Midnight at Bohemian Grove.

The child is taken in the middle of the day, and no one notices.

Her parents are sitting, swollen, in front of their television. They are weighed down by a combined fifteen pounds of cholesterol sitting in their circulatory system. Dorito crumbs and cockroachs race through their hair. Tapeworms and cancer cells plot treason in their dank colons. Brain tissue dries, cracks, flakes away. Gas fumes smell like rose petals.

The long black limo purrs through the street. The child watches from the back seat through tinted glass at smeared streaks of neon. She is pulled towards sleep by the rythmn.

She awakes in the woods. On a pyre. Staring up into the dead eyes of a giant wooden owl. She hears the murmurs around her, but she can't move her head to see. The voices are mummified, cracking with age and affluence. She can't see the faces, but the shadows dance across the trees: hunched, frozen, slavering. Some chant in a dead tongue, some mutter with restrained lust, others scream wordlessly into the wild. She hears a voice, one deeply familiar to her, one heard hundreds of times on television, float into her ear. The voice says "you will burn well, tender one." Faces fill her vision. They are starkly white, flesh hangs in sacks, lips curl back on hard white plastic teeth. Knives glint in the fire.

The body is discovered next to a McDonalds. The organs had been removed. Some suspect that they made their way into the McNuggets. No one notices.