A dreary mining town hysterically searches for a killer when a schoolboy is found brutally murdered, all except for the eleven-year-old town pariah.

SYNOPSIS:

Royalty Free Stock Photo by Min An, courtesy of Pexels

Based on my short story of the same name (June 2019). Edit: As of November 2019, an edited version of the original story was submitted to the Writer's Digest Short Short Story Competition.

What if the child killer in Fritz Lang’s M wasn’t a man at all?

Born with a cancer that cost her right eye, CHIHIRO KRITANTA is a peculiar social outcast. Introverted and all around unfriendly, the children of her secondary school, St. Arledge’s take great lengths to avoid her at whatever cost. Her grey, artificial eye certainly doesn’t help matters. “Dead Eyes,” “Spooky Eyes” and “Chillhirio—the Witch of Achbor Colton” are names that have been bestowed upon her. None of it seems to matter much to her though—as long as she can be left in peace to enjoy her library book on eighteenth and nineteenth-century crimes.

On the very day Chihiro starts her period, she frequents her usual shortcut after school by the disused cotton mill. Nothing is out of the ordinary until the violated, naked and nearly decapitated body of CLEMENCY BURNE who has been missing for twenty-four hours is found in the polluted icy river by a mob of townsfolk and policemen. In the wake of his murder, the town is gripped by dread as a chaotic manhunt for the killer begins.

While the community comes to terms with the graphic tragedy, especially Clemency’s mother BUNNY who is sent to a psychiatric hospital, and the children of St. Arledge’s are visited by DETECTIVE CHIEF INSPECTOR CONROY from the northwest, Chihiro remains devoid of anxiety. In fact, when Inspector Conroy earns a chance to speak to her, she shares a precocious world perspective on the minds of killers that Conroy doesn’t think possible for an eleven-year-old.

CHIHIRO