She hadn’t slept at all during the night; not one wink. Now, at 4am she was alone in the kitchen; her mug of tea cold, untouched.
With a lump of lead growing in her stomach she scrolled through her phone, scanning news sites.
She hoped the answer to her problem was there somewhere. A clue, information, anything that would make sense of last night.
When had it happened exactly? At various times over the past what, two, three years? Where? In towns and villages across the South.
What had he been saying last night, slurring his words like a drunkard? But in the nearly fifteen years she had been married she’d never known him touch a drop.
Was he on drugs? Ditto to that, not even one puff of cannabis.
Sickness, was he sick? Probably. If there was a shred of truth in what he had told her, he must be mad. Mad to have told her, mad to have done it. No, not ‘it;’ mad to have done ‘them;’ all of them. How many, exactly?
She scrolled down Yahoo! News. There were plenty of posts, hundreds maybe. Far too many for her to find much sense.
They called him ‘The Ripper.’ They always did, the police and the newspapers. There had been Jack back in Victorian times and the Yorkshire Ripper and that bloke in Cambridgeshire and, she tried hard to remember, hadn’t there been one in Edinburgh? Somewhere in Scotland anyway.
And, in bed upstairs, her husband slept.
Words: Richard Rooney
Illustration: A.I.
Flash Fiction 250
Flash Fiction 250 