The Pink Glove

The Pink Glove
Form: Flash Fiction

I had fallen in love with the old house the day I viewed it. For the last 30 years, it had stood empty and neglected. Now it was for sale. Sat in a garden gone wild and with an interior showing its age – I loved it. My offer had been accepted and after some months of renovations, I had moved in. That winter I made my house my home – arranging furniture and placing bits and bobs from boxes here and there.

The weekend I was determined to tackle the wilderness of the garden. Shrubs and brambles had run their own riot – I wondered if there was room for a lawn under all that. I started at the doors that opened out onto the garden from the living room. Several hours of hard graft and as men bin bags of garden overgrowth later I was stood on the makings of a patio – absolutely knackered.

I sat on the doorstep with a mug of coffee looking at the grubby curvy paving. From the doors, it spread out in a circular shape. A bit of a power shower would soon clean it up. I was thinking how good it would look when it caught my eye. A glimpse of dirty pink poked out from beneath one of the curving bricks. I thought it was a flower reaching for light and briefly forgot about it.

Briefly, it didn’t take long for my brain to realize a delicate little flower would have been suffocated by the overgrowth years ago. I went over to investigate. Close up I could see it was fabric and not a flower. I needed to lift that brick to get it out.

Easing up the brick so I could put it back I found the pink glimpse was the fingertip of the glove, a delicate soft leather lady’s glove. It was intact and still on the hand of its owner. Naturally, I called the police. It didn’t take them long to recover the human remains from beneath the patio.

A woman in her thirties they think, but its hard to tell as she has been lying under my patio for decades

©JGFarmer2023