The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

Unnoticed 
by Rie Sheridan Rose 

You would never know what lies inside the nondescript tan suitcase. It’s just one of dozens stacked away in the bowels of the lost luggage area at the airport closest to my home. These are the lost things. The things no one bothered to claim. Perhaps someone valued them once, but that was long ago—as the ages of the stacked cases suggest. Brittle leather, cracked vinyl, moth-eaten fabric…examples of all these rest in the dim shadows. That one tan case bears no difference from its fellows…something lost and never reclaimed.

One would think that its secrets would reveal themselves in time through mere reality. You know—how things decay and drip and stain and shift…causing an inescapable mess. But so far, no one has noticed the case, sitting halfway up the column, halfway down the room. The midpoint of the muddle. Completely overlookable. Completely hidden in plain sight.

It’s been here almost two decades now. I should know. He packed it with care. I’ll give him that. Every piece wrapped in tight plastic and tucked into a larger bag filled with lime. No extra space for air to interact with the contents. All according to the instructions he found in a book somewhere. A book no one should have written in the first place, but people are strange.

Not that he was too strange. Not at first. He seemed like such a great guy. The best man I’d ever been with. Until he wasn’t.

The bag is bigger than it looks…like a TARDIS on the inside, I suppose. I miss that show…I miss a lot of things.

But here I sit. Unnoticed.

.

Fiction © Copyright Rie Sheridan Rose
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com

More from Author Rie Sheridan Rose:

Overheard in Hell:
Dark Poetry

Poems exploring hell and damnation. Tales of sorrow, vengeance, betrayal, and redemption. Ghosts, ghouls, and demons stalk these pages. Don’t read in a lonely house…in a darkened room by a single candle…

…unless you like the touch of an icy finger up your spine.

Available on Amazon!