The Black Doll

by Hafsa Khalid
(lahore, pakistan)

In Japan, there was a mother who lived alone with her newborn baby. She wasn’t able to work and had no living relatives and no friends to help her. So she found it very difficult to cope on her own.

One day, she went out shopping for groceries and left the baby at home alone. On the way home, she met with an accident and was killed. She wasn’t carrying any identification at that time and the police were unable to figure out who she was.

Nobody came forward to claim her body, so she was buried in an unmarked grave. She had no relatives, which meant that nobody noticed her disappearance.

Two months later, the dead mother’s landlord noticed that he hadn’t received any rent from her. He visited her house and knocked the door. When nobody answered, he opened the front door using his duplicate key.

He went inside and found the house in complete darkness. The electricity had been cut off. He walked around in the dark, going from room to room. All of the woman’s furniture and clothing were still there. In the bedroom, he found a black doll lying in the middle of the floor.

“She must have left in a hurry” he said to himself. “She didn’t take anything with her.”

Then he heard a rustling noise. It was coming from the black doll. He bent down to pick it up, but the moment he touched it, the doll crumbled apart in his hands. Hundreds of cockroaches scurried away and all that was left was the skeleton of a ‘BABY’…