't want to wear a plastic mask with that smile forever imprinted on my face. I don't want to go to church everyday and act like I'm this haughty and rich and pure person who's never done anything wrong! And that's just how I'm going to live!"

He felt his father was just as disgusting as a viper, with its jagged teeth, with its turpentine eyes, with its serpentine ways that convinced Eve to eat the apple.

His father was the main reason his paradise was gone, his little Eden.

He forced him into everything. The soccer games, the debate team, he worked his ass off to be nothing he wanted to be. He was doing everything to become a fake. Becoming plastic, death.

As he watched his father's blue holed eyes, he grew to hate him. He grew to hate his genes. Even at the age of 17 he could find a few feathers of gray hair, maybe a wrinkle or two in his eyes. A progressive aging disease. He knew he was going to be old like him, in only a few years, and he hated him, because he was becoming him.

He could hear the belt beginning to unravel. He knew he wasn't going to be abused this time. He had a plan. He was lucky that he was right next to the front door, where his father was possibly so wrought with his senility at 36 years old, that he didn't care if even the police saw him smacking his son with a belt.

He wondered if he was going to get that old at 36 years old. To the point of not caring that he was abusing someone, his mind rifled with dementia.

"Well son, I hate to do this, but I gotta teach you…I gotta teach you…"

He was already bald at 36 years old, his face was already a stretched wrinkled paper at 36 years old, and his eyes already had that baby innocence, even if he knew he wasn't so innocent, with his father hitting him just to be "taught a lesson" about the Bible. His father was old in his morals as old as his face, as they didn't eat shellfish, though when his wife was having her period she always remained near him, smiling that caustic plastic smile that Edward soon grew to hate. His father divorced his first wife, without believing that you always had to remain through her in sickness and in health, till death did they part, but he never knew his mother, and he never heard his old, wrinkled father ever speak of her. Just simply his trophy wife Michelle, who had that rosy grin, that bloody face mask, and from what he heard about his mother and the rumors about her from other places that were simply whispered in his unintended ears, was that she was schizophrenic and locked away at the Minnesota State Hospital. He could visit her, but he knew he didn't want to, because he wanted to fly away from his nest, fly away from his grandpa father and from his beautiful cellophane wife and to another state he knew he wouldn't give a rat's ass about, a state they affectionately referred to Indiana.

And to have even worse genes, the linger of schizophrenia in his brain, he grew more afraid of his family, and he wished he could detach himself from his blood lines, into someone else's.

Life never worked that way.

He was going to become a Hoosier, someone who lived in a state that didn't exist to the rest of America.

He took so much money from his bank account. He knew his PIN number and how much he usually stowed away. He knew right when he would find out his money was stolen, Grandpa Dad would change his PIN, but he knew he wouldn't bother calling the police on his son.

His son, a criminal, who took from him 550,000 dollars. And he had all that, in cash, in his duffel bag. He was ready to leave this awful, senile place that smelled of beer and piss and old medication.

His father already had heart and cholesterol problems, at an age where people thought you were alive and vivid and free.

But his father was becoming a cold dead gray, already at 36.

He imagined himself as old as his father, already wrinkled at 36, already with frail hands that hurt so much, already with the belt at his torso, ready to hit his 17-year-old son as if he was a petulant child.

He was ready to leave. He opened the door with his duffel bag carrying his father's 550,000 dollars, and he knew he wasn't ever going to turn back. He wasn't going to acknowledge his father, he was going to hope he wouldn't have a white head full of snow at 36, he hoped he wouldn't be swallowing a river of medication at his age, and he said only one word to him, as he touched the doorknob with his fingers he feared would become as brittle as his father's.

"Goodbye."

He still held the belt so firmly in his hands, his wrinkled fingers shaking, his blue baby eyes beginning to form tears. He was like a baby again, at 36 years old, as he wondered how his own son could do this to him, how he could rob him blind and start a new beginning without him.

"I'm sorry," he said.

"You better be. I won't be back. I'll be starting a new life. I'll have a child and wife, without you constantly telling me what I'm doing wrong. I would prefer it that way, Dan."

He no longer called him his father. And his father no longer called him his son.

"Bye Edward. Have a fun life."

It's been ten years since he left his father.

He thought his wife was going to let go of the steering wheel, her fingers so hooked into them, so sweaty, so hurt, as she thought over his past.

"You changed your name and you never met your father again. You moved to Indiana, where he wouldn't bother finding you. Because here in Indiana, it's a forgotten land. No one really remembers this place. But I did the same thing, Edward. I left my father and mother too. I didn't change my name, but I knew they wouldn't care to see me again and they wouldn't be searching for me either. My father was an awful man. At least yours was highly successful and cared about you at least a little."
"Yeah, but I can't stand knowing I'm related to him." He pulled out a Camel cigarette, flickered the flame on his lighter, and began to smoke. He always had to smoke in a car ride. He never did it near Annabelle, but he still shook from the lack of cigarettes in his system from being with her. That was the sacrifice of being with his lovely daughter. The daughter he raised himself, without his father's help.

