The Stitches

As Dierdre stared at the floor she realized for the first time that the paper was not blank or just some advertisements as she had assumed but were handwritten pages. A chill spread through her as she recognized her father's handwriting. She did not know why fear was there, but fear had come and he was telling her that something was wrong. She walked the house room to room, leaving shreds of paper In her wake. She checked every room. Her father was not there. Her father never left the house. The drugs were numbing her panic but fear was still there, standing always just out of sight. He's an old friend who's always around to let you know when things aren't right. The coffee pot gurgled and began to drip.

"Fuckin' bastard never leaves me alone."

She bent and began picking up the strips of paper, doing her best to keep an order of sorts to the madness. There were words and what she guessed must have been crude sketches, of what she could not tell. The rustling of the paper reminded her of school and of the woods in Autumn. Some of the pages were several years old from the discoloration alone. They felt dry and crisp in her soft hands.

Dierdre had made her way through most of the pot of coffee and still understood little of what the pages contained. She had spent the past two hours piecing pages together like a morbid puzzle. There were stories of witches and folk tales from Germany. There were sketches of public hangings and burnings with notes off to the side giving dates and names. The only things she could find that seemed to connect any of this were that they all took place in the late seventeenth century and a name that her father had written on nearly every page: Vermisst. She had never known her father to be interested in such things. He had never been a superstitious man or even much of a history buff, but these pages showed a man with an obsession. If she wasn't positive that the handwriting was her father's she would swear it had been something her mother had written. At the bottom of one of the pages it said: I see him in the woods sometimes.