Flash Fiction: The Vanishing Time

PHOTO PROMPT © Dale Rogerson for Rochelle’s Friday Fictioneers. Other stories featuring the prompt can be found here.

The children were told to stay indoors. Not safe to wander. A shadow cloaked the sun. The atmosphere crackled. The invaders close. The vanishing time.

Only speculation rotated; same say alien experiments, others claim planets need populating, or more gruesome, aliens need to eat. One fact unshaken: children didn’t come home.

At first, the police hounded every known and potential paedophile, no avail. Psychics stepped forward and were treated as criminals for inciting mass hysteria. Children continued to disappear, the lighting always the same.

This time different; one of the missing returned – found in a daze at the same park he disappeared from decades earlier.