One

The summer the girl with the pigtails went missing, Manny was just a little boy running barefoot through Big Momma’s bayou—half-wild, sunstruck, and blissfully unaware that his life was about to split open like storm clouds.

He never knew the girl when she was alive. But she would be the first to show him what he was.

Big Momma’s farmhouse sat low beneath pecan trees, the whole yard humming with cicadas and the ghost-breath of the swamp. To Manny, the place was a kingdom. Catfish swarmed the lakes, crawfish darted beneath the mud, and treasure—real or imagined—waited beneath every root. Chicago felt far away, like a dream he’d outgrown.

His constant companion was Maxine—Max—a cranky, bow-legged Chihuahua who eventually surrendered to his affection. She knew every trail behind Big Momma’s land and led him through them like a tiny, judgmental tour guide.

That morning, he left before dawn, armed only with his GI Joe Survival Pack and Pawpaw’s old walkie-talkie. The world was still blue. Dew hung heavy on the trees. Fog wrapped itself around the cypress knees like a quilt stitched by ghosts.

Manny crushed pinecones beneath his sneakers, each crackle a victory. Max trotted ahead, tail shaking at the air as if testing its temperature.

Then she stopped.

A single bark burst from her, sharp as a slap.

Manny looked up.

A girl stood beneath a weeping willow thirty feet away. Catholic school uniform. White knee socks still impossibly clean. Twin pigtails framing a face that wasn’t frightened—but faraway, as if she were listening to something he couldn’t hear.

A cold shiver clung to the hot morning.

“Are you lost?” Manny called out.

She didn’t blink.

And then, just as quickly as she appeared, she was gone. The vines swayed where she’d been, but the space beneath them was empty.

Max whimpered. Manny felt something—not fear, but the unsettling sense that something had reached for him in the dark.

And he touched it back.

Two

Years later, Manny woke from a dream soaked in grief so real he couldn’t breathe. Big Momma’s obituary had floated before him like a page torn from the future: Clara Jean Hudson, beloved wife and grandmother, passed unexpectedly in her sleep. Her soft smile beside it.

He felt the loss before the truth arrived.

As dawn slid across the lakefront outside his high-rise condo, Manny stepped onto the terrace, robe cinched tight, heart drowning. His gifts had bought this view, this quiet, this distance. But he’d trade it all—every book sale, every solved case, every piece of fame—to bring Big Momma back.

Inside, the landline rang.

The call that would confirm what he already knew.

He didn’t answer. Not yet. He needed a breath, one small moment privately alone with the way Big Momma always deserved.

In a few hours, he’d take the train south—the same route he traveled as a boy—to return to the place where his abilities first cracked open like an egg.

But the truth weighed on him: the gift was never fully his. It was a burden. A responsibility. A tether tying him to every lost soul who whispered to him from beyond

By the time he boarded the Amtrak Delta Concorde, rain threatened the edges of the city. A handsome attendant directed him to his sleeper cabin with a bright, easy smile. Manny tipped him mentally, if not literally, and collapsed into bed.

The rhythm of the rocking train tucked him into sleep. But the darkness on the other side of the window felt too familiar, too watchful.

Three

Decades earlier, Big Momma had been sitting at her emerald, green kitchen table and chairs—rescued from a rich white lady’s trash pile—with her coffee steaming and Oprah just minutes away from coming on. Rain was coming; she could smell it in the air like a warning.

She heard Max’s nails scratching at the back door before she saw her. Alone.

Her stomach dropped.

“Manny?” she said into Pawpaw’s walkie-talkie.

Only static answered.

She called again, louder, voice sharp enough to slice through the swamp air. “Boy, if I gotta leave my show to come git you—!”

Her threat hung unfinished. Manny’s voice didn’t come through. But she knew her grandson. Something was wrong.

By the time she found him in the barn, he was curled on the dirt floor, face pale as river mist, trembling so hard she could feel it in her own bones.

