It took three weeks for anyone to notice the decapitated head in the attic window of the Kowalski house. Even then, people thought it was a decoration. Halloween come early or some other eccentric reasoning.
It wasn’t until the postman noticed the smell that the town of Auburn realized something was wrong.

People don’t have a tendency to look up. If they did, they would have noticed the strange happenings in the Kowalski house long before the sour stench of decomposition started flowing past the porch.

Originally the Kowalski family had five members when they moved into the house in 1972. Husband and wife, Harry and Lisa, and their three kids, Stephen, Simon, and Tiffany. Slap a sitcom title across their family portrait and they wouldn’t have looked out of place next to the Brady Bunch. But behind their carefully manicured hair and bright eyes— something was missing.

With Simon, the kids at school could have sworn there were whispers that trailed his voice as he spoke. For Tiffany, it was the hollowed stare of her ex-boyfriends after she finished dating them. But Stephen? No one could remember anything about him. Even the idea of him seemed to slip their mind. As for Harry and Lisa, they were somehow always together. They were like a stubborn elastic band that refused to stretch.

The head appeared one year after Stephen graduated from college and returned home. Not that anyone remembered him even going off to college in the first place. The police were summoned to the house to question the Kowalski’s, but by the time they arrived there was nothing to discover. No head. No smell. In fact, there was nothing inside the house at all.

Now, the Kowalski’s, while odd, had certainly lived in the neighborhood since 1972. Even the most stubborn neighbor would attest to that. But the strangest thing was that no one could find a picture of them. Not within the school yearbooks or local papers. Not in old Polaroids or projector slides. Even journal entries seemed oddly smudged where a name might have been.

Even the day before the police arrived, neighbors had seen the Kowalski’s departing the house and returning later. No moving vans or packed cars. No urgency in the air. Nothing at all.

The family had been there. And then they were not there.
Not once did anyone think to look up.