The World Is Getting Darker Now

On June 13, 1994, 13-year-old NIcholas Barclay disappeared from a friend’s home in San Antonio, Texas. Known as a troublemaker at the center of family disputes that often ended in calls to the police, the Barclay family assumed that Nicholas had run away and would return home, but he never did.

Three years into his disappearance, the Barclays received a call from a shelter in Spain claiming that their son was living at a shelter following an escape from a child sex ring. Nicholas’s sister immediately flew to Spain and brought him home to Texas. Despite having dark hair, brown eyes, a significant French accent, and looking much older than sixteen, the Barclay family believed that their son was finally home. Nicholas claimed that his abductors had altered his hair and eye color, and he had picked up the accent on his own. 

After a media frenzy, people grew suspicious that this man was not Nicholas Barclay. He refused to give fingerprints or participate in DNA tests to prove his identity, yet the Barclays defended their son. In 1998, the FBI received a court order to obtain the man’s fingerprints, revealing that the man was not Nicholas, but Frederic Pierre Bourdin, a 23-year-old French citizen with a history of similar crimes. Bourdin was taken into custody and eventually sentenced to six years in prison. 

Authorities began investigating the Barclays for Nicholas’s disappearance after Bourdin’s sentencing and knowledge of familial violence and drug abuse surfaced. Some believe that the family was so quick to accept Frederic Bourdin as Nicholas because they had killed him and his “return” would cover their tracks. Though claims have been made, nothing has been proven and Nicholas’s case is still unsolved.

I just don’t want to become the devil’s bitch.

Pictures from Another Time

“I will try to explain what I see in the pictures and what my friends have thought. I tried several times to show these photos to Native Americans, but they are afraid of them. This is because they agree, the photos are a ritual of cremation. The pictures were taken in my backyard in Placentia, Orange County, California September 1969. They were taken with a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye 20, with b/w 620 film. The camera cost $10.00 in 1961, and I had to wind the film myself. There were 20 photos on the roll. 19 photos developed, number 20 was black on the negative.” -Rita

In 1997, Rita Swift found an old undeveloped roll of film with a note on it. The note read “taken in our backyard Sep. 1969.” Rita took the roll to get developed and 19 of the 20 pictures developed successfully. 

When going through the first few photos nothing was unusual. They were typical photos of her at 5 years old, her dog, cat, swing set, just a normal backyard, with great clarity!

Pictures 17-19 (ordered top to bottom in this post) took Rita by surprise. The last three pictures appeared to show what Rita claims to be a Native American ritual of cremation. She took the developed pictures to the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles where they suggested the Native Americans in these photographs, resemble the Chumash. They tribe dates back to the 1700s.

Rita believes these pictures were a portal to another time. 

Calories in, calories out.

I used the dremel saw I stole from work to cut off the first knuckle of my left pinky. The bosses had to know I took the thing but I doubt they even cared. What’s a $100 tool to a company that’s worth millions? Besides, they were getting rid of me, and that’s what their priority was. Maybe they’ll take it out of the last check they said they’d mail.

Despite what I thought, it wasn’t easy to pull the bone out of the finger chunk. So, I peeled off the nail and then cut the remainder of the piece open with the dremel and took the bone out the messy way. I didn’t think much as I popped the fingertip in my mouth and chewed for what felt like an hour before the meat broke down enough for me to comfortably swallow. I tried to figure out how many calories were in the finger segment while also working to determine how my caloric needs have changed now that my body mass had decreased by that little bit. I don’t know why I wasted so many years cutting when I could’ve done the smart thing by cutting off.