The walkie-talkie lay broken against the wall. The GI Joe Survival Pack spilled open like a torn heart.

Big Momma knelt before him, all bracelets and soft arms and worry. “Baby, what happened?”

At first, he couldn’t speak. The words jammed in his throat like stones. He’d seen things no child should see: the pigtail girl’s last moments, the trucker who hurt her, the way she’d begged him to die.

When he finally spoke, it came out in gasps.

Big Momma cupped his face.

“Manny baby, some children of God are born with a gift. Some can move mountains with it. Some can heal. Some can see what others can’t.” Her voice gentled to a whisper.

“You a seer child. Just like me. And we don’t run from what God gives us.”

She held him until his shaking stopped. Outside, thunder rolled low and long across the bayou.

Four

The train jolted Manny awake sometime after midnight. Lightning stitched itself across the sky in frantic strokes. The cabin lights flickered, dimmed, returned.

A knock sounded at the door.

The handsome attendant stood there, book in hand—They All Belong to Him, Manny’s first.

“I was tryin’ to mind my business,” the man said sheepishly, “but I’m a fan. My partner Kevin put me onto your podcast.”

His smile was earnest. Kind.

The lights flickered again.

Manny forced a nod, sudden unease crawling up his spine. The train felt too fast. The windows shuddered as if something outside wanted in.

The attendant raised the book. “Would you sign it? To Kevin and Archie?”

Manny obliged. His pen moved automatically.

Then a flicker of motion beyond the attendant’s shoulder caught his eye.

A girl sat in coach. Blue-and-green plaid uniform. Pigtails tied neatly.

The same girl. Unchanged by decades or death.

His heart thudded painfully.

The attendant followed Manny’s gaze. “Who’s that?”

“You see her too?” Manny whispered.

The girl stood. Not a threat—just a summons. Her voice reached him from across the cabin like breath against his ear.

“Come on, Manny. Your Big Momma’s waitin.”

Wind screamed along the outside of the train. Metal groaned. Darkness swallowed the lights until the cabin faded to nothing but shadow.

The attendant dissolved into the void. And Manny followed the girl down the narrow aisle toward whatever waited at the end of the line.

Three Years Later

Pawpaw—James Gabriel Hudson—sat on the porch he once shared with Clara Jean, letting the sun warm his eyelids. Grief had worn him thin, made him smaller. Every July, memory cracked open like a bruise.

His wife had gone first, slipping away quietly in her sleep.

His grandson followed, taken in the Delta Concorde train disaster. Pawpaw still woke sometimes hearing that final whistle, even though trains rarely came through now.

He looked for signs. He always had. Manny once told him that the dead never wandered far from the ones they loved.

So when Pawpaw found the old missing-girl poster snagged in a willow tree on his land—a girl with pigtails and a Catholic uniform, long vanished from the world—he understood it wasn’t coincidence. It was a message. A breadcrumb from beyond.

That afternoon, a FedEx truck rumbled down his road. Pawpaw wasn’t expecting a thing.

“You Mr. Hudson?” the driver asked, handing over a Tyvek envelope warped with water damage and soot

“Yes sir.”

Inside, Pawpaw found a book—half-burnt, edges curled, pages stiff with soot. They All Belong to Him, by Manny Hudson.

A letter was scrawled on the inside cover, written in Manny’s unmistakable hand, shaky but steady enough.

To my dearest Pawpaw,

I’m on the train, but I don’t believe I’ll make it home to bury Big Momma.

She’s tellin’ me we’ll be waiting for you.

Eternal love always,

Your grandboy, Manny.

As Pawpaw read the words, a train whistle echoed faintly across the fields—soft, impossible, and full of promise.

He closed the book against his chest.

“They all belong to Him,” he whispered, voice trembling with grief and peace.

And Pawpaw understood at last:

his family would always be together, bound across worlds by a gift neither time nor death could break.