The Orange Plastic Bag

A short horror story that came to me just before midnight. Well you just have to, don't you, when the horror bites.

May 23, 2026

It looked heavy. It looked wrong, the orange plastic bag. Where it was, what it looked like it might have in it, but most of all, the colour of it. You didn’t see a bag like that at the side of the road, on the verge, just off the roundabout where your car speeds up out of the corner and you’re going almost too fast to notice…almost.

A bag like that, the size of it, the heaviness in it? How it sat like someone had placed it just exactly where it was, precisely where it needed to be…to be visible, but not quite. Not dumped, not blown there by the wind to somehow take root and settle. Not thrown from a car window, guiltily, stuffed with road-trip lunch scraps which would escape, piecemeal, on a scavenging wind. The sliproad verge was not a place for dog-walkers, and the bag was orange. It was not black or green like dog shit bags. It was not hung from a branch like those feculent low-hanging fruit, for all that it was the very colour of an orange.

Day after day it was there, catching his eye as he accelerated out of the roundabout’s curve, the flash of orange in the weeds turning his head like he was nodding good morning to it. Litter was transient –it came and went, but the orange plastic bag remained. It showed no sign of moving on and whatever was within it –dense and shapeless–seemed to hug the ground like home.

Shapeless. Was it shapeless?

Another week; it was still there, winking at him now from between the tips of lively spring grass. You would miss it if you didn’t know it was there; but he did. A shape was forming in his mind, a shape of something that might be in the orange plastic bag, but it was getting harder to tell, amongst the grass. He asked his wife, “When you go to your pilates, have you ever noticed that orange plastic bag, just off to the right when you come off the roundabout? No? Why? Oh, no reason. Just…annoying. Bloody litter louts.”

He didn’t realise that he’d begun to come off the roundabout a little slower each day on his commute, trying to snatch a longer, more revealing glimpse. He was thinking: “If I rode my bike here, I could stop…” when the shiny audi, overtaking on the outside lane, clipped his rear wing and made him stop anyway. Angry voices, apologies and insurance details were exchanged. “Just a ding. No need to call the police.” The shiny audi sped off, but like the orange plastic bag, he remained.

Leaving footsteps in the dew he approached it. Somehow it seemed larger, close-up, but it was just a plastic bag, the sort you get in corner shops, the ones you’re never sure will take a six pack and a pint of milk, the ones you need to double-bag. Except those ones were always white, not orange, like this one at his feet.

How can you tell something’s heavy, just by the look of it?

He didn’t know how, he just knew it would be, even before he picked it up by the handles, knotted and bow-tied, poking up like hare’s ears. Four handles –it was double bagged, whatever was inside, the heavy thing that had a shape now. It definitely had a shape, even through two orange plastic bags. And after he swallowed down the dryness in his mouth and took hold of the handles and started to lift it, he felt the resistance of the thing inside to being disturbed. Its inertia yielded to him, reluctantly, because it was a heavy thing –the thing inside. Heavier than you would think. The shape of it pressed through the tightening orange plastic as if it yearned for the ground.

He set it down. The bag rustled gently. The hare’s ears drooped and the contours of the thing inside softened, receded into the orange plastic.

He needed air. He swallowed spit in strands. He had to sit down to call the police; the grass was wet but he didn’t feel it. He sat with his back to the orange plastic bag, the morning traffic passing behind, an oblivious rhythm. He saw a crow sidling back to its breakfast, further up the slip road. He saw a crocodile cloud in the sky. He saw a stream of ants trickling up the grassy bank into a scraggy line of trees, where, in the gloom beneath there was another orange plastic bag.

This story came to me because for weeks I have been seeing an orange plastic bag just on the verge coming off the roundabout on my way to work…and I can’t stop thinking about what might be inside it.