In the Attic
In The Attic (first published on Red Monster)
In the attic of number five Ermin Street there is an old trunk. Now this trunk is not the sort you could fit a body in, oh no, it is far far too small. However, what it does contain is the severed head of one Mr. A. S. Harding who was an accountant at some large and inhuman institution. He was married to a quiet, washed out woman called April.
A. S. Harding was a model citizen and like his suit a very grey sort of person.
However, he had a secret and this was that he was a very nasty and malicious man and used to beat his wife with a sort of remoteness born of calculation. He was very clever about it and no one ever suspected. Then one day he just disappeared and his poor wife was hysterical and sort of fell apart at the seams.
She kept saying it was all her fault but then his body was found in the local reservoir – just his body you understand, his head being in the attic. It was then discovered he was moonlighting as a dodgy accountant for a charity money-embezzling organisation known as the Mafia.
April got his life insurance money and his pension and went back to college to study art, a subject her husband had tried to beat out of her. April soon remarried and even had a kid but kept her old house neglected and empty. It was, after all, the house she had shared with Mr A. S. Harding and that was why she had kept his head there.
The head was in the old trunk that her wedding dress had sat in. You see there are only so many pre-planned beatings a woman can take and eventually he would have killed her, so she had taken precautions. This had involved severing her husband’s head from his shoulders – fortunately she had done this in the bathroom and the blood had all just washed away.
Of course she had been hysterical afterwards but no one had believed her and then his underground connections had come out and, well, the rest was history.
Posted: Wednesday, April 11th, 2012 @ 9:07 pm
Categories: Flash Fiction.
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