"He's got a disease where his age rapidly catches up with him. I think I'm beginning to get a few gray hairs, even though I'm only 27. I wonder if I'm going to be as old as him when I'm 36. Even older when I'm 40. Nearly dead when I'm 50. They said my father isn't going to live past 50, but yet he's still here, but he doesn't have a lot of time left. And I still haven't visited him in so long. He might die without me seeing him at all. Isn't that sad that I don't care about my father? Because he would force the Bible on me with his belts, and the teachers would often hit my hand with rulers, even though this is the modern era, no longer the damn '60s. They always had me try to remember all this shit that I knew no longer applied to us, and even if I might one day believe in God (maybe), I wouldn't think of myself as Catholic. Or any of the sects really. They seem to be all wrong."

Cassandra grabbed his carton of cigarettes, got out a long thin stick, lit, and blew a cascade of smoke that warmed them from the cold, rainy day that nearly stuck out to their jackets and hoodies.

"My father…I hated that bastard. Did you know that he abused me? Molested me? I could never forgive him, even when he's dead and cold in the ground. He always drank. He would drink an entire bottle of wine, a pint of vodka, things that would get anyone completely drunk, yet sometimes I still thought he still had a rational mind, that he knew what he was doing, and he didn't even had one inch of regret for what he did."

Her words were hollow, cold as the cold rainy day, and she wished that the cigarette was her joint so she could relax about thinking about her father's abuse, but she always thought that he was everywhere, always scraping his eyes to look for her, to abuse and rape her again. She wished he was dead, but ever since he left, he went to AA and tried to rebuild his life. Without her. Without thinking about the damage he caused to his daughter.

"Whore," he said. "Slut."

Her body was so old, so crooked, but yet he took advantage of it, even though she was only 14. Her bare, diaphanous skin was always seeped away of their purity. Her mouth was always vile, so dirty, she wished she could wash it with soap without the disgusting aftertaste. Her fingers had to touch dirty things. Things she never wanted to touch, even if many years later she had sex with her husband, Edward.

Oral. Is that what they called it? It sounded like such a hideous word. She never wanted to say it. It conjured up images of her father. She was raped with her mouth. Her mouth that had the plasticine appearance, the rosy lips that she never wished to see, that she wished she could wash away in the shower, but the blood still remained. The semen still remained on her lips too.

God has forsaken her for all her life. She was abused and tortured for many years. It was until she was 16 that she left, as soon as she got her driver's license, that she drove away from her drunk father's cavern and into Indiana, away from Michigan, the state of Hell. In fact, she even lived in a place called Hell before she left to the Phantom State, the state without anything interesting inside it, without legs and without arms. There were no gods in Indiana too. While in Michigan, she knew that Satan lived not in Hell, but Detroit.

Her father was always thirsty. He always drank, and drank, and drank. Bottles of sherry and champagne would be devoured by his mouth that wasn't raped but evil with his twisted kisses. He sipped vodka during work. He claimed it made him function. He claimed it made him go through the work week.

But there was his rages when he came back home. He hit his wife several times, to the point that after Cassandra left, she left him too. And he claimed she was the love of his life, not his small, cherubic lolita named Cassandra, who he continued to ravage. He thought of her as the garden of Eden, so pure until he tasted Satan's apple.

She wished when he saw one of his pistols that she would've shot her father. Although she considered the possibility of her father one day using the gun on her if he ever got pissed enough, she never touched it, and let it lay, touched by the dust of God's eyes.

The only thing she could do was escape one day, as she stared at the window, as she saw all the happy people walking outside, playing. All the preteens having fun in the sun. But she never had fun. She never had friends except for Edward. She never even knew anyone who could stand her, not even her daughter, who she loved, and wanted to raise her child better than her mother, who was so passive to realize she was being abused, and definitely more than her father, who never cared about her, and only thought of her as a commodity to his delirium.

She cut the ignition with her key, and she knew she would be much happier without him, without this bastard of a father.

And she soon realized he was happier without her, as he soon tried to rebuild his life without his daughter. Believing that the alcohol caused so much damage, so much pain, that he never had his own daughter, his own wife tell him that.

"Fuck him!"

She turned the key.

