Estate Of Confusion: The Mystery Of The Disappearing Children

There has been a most worrying — frankly puzzling — development in our housing estate recently: children disappearing, and then reappearing …

Well, reappearing thus far…

We might have to get on to the local council if this continues or, heavens forbid, escalates…

Now in fairness it has kind of happened before … not just with children  … odd things happen, no perpetrators can be found — they vanish like Macacavity: The Mystery Cat — and we all just carry on.

You know the kind of thing … shopping trollies that mysteriously beam down at the side of your house … kids buggies …  play kitchens … scooters, the odd little bicycle that would lie there gathering rust if you didn’t post something on Facebook, or in the case of the shopping trollies, push them yourself the half mile to our local Tesco.

But the most perplexing variation is the most recent: bits of the wooden fence behind the smaller green space near our house have started to spontaneously break off.

Chatting to individual parents of the children who play there every day, it seems that whenever the first plank fell away, their children, and their children alone, just disappeared at that exact instant … and as each subsequent piece has been removed and displaced, the culprits, and even any witnesses, again just disappeared … each and every time …

And then, just as miraculously, reappeared, each time, playing away like before.

So, of course, since those children weren’t there at the crucial moments, as their parents rightly say, they have nothing to do with this inexplicable development.

Now, whatever about the baffling Self-Demolishing Fence business, we’re actually more concerned about those Disappearing Kids, and their likely whereabouts during these uncharted absences …

As members of Concerned Parents Against Disappearing Children here in our estate, we are frankly … well, concerned.

Like, just here have the children been disappearing to?

The Upside Down, maybe?

Yes, it would remind you of Stranger Things, wouldn’t it? Especially those strange trance states Nancy, Max and other poor divils get into, while their frantic late-20s teenage pals try to bring them back from that spooky place … you know,  burst mattress fluff floating in a grim post-apocalyptic landscape … no wait, that’s Portlaoise … in this place flickering lights in the Down Side Up are connected to it somehow … there’s menacing music, of course … weird bat birds and creepiest of all, that fella with the bad skin rash and vine pair(s) of retractable limbs … Vecna?

Now, none of our Disappearing Kids here have started doing that weird levitating thing, just before their bones go all funny and their eyes pop … yet … but frankly, maybe our councillors, or even our TDs might not be enough if they do.

We might have to appeal to even higher powers … El, maybe, when she’s finished saving the world, now that she has her superhero powers back …

Just a thought here, why didn’t they just check the wifi signal in the lab first before they put her through all that weird memory retrieval stuff in that paddling pool thing?

But back to the stranger thingsu happening in our own little Hawkins … I mean Rush …

Now maybe it is Vecna, or his underlings, who are responsible for the Decline and Fall of our Fence … And this time even Kate Bush might’t be able to save us …

Now if you are reading this, we do hope you don’t take a fence … after all, nobody else has …