A white, raggedy bunny slipper is the first part of Morgan to break the rules. She steps out from behind the door, placing her left foot down precariously on the wooden front porch of her house. The heavy door creaks as she opens it a sliver more to slip the rest of her body outdoors. With shaking hands, the eight-year-old girl shuts the door gently. Morgan shivers in her thin, cotton pajamas as the cold December wind dances wickedly around her.
She pushes her ratty hair away from her face and stares at the line of houses down the sloped street. Although she has lived here for years, Morgan has never seen her neighborhood at midnight before. The way that the mystical blue sky with ominous clouds blankets her surroundings in a dramatic glow fascinates the young girl. While Morgan is well aware that her father has strictly forbidden her from going outside alone after sundown, the risk is one she is willing to take now. Morgan tries to picture the look on his face if he finds out she isn’t tucked safely in her bed and shutters with trepidation. The last thing that she wants to do is disappoint her dad, who has always been her best friend, but she is left with no other option than to continue down the path of rebellion.
The pale midnight moon provides just enough light for Morgan to safely make her way through her mundane neighborhood and to the nearby playground. She continues to shiver vigorously in the bitterly cold air, but she does not dare to speak just in case someone is listening. With every hoot of an owl and chirp of a cricket, Morgan’s heart jolts with fear of being caught breaking the rules.
By the time she reaches her destination, her head feels unbearably heavy with anxiety. Yet, her rigid paranoia settles down slightly now, for the first phase of the journey has been accomplished.
The playground is right next to a large soccer field and some tennis courts, all of which look far more like they belong in scenes of a horror movie at this time of night. Morgan walks up to the play structure, careful not to make any noise on the woodchip-covered ground. She touches the rusted chains of the swings with her fingertips; they are colder than ice. She continues to walk past the other swings, the slide, and the monkey bars, peering at them suspiciously. Her expression falls with disappointment when she does not find her missing necklace immediately. To Morgan’s dismay, she will have to search in the field of snow-covered grass.
Reluctantly, Morgan places her hands and knees in the fluffy, cloud-like snow beneath her. She begins to crawl, her sleep-deprived eyes with dark bags large enough to hold groceries darting across the ground in search of her special necklace. Her bunny slippers are not helping to keep her toes warm, and within seconds her frail palms and skinny knees are numb.
Morgan would never deliberately disobey her father and willingly soak her pajamas in melted snow, but this necklace is particularly sentimental to her. Her mother gifted it to her when she was five years old, and she’s never taken it off since. So when she noticed its absence from her collarbone during dinner a few hours prior, she searched the whole house and panicked when she couldn’t find it. Morgan knows that it would kill her dad to take her out at night to look for this necklace, so she decides to go alone.
After several minutes of crawling, her arms fail to uphold her body’s weight any longer and she face-plants into the snow. Morgan climbs to her feet and shakes the cold, white clumps out of her brown hair. Her face is ten different shades of red, and while some are due to numbness, the others are from frustrated anger at her terrible luck.
As she squeezes the ice-cold water from her dripping clothes, Morgan spots something twenty feet away in the field from the corner of her eye, barely peeking out from behind the snow. She shuffles towards it, curiosity flooding through her body and diluting her annoyance. When Morgan sees what it is, she sees her breath dance in front of her face as she exhales in shock. Her blue eyes widen and her mouth freezes in astonishment.
Lying there in the snow is a woman. She is wearing blue skinny jeans and a brown button-down coat. Her blonde hair forms a ring on the ground, framing her expressionless face. Morgan’s body is shaking as she leans over her and looks directly into her blue, emotionless eyes. She swims desperately in her gaze, looking for some hidden sign of life. But it is clear that this woman is dead.
Morgan is about to react to her findings when she notices a thin chain around the woman’s neck that is tucked neatly into her coat. Before she can stop herself, she sinks to her knees in the disheveled snow beside her. Morgan watches as her hand extends towards the body’s neck and pulls the chain out into the cold air. She takes her first breath in a minute to gasp. Laying in her pale, freezing palm is a small blue pendant: her missing necklace. Without giving it a second thought, Morgan yanks the piece of jewelry off of the woman’s ice-cold skin and clutches it tightly in her fist. She grins from ear to ear, feeling a sense of giddy excitement now that she has found what she was looking for.
Suddenly, flashing blue and red lights glisten on the pearly white snow around the body. A group of policemen and Morgan’s father sprint towards the young girl, holding flashlights and guns. Five witnesses see Morgan kneeling next to a dead woman’s body with a crazed, greedy expression plastered on her face.