All the neighbors agreed; the new family who’d
moved into the old Duncan place on Hollyhock Lane was most peculiar. They’d
arrived quietly under the cover of night and few had seen them in the light of
day, though those who had reported that they looked rather unseemly and their
children tended to bite.
More than one neighbor told of being awakened
in the night by loud moaning and odd shrieks coming from the house that sounded
neither animal nor human, while the free-roaming neighborhood dogs seemed to
have developed an obsession with the new family’s garbage.
Mable Hollyhock, whose family had once owned most of
the land on this street, had been dying to see inside the home, and so it was that on a
warm spring Sunday, still dressed in her church finery, her grandmother’s
prized emerald-and-gold ring tightly wedged on her finger and a basket of
freshly-baked muffins on her arm, rapped her fleshy knuckles loudly on the new family's front door.
No one noticed Mable’s disappearance until a few
mornings later when Dobbs McKinley, cursing the dogs that daily dirtied his
front lawn, suddenly paused his shovel mid-scoop when a
sparkle of green from within one of the mutts’offerings caught his eye and where,
upon closer inspection and to his lasting puzzlement, he discovered what
appeared to be – by gosh it was – a large emerald-and-gold ring.
This post is
in response to the Five Sentence Fiction prompt “zombies.”
