The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

Lost Baggage 
by Kim Richards 

I sit a room full of dust, among other cracked leather suitcases stacked like walls. We’re invisible, forsaken in the darkness. When the last case filled the only remaining space, the doors were locked and sealed. The poor little thing cried for months. I guess it belonged to a child lost to cancer. Inside a well-loved teddy bear found its grave.

Some of the suitcases contain belongings, some treasures put here to hide them from greedy relatives. I wonder why those folks never came back for them. It’s fun to imagine their lives and what fates befell them.

Other cases were found discarded on the roadside ditches. Without identification and months unclaimed, they were shoved in here with the rest of us. One particularly beat up case contains coffee grounds and, he claims, bricks of cocaine.

I’m the especially grim one. My innards are comprised of long decayed body parts: legs, arms, a head, a hacked up torso. Who knows if they’re all from the same body or miscellaneous parts from multiple people. My owner bought me all beautiful and new. He filled me with these bloody things and shoved me in the back of this room. He, too, hasn’t been back. I wish I could call out to him to return and tell me his tale.

After a week or so, my insides began to rot. The stench of death filled the entire warehouse. Even the rats stopped coming in. Noone came to investigate and so eventually the smell dissipated. The whole place remains still and too quiet.

All of us just sit here and wait. I suppose until the already dilapidated building around us collapses in disrepair. Then we’ll wait beneath the rubble. Yes, we will wait…lost and forgotten.

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Fiction © Copyright Kim Richards
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com