Diana was three when she first vanished during hide-and-seek.
It took me hours to find her. And let’s be clear—no three-year-old is good at hiding. So after too many games that ended with me giving up, I strapped a camera to her head. What I saw that day still haunts me.
The Wyrd Interlude:
Not all mysteries scream for answers. Some simply whisper their presence, waiting to be noticed. In the gaps between what we see and what we know, the wyrd lingers, nudging us to question where the line between the impossible and the ordinary truly lies. This—is wyrd fiction.
It’s been fifteen years, and I still don’t understand. Maybe it was some freak accident of a universe beyond my comprehension.
It still keeps me up some nights.
I never told my daughter what I saw. I barely believed it myself. My wife would have been terrified—and I don’t want to put that worry on them.
But secrets have a way of coming back around.
It was just a normal Monday. My wife was at her book club and I had the luxury of watching football in an empty living room. Diana was in her first year of college. Full scholarship. Smart girl. God bless her.
Suddenly, the lights dimmed, a loud pop echoed, and Diana appeared in the chair beside me—knees drawn up, head buried in her hands. I was at her side before I could process what had happened.
“Diana,” I said, my hands resting on her shoulders. Startled, she reacted defensively, snapping, “Leave me alone, asshole!”
“Diana, it’s me. It’s Dad,” I said.
Her eyes turned up, and my heart broke. A bruise disfigured her left cheek, and tears streamed down her face.
As I looked her over, trying to piece together some kind of idea of what had happened, she surveyed our living room.
“I’m home…” she sounded surprised. She was drunk. Her eyes drifted, and the stench from her mouth was so potent that it made me feel drunk by proximity.
“I’m home,” she said.
“Yes, sweetheart, you’re home.” I smiled and gave her a hug. “It’s okay.”
I brushed her marked cheek and tried to keep my emotions controlled. “What happened?”
“I was at a party.” She pushed tears off her face. “Some guy — some jerk.”
“Did he hit you?” I asked, and it sparked a gruesome fantasy in my brain. I was driving ninety miles to some college party, beating the shit out of some twenty-year-old with a baseball bat and spending the night in jail.
“No,” she huffed. “I don’t want to talk about it.” She started crying again, and I pulled her close. We sat quietly for the rest of the football game. I gave her water and a sandwich.
“Where’s Mom?” she asked, some time later.
“Book club.”
“I need to talk to her.”
“You can talk to me.”
“It’s… personal stuff.”
“There’s nothing you can’t tell me. You’re in college, college kids drink and do dumb things. That’s life. If you were with some boy and —”
“Jesus, Dad, I wasn’t with some boy! I got drunk at a party, made a fool of myself, and just wanted to come home.”
“And that’s when you showed up here?”
She was silent and looked around the room. “Yeah.” Her eyes averted. “I suppose you’re curious about that… sudden appearance… you saw that?”
“I’m curious?”
“I’m sorry, Dad, I should’ve told you.”
“Tell me? I’m confused.”
She shrugged. “Yeah… that I can teleport.”
“Is that still happening?” I tried to keep my shock calm.
“What?” She was just as confused. “You know? Mom told me not to tell you.”
If life were a cartoon, my jaw would have hit the floor like Roger Rabbit. “Mom knows too?”
“She was the one who taught me how to control it. She said telling you would only make you worry.”
“Freak me out?” I responded, looking freaked out.
“I can’t believe Mom told you after all the grief she gave me about keeping it a secret,” she said.
“Mom didn’t tell me.”
“She didn’t?”
“Nope,” I said. “I knew this happened when you were a baby. I know you’re too young to remember, but let’s just say that no three-year-old is that good at hide and seek.”
A smile spread across her face, quickly blossoming into a hearty laugh.
“So, teleportation runs in the family?” I asked, trying to process the surreal truth.
Diana nodded yes.
“Well, how about that?” I fell back onto the couch.
“Sorry. Are you okay?”
“Oh, yes, I’m fine.”
She laughed. “You don’t look fine.”
I smirked and pointed to her bruised face. “What’s that about?”
“Missed my first few jumps,” she said. “Before I came here, I was crying at a bus stop, trying to focus my mind,” she rubbed her cheek. “It’s stupid. Mom told me that if you do it too fast, it’s like being punched in the —”
“Diana!” my wife called, and we both spun around.
There was a lingering silence. I couldn’t gather what to say, and neither could anyone else.
My wife, my partner in every decision, had kept this from me for over twenty years. But I suppose I did too, in a way. I couldn’t decide whether to be furious or impressed—or just confused.
Either way, that’s not a conversation to have with her while the kid is here.
I broke the brief silence as dads do: “So… how was book club?”
She forced a smile. “The book was bad, the wine was good.”
“Nice.”
Diana laughed and looked nervous.
“Hey,” I said, touching her face. “No worries. Fifteen years of mysteries solved in one night. But seriously, we’re talking about all the money we could have saved on airfare later.” She laughed and I pulled her close for a hug.
The Wyrd Curtain:
Some secrets hide in plain sight. Woven into the mundane until they suddenly demand to be seen. Even then, the strangest part isn’t the secret—it’s how much of it feels ordinary. Sometimes, the extraordinary is just family being family. Until next time—Wyrd World yet await.