Leigh Kimmel is the Readers’ Choice in this week’s Indies Unlimited Flash Fiction Challenge. The winning entry is decided by the popular vote and rewarded with a special feature here today. (In case of a tie, the writer who submitted an entry first is the winner per our rules.) Without further ado, here’s the winning story:
Photo content: Stevens County K9 SAR Team Havoc
Missing
by Leigh Kimmel
The air had the gritty feel that always brought back the old memories. Cinda had been one of the first telepaths to volunteer for search and rescue duty in the wake of the disaster the media had dubbed Skyfall.
The Chinese space station had been failing for months, but Beijing had ignored the pleas of the international community for a controlled deorbit. In the end the people of Phoenix paid the price of the Chinese Communist Party’s obsession with not losing face. In the days and weeks that followed, Cinda had helped locate survivors in the wreckage of buildings that had collapsed, then went into hospitals to identify people found unconscious and without identification.
It had been exhausting work, opening one’s mind to the miasma of anguish in hope of finding one more survivor, reuniting one more John Doe with family. Even to this day Cinda still had nightmares, but here she was to help search the site of an industrial explosion. Sometimes she wondered why she kept doing it.
It wasn’t about the medals or the speeches afterward. No, it was knowing that everyone was someone’s son or daughter, and every family deserved to know what had become of their loved one, even if it was just a pine box to bury in the family plot.
