Who's Gage

The cereal went soggy faster than I liked, but I still ate it that way.

The house was quiet except for the hum of the refrigerator and the ticking clock in the hallway. Morning light stretched across the kitchen table and stopped just short of the bowl.

I picked up the milk carton and poured a little more into the cereal. The milk rose slowly around the pieces until they began to float.

I turned the carton in my hands, reading the side the way people do when they have nothing else to look at.

That’s when I noticed the picture.

It was one of those missing kid photos they sometimes print on cartons. The kind they rerun every few years when the case is still open.

The boy in the picture couldn’t have been older than seven.

Dark hair. Thin face. A crooked smile caught halfway through forming.

He was wearing a dark green jacket.

I stared a little longer.

Something about the picture felt familiar.

The kid looked younger than me. A lot younger.

But the face looked like the ones in the few old pictures I’d seen of myself.

The strange thing was, every picture of me in the house started around that age.

Before that, there was nothing.

No birthdays.
No school pictures.
No awkward smiles with missing teeth.

Just a blank space where those years should have been.

I used to think that was normal.

Lots of people didn’t keep old photos. Phones got lost. Computers crashed. Things disappeared over time.

Still, it was strange how clean the gap was.

No pictures from before that age. No stories either.

Whenever the subject came up, it was brushed aside with the same answer.

“You were little. You probably just don’t remember.”

Maybe that was true.

But staring at the boy on the carton, I had the uneasy feeling that I should.

Like something important had been misplaced inside my own head.

I looked again at the date printed beneath the picture.

Ten years.

Ten years since the boy named Gage had disappeared.

The carton felt heavier in my hands.

I realized I had been holding my breath.

I looked down again at the jacket.

Dark green.

I tried to remember where I’d seen a jacket like that before.

Something about it tugged at the back of my mind the way a word sits on the tip of your tongue.

I could almost picture it.

Running between trees.

Branches snapping somewhere behind me.

The sound of someone shouting my name.

But the memory slipped away before I could hold onto it.

Something shifted in the back of my mind.

Not a full memory. Just pieces pushing through.

Leaves under my shoes.

Wind moving through tall trees.

The smell of damp earth.

Someone grabbing my arm too hard.

I twisted away and my sleeve caught on something.

Cold iron.

The sound of fabric tearing.

My fingers tightened against the edge of the table.

The kitchen suddenly felt smaller somehow, like the walls had leaned in while I wasn’t paying attention.

I could almost hear my own voice yelling.

The words came back slowly, like they’d been buried somewhere deep.

“My name’s not Andrew.”

The memory pressed harder.

“My name’s not Andrew… it’s Gage.”

I blinked and looked down at the bowl in front of me.

The cereal had gone soft and gray in the milk.

The spoon rocked slightly in the bowl.

I hadn’t taken a bite in a while.

My hand drifted up to the scar above my eyebrow.

I’d had it for as long as I could remember.

No one had ever told me how I got it.

The house creaked softly somewhere down the hallway.

A floorboard.

Then footsteps.

Slow. Familiar.

I lowered the carton slightly but kept my eyes on the picture.

The boy in the green jacket was still smiling.

For a moment, I had the strange feeling he was smiling at me.

The footsteps grew closer.

The woman’s voice drifted down the hallway toward the kitchen.

“Andrew?”