Her organs were crawling with insects. She imagined worms digging in the trees of her lungs, the beetles in the carcass of her heart, the maggots in her intestines. Her insides were slowly roasting inside her, slowly turning black, charred, creosote and ashy. She never thought of her insides as alive as soon as her father touched her with the fingers of death. She thought they would spill out of her at any moment. So sometimes she would wear a corset, to keep them inside. Sometimes she wrapped them with Saran-wrap. Bandages. She wished they would stop trying to crawl out of her, but she had to blame her father for that. She had to blame her mother for that too, for never acknowledging what was going inside her satin and pink bedroom.

The car roared to life.

She left. She ran away. She never wanted to see him again. She hated him. She wished he would choke on her mouth. She wished her tongue was a dagger that she could use to cut out her father's tongue. He never deserved it anyways. He never deserved to speak.

The car drove out of his home, and into God Knows Where.

She drove for so long. She was going to drive until she ran out of money to pay for gas. She wanted to run so far from her father that she didn't care if she even drove all the way to Canada, drove all the way to the Atlantic Ocean, to Mexico, to Brazil. She just wanted to get away from him, from his ripe fingers, from his mouth covered in rotting meat.

It was early morning, in the dawn of summer when she ran out of money running away, and she was stuck in Terre Haute, Indiana. She saw the Terre Haute Asylum for the Mentally Ill next to her still car, out in the cold whispers of morning, out in the pink rimmed dawn with the stars glittering through the turpentine glass, and she thought she needed to go there. She was probably insane, to want to drive to Canada to get away from her father. To think her insides were dead. But she couldn't shake that belief from her head. As many times as she hit her head on the steering wheel, trying to keep herself awake, she couldn't stop being so crazy, that her father infected her with this madness. She thought she would soon begin drinking, soon abusing anyone who wished to be with her, soon making herself drenched in wine and champagne.

She was awake for 36 hours. She thought she should admit herself in the Asylum, just so she could get a goodnight's sleep on their Haldol and Thorazine.

It was until she met a man, with a few white hairs in his jet black head, wearing a tweed jacket and smoking a Camel cigarette, saw her car, approached her with confidence that she admitted to herself that she wished she had, and as he pulled out the long drag of his cigarette, his voice looking like a smoky ghost, he said, "Hey, you've been sitting there for a couple of hours now, trying to stay awake. Do you want me to drive you to my place? You seem really stressed out, Jesus Christ your eyes are black. You need a good rest in my house, not this insane asylum. I'm sure you don't belong there, babe."

And for the first time in what seemed to be so long, she smiled.

"My name is Cassandra. I appreciate the offer, but…I think I need a couple of their strong ass medicine to put me to sleep. I've only slept 6 hours in four days. Just…it's a long story, I can't tell you. I really need to…"

"I thought about coming here too, but turns out I changed my mind." He snuffed out his cigarette, the small lines of silver smoke beginning to crinkle and dissolve, and he smiled back, as he told her his name. Edward.

"I ran out of gas and I got nowhere to go. I ran out of money. I just…drove for so long with so little sleep that I just…don't know where I'm going…"

She knew she wanted to go to the land of God Knows Where, but she wondered if it was a land she made up in her head. Her head always seemed to create so many imaginative things that she wasn't sure exactly if they were real or not. They seemed absurd, but realistic. Surreal.

"Then we can just call someone to tow away your car and you can get it later and you can come to my house and have a nice coffee and talk about our drama. Sound good to you? Or maybe getting some damn sleep, I mean…"

She thought she had no choice. She had no health insurance and no money, so they wouldn't be able to keep her very long in the Asylum, and this Edward appeared to be loaded. He had about 500,000 dollars in the bank (Where he got it, she never asked.) He promised later tonight he would take her to a nice restaurant and they could discuss why they came to this shitty state and talk about their shitty fathers and talk about possibly building a brand new not shitty future together, without their parents conspiring everything for them.

And she said she would like that, as he pulled a blanket from the back of his van and a pillow, and as they drove as the summer began to get hotter, the sun rising and opening its golden eyes, she fell asleep, listening to talk radio discuss about the governors running in Indiana, not that she cared any damn bit.

"You know what's one thing I never understood though, Cassie?" he asked.

"What?" The cigarette dangled from her lips, like bits of paper stuck through her bloody corpse. The ashes in her death, ever since her father had devoured her.

"Why do you always wear corsets? Why do you always wrap up your body? I think you look great. You don't have to do that."

She had to.

To keep her life together. To keep her marriage with Edward together. To keep her love for Annabelle, wherever she was, inside of her, so her heart wouldn't pop from her chest and roll its arteries and veins to the world.

"Why?"

And she told him as they kept driving to find their daughter, their sweet miss little Annabelle Wayne, that she didn't know.

And although she tried to keep herself calm, she wished the same would never happen to her daughter. She hoped she was safe, and in good arms.

And not with a rotting dead chest like hers.