No one was spared. This was meant to be no one spared any expense to engage in their bi-yearly pilgrimage to escape the boredom of a home of industrious tedium and mass-produced consumption of essentials, hopefully to other lands where only sights and cultures and cuisines existed. Even if this meant staying elsewhere locally, compensating with pretense as if in foreign grounds. And buildings. And look at the horror it cost us this time.
Jumbo flights gone missing over metropoli flown past, or across oceans the seasonal cruise ships drowned in suspected and sudden rogue waves. Even closer home, on main island itself, bizarre mini-epidemics haunted the usual getaway overnight rooms, even kin sleeping over across public apartments merely across land at opposite coasts. And wherever our tourists stayed, not everyone had the presence to check out, and the muggings, accidents - and similar tourist tragedies - stacked up.
Families missing. Children and youths who were here one moment, and no trace that they existed the next. Parents who did not return to assure their silently hysterical, henceforth traumatised progeny. Lonely luggage of descendants, abandoned shopping bags of older travellers.
Eventually, the month-long vacation ended, and everybody returned, to their coffee shops, and playing courts, noisy laughter and choking smokes, money flowing out with beers all day and night once more. Not a single soul lost, no one died or stayed hospitalised, or could not recover from injuries.
Yet something was amiss. The students returning to school, full attendance yet quite a few were missing. Commuters returning to office, enough to be laid off after the school break, but already, even worker supervisors and managers, though physically present, it was as if they left before, but never returned.
Across the island, cemeteries out of fashion did not increase burials, and crematoriums continued feeding columbaria as projected. Yet we were running out of land to accommodate more and more, of those who never came back to our living. Were ghosts, changelings, or the re-possessed numbered more amongst the population?