The haunted pencil wrote in elegant Victorian script the true identity of Jack the Ripper, the details of his crimes, and how he escaped justice.

A teenager found the pages, couldn’t bother deciphering them, and threw them out.

Ignorance triumphs once again.

Kit Irwin lives on Cape Cod. Her work has appeared in places such as The Kenyon Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, and Flash Fiction Forward.