Evil Lives with You

A Story by Summer Grace

This is intended to be about 400 word flash fiction..

Sometimes evil is revealed in death, sometimes in life. Sometimes those who do it go to the grave with their secrets. Sometimes they are exposed in life.The evildoers who seem lucky leave this world with their deeds a mystery. Evil lurks everywhere. It could be married to you. It could be in a relationship with you. It could be your son or daughter. It could be your neighbor. One never knows, does one?

The girl drifts in the stagnant water of the water of the river close to shore. It's midsummer and she's dead. They tried to give her a name. She had been brutally beaten. What a beauty she must have been in life, they thought. Failing in their quest to find her name, she was buried as a Jane Doe in 1976 in the small country cemetery. What was remembered was her tattoo of a black cat.

It's 2006, and Roberta's husband, Henry, had just been buried. She had expected it, they were both old. He had been ill a long time. She had stopped crying for now, but she didn't know when it might start again. It was a hot evening in midsummer. It's midsummer and Roberta's husband, a good man, had just been buried. The relatives had left, even the kids, and gone to dinner. She didn't feel up to joining them, she needed to be left alone she said.

So she was in the still too warm house alone. Roberta went to the bedroom they had shared and sat down on the bed. She opened a drawer of a small table. He had never let her open it in all the years they had been married, and he'd lived in the house before they had married in the early 1960s. She was a bit surprised when she opened it, nothing unremarkable was in there. She'd always wondered.

Then she picked up a book from the drawer and out fell a drawing, of a nude girl lying, it seemed asleep, on the floor of a forest. What! she thought, but then she noticed the tattoo of the black cat on the arm of the girl in the drawing. It was unmistakable. Why would Henry have chosen to draw this, Roberta wondered, when the local Jane Doe in this rural area was known as "The girl with the Black Cat Tattoo?" Evil lurks everywhere.