“Gone? Well, where is it?!” Josh asked.
Mel shrugged. “How’d I know? There’s lots of places!” she replied innocently.
Josh groaned inwardly. This is what he got for questioning a 10 year old. Actually, this is what he got for volunteering to take a case where a 10 year old was the only witness. He had always thought being a CIA agent would mean doing cool stuff, like climbing up the side of buildings in the middle of the night or firing at men in black suits firing at him from speeding Mercedes in the middle of the night. Questioning 10 year olds at 4 O’clock in the afternoon was not what he had been planning on.
“Let’s start over. When did you last see it?” he asked her, understanding at last why Patience 101 had been required for his training.
“I was walking Mico to a friend’s house. Mom told me to bring her mom a message. It was in a black sealed envelope, with silver writing. She told me I must not open it or give it to anyone except Liz’s mom. A black car stopped by the curb and a man leaned out the window. He grabbed the envelope from my hand and drove off with it, so I ran home and told Mom it was gone. That’s when she called you,” Mel explained for the tenth time.
She didn’t know why she had agreed to work with this man. She had already told him everything she knew, so why did he keep asking her to tell him again? She hadn’t thought the agent would be so difficult. Perhaps he was having trouble hearing her.
Josh, meanwhile, was wondering what the consequences would be if this little witch suddenly disappeared and was never heard from again. Of course, if he were her mother, he’d be relieved to hear about that, but mothers could be peculiar sometimes.
Josh and Mel stood there and stared at each other for a moment, each growing more annoyed by the second. Finally, Josh cleared his throat. “What was in the envelope?” he asked.
Mel looked at him with big eyes wide. “The Thing,” she said, wondering how he could have landed his job as an agent if he didn’t even know something so obvious.
Josh felt even more nervous, but he just wrote it down. It wasn’t like he could do much, with only a 10 year old’s word for evidence. It was probably just some note about the PTA meeting, anyway.
“And now it’s with the man in the black car,” he said, wondering if he should feel like he’d accomplished something or not.
Mel shook her head. “It’s gone,” she whispered.
“Yes, but we’ll get it back once we find the man,” he said, hoping it would be good enough. He should have known better.
“You won’t find the letter with the man. It’s gone,” Mel whispered. “The car just disappeared.”
“You imagined it, cars don’t disappear,” Josh tried to reassure her. He didn’t care much whether she felt good or not, but if she cried, he would have to listen to her.
“No, you don’t understand. It was there, and then it vanished!” Mel whimpered.
Josh sighed and handed her a handkerchief. “Don’t cry,” he said firmly. “Whatever happened, we’ll find out.” Why was the CIA involved in this, anyway?
“No, you won’t. There’s nothing to find out, the car is gone!” Mel kept insisting.
“Maybe I should go file my report,” Josh murmured uneasily, shifting towards the door.
Just then, he looked out the window and saw a black car parked by the curb. In front of his eyes, the car vanished into thin air.
Josh stood there by the door, staring out the window, then he turned towards Mel. Why hadn’t he noticed it before? The deep, dark eyes, the glowing skin, the ebony whispy hair. He should have seen it! Mel was still looking up at him, with her large eyes pleading.
“Find him,” she whispered, before fading away.
Josh stared at where Mel had been standing just a second before. He understood why, now, that this case was so important. The Other Worlders didn’t appreciate being robbed.
“I really should have taken the murdered Panda case,” he muttered to himself.
End
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139,821 Literary Works • 672,772 Reviews
I found that how you wrote this was excellent, it left a lot to the imagination which I myself always like in a piece of writing.
The characters were written so well; I could picture them really clearly, their personalities being kept consistent throughout.
The way in which you never quite explained what was happening was really interesting, it kept a lot of guessing to be done, and the ending was a twist that I didn't expect at all!
Well you set up a large amount of suspense and foreshadowing that I might as well think that this was supposed to be the prelude or prologue to the beginning of a book. I admired how you slowly incorporated the unreal into the reality and, believe it or not, it is more difficult to do than it sounds. The way you set up the personality of these two characters was great as well. Your audience can read this and easily empathize with Mel, just being a ten-year-old girl and full of innocence--or maybe not so innocent as she disappeared towards the end of the story. That was certainly unexpected. And just by reading this, you can tell that Josh is a novice agent and obviously had not had a number of cases yet in his career. Listening to this girl really tests everything that was taught to him in the academy and seeing his difficulty in hiding his frustration is just perfect. The only error that I found in this entire piece was in the last sentence of the first paragraph where you used "I" when it should be "he" since this is meant to be told in the third person. Unless it was something that he was thinking, you should italicize it and put "he thought" at the end of the sentence. Other than that small error, great job!