The Nowhere Place: Missing and Made-Up People

A quote from Kathleen Donohoe’s short essay on missing people:

“In the early 1980’s, pictures of missing children began appearing on the backs of milk cartons. The information was scant: hometown, height, weight, birthday and the date the child disappeared. The photographs were close-ups, grainy and dark. Looking back, it’s easy to see them not as formal school photos or candid shots, but rather as pictures taken in the purgatory where the long-missing wait. The in-between. A nowhere place. A tattered poster stapled to a telephone pole, but instead of Missing, it says, This is Where I Am.”

Today’s episode: The Nowhere Place. Where people go missing, yes, but what about the people who were born there? That is to say, who never existed at all?