The night after the boy was kidnapped, a group of teens got high and formed the Ministry of Pre-Emptive Memorials. The Minister of Stuffed Animals, The Minister of Flowers and the Minister of Signed Letters and Anonymous Poems embarked with the others in pairs to locate the goods they had been assigned to gather. Their work was finished by dawn, and they photographed it, though the memorial lacked the contribution of the Minister of Wreaths (who had been arrested lurking naked in the meat section of an all-night supermarket). The memorial did not bear witness to the boy. What the friends had prepared was meant to brace the world against a calamity yet to come.
But the next morning a woman who had knit a toque for the kidnapped boy mistook these flowers piled with crucifixes and homemade cards as a gathering undertaken for the boy; she added her offering. She had seen footage from the mall’s security camera, on TV first, then online and it doesn’t look like a kidnapping. The kidnapper emerges from the crowd of holiday shoppers. They share a few exchanges, man and boy, and then vanish down a hall hand-in-hand. A comment posted online described the uncoloured blur of their encounter as two ghosts in the afterlife meeting again for the very first time. The woman only knew how to knit toques, which was fine; the days were getting shorter. She promised the boy if she learned to knit mitts she would leave a pair to match the hat.

The boy’s father had already destroyed the memorial created for the missing child. Neighbours had started it at the entrance of a local park. The boy’s father shredded hand-drawn laments and snapped stems as he shouted, “He isn’t dead!” Gathering the debris into a new pile, he ignited it using gas from a jerry can and his car’s cigarette lighter.

The boy’s father also had reservations about the candle-lit vigil organised by their church, but he was too busy keeping pressure on the police to imagine the proper protest. His wife spent the whole vigil onstage, though she wasn’t really there. Eyes closed on the encouragement each speaker extended to the crowd, eyes closed on the glow of the crowd’s flickering support, the boy’s mother did what she could to keep close to her son. She sent herself into him. If it had to be this way, it had to; she alone in her love would be the last thing he sensed or saw.

In the passing days, she kept this up, increasing her efforts ten-fold, even as she and her husband held press conferences, gave interviews to reporters and local talk show hosts. Their boy became a lesson to other children — the don’ts and dos of strangers. Many of these children, this ancient tale new in their ears, wondered what it would be like to be the boy’s friend or cousin or sibling or (their stomachs twisting even to think it) — what would it be like to be that, that taken away? A pastor told the story of Christ’s empty tomb and said the boy, like that abandoned burial, reminds us of the power of what is missing. One parishioner wondered if this reminder was worth the boy’s loss before deciding it was; as the pastor said, the boy teaches us to hope. He will be found. It all will have been for the best.

By then the boy was dead. The death had not been a part of the kidnapper’s plan. Before finding the boy, the kidnapper had taken pictures of different spaces in his own home. He had secretly poured over the photos at work, trying to decide where in his house the boy would live. To him, great men coined new absences, removed whole peoples, their paces, from the world’s endless racing. The room had been right. The boy not. He would never be a great man but that was OK. Soon he would find another boy. Soon he would find another time to take another life and hold it. Soon, in another room, if need be.

Soon the boy was gone from the headlines, gone from small talk, gone from TV. Other events overtook him. The sun’s rays grew more dangerous. Rebels barricaded themselves in a classroom of first-graders. A stewardess birthed mid-flight a little one she wasn’t even aware she’d conceived. One octogenarian, though, did wake suddenly in the night months later with the urge to pray for the safety of that poor kidnapped boy she had heard about in the news. She pushed through the papers piled in the kitchen, searching for something with his name. But the page was gone, the boy’s name with it. She resigned to saying her prayer not for him alone but for all lost little boys, and maybe for all the lost little girls, which she herself sometimes thought she was, looking in the mirror, because inside, inside living felt the same, but outside, my God, what happened?

First runner-up: Alexander Cole's "The Kali Yuga"

Second runner-up: Grace O'Connell's "Annie, You Foolish Girl, I Love You"