#itditd

One leg up, then the other, that’s it.

The rain is stopping. Slowing to just a sprinkle.

Where are you going to go?

The cemetery spreads out before you, wide and hilled and completely unfamiliar. You could be anywhere. Literally anywhere (maybe not literally, you are, clearly, not at the bottom of the ocean, and you are also somewhere that the stones are still written in a mix of English and Latin). You pick a direction and start walking. Sliding a little on the slopes in the watery grass until you are running pell-mell down the hills towards what looks to be a gate. Tall and imposing, like the gate to a castle, but only to the dead.

You half expect some sort of barrier to stop you walking through it. Since apparently this is where you belong.

Nothing stops you.

There is no barrier.

You step off the gravel road and onto pavement.

You look to your right and see the road curve out of sight past the gate.

You look to your left and see a brightness in the sky you think means light pollution, which means streetlights, which means town.

So you start walking left. Hugging the ditch on the side of the road because there is no sidewalk here. That’s alright, you don’t really need it. Nobody seems to be out at—whatever hour this is. There’s no moon, it’s still too cloudy. The pavement shines wet and slick under your feet, brightening more and more as you get closer to the glow of streetlights and civilisation.

You still haven’t figured out if you know where you are.

It’s hard to tell at night.

Places always look different in the dark.

Everywhere near where you live looks basically the same anyways.

You could be within spitting distance of your childhood home and not even notice.

You round a corner into blinding light and the earsplitting blare of a car horn, you’ve got just enough time to remember how much you hate LED headlights and then—

BANG!

Oh.

You think that should hurt a lot more than it does.

The impact of the car throws you fully into the ditch, you hear it when one of your shoulders crunches inward against your collarbone. You think the heavy pressure in your chest might be—oh—oh shit you are coughing up blood that is definitely broken ribs—why doesn’t any of this hurt?

Your chest and stomach hurt more from all that disgusting sobbing you did less than an hour ago than they do from getting hit by a car.

Add that to the list of things that don’t make any sense.

You stop breathing again.

Just so that you can maybe stop coughing up blood.

The tang of iron and salt on your tongue is making your stomach churn again—although, that could also just be from getting thrown several feet by a car.

You were hit by a car.

Where did the car go?

You can still hear it, engine growling a little ways down the road.

You wonder if the driver is alright.

Are you more or less dangerous to hit than a deer?

Hitting a deer can be a death sentence.

…You’re probably smaller than a killer deer.

You drag yourself back up to your feet and oh—oh there is the nausea again as you hear one, two, three, four, five distinct cracking noises, and the pressure on your chest ebbs away.

Okay.

Okay?

You roll your shoulders and are rewarded with another sharp snap as your collarbone rights itself.

You start to doubt your earlier conclusion.

You must be dreaming.

“Hello?”

Oh?

See, you are smaller than a killer deer after all.

“Hello? Are—christ alive I’m so sorry—are you okay?”

You are nowhere near the realm of okay.

But…aside from the lack of a heartbeat and the having to think about breathing and the very intense nausea, you are physically unharmed. Now, anyways. What could be said for seconds ago.

You should respond.

You can see the driver walking towards you.

“I’m okay.” You are not okay, you are not okay, you are not okay.

“I’m so sorry,” the driver says again, close enough now that you can see how absolutely terrified he looks. Who wouldn’t, having just hit a person on the side of the road. “I didn’t see you until it was too late, rain at night you—” he stops, frowning at you in the dark.

“Is something wrong?” You ask, and you don’t really know why. You don’t particularly care what is wrong with this man who hit you with his car when you were barely even on the road. You tilt your head to one side in a move you are quite sure is condescending. As though you are challenging him to say he is shaken up.

“I—sorry, I’m a little shook up by, shit, can I take you to the hospital?”

No.

That would be a bad idea for someone without a heartbeat, you think.

“Sure.” You say, and it sounds friendly enough. It’s not what you meant to say, or even in the ballpark of what you wanted to say.

But you follow him back to his car.

You don’t need a hospital.

…But you do look as though you do.

Covered in dirt, bloody-fingered and kneed, and soaked to the bone to boot.

And now spattered with mud, covered in more blood from the impact of the car.

Of course the guy wants to bring you in, he wants to make sure he doesn’t leave you for dead.

Pity he’s a little late for that.

You kill him as he reaches for the passenger door.

…

…no the fuck you do not.

You do though.

You quicken your steps up behind him and tear him away from the car before the door is even open. Your fingers dig into the flesh of his throat, your left arm wraps around his middle and pulls him back to you, blood runs hot under your fingers and your mouth follows where they’ve torn into—

No. The fuck. It does not.

You sway a little where you stand, having stopped several feet back in the middle of the road.

You stare at the man as he opens the car’s passenger side door.

He looks back at you, waves you forward.

Can you have a panic attack without breathing?

Without your heart racing?

You think you are having a panic attack.

You make your way forward, wait until you are both in the car, and then?

Then you kill him.

You reach across the console and pull him by the shoulders, letting go once he’s halfway across and tangling fingers into his hair, ripping out chunks of it with the amount of force you’re using. You squeeze fingers into eyesockets, bring your tongue to the beckoning red that leaks out—

No.

NO.

“Are you sure you’re okay?”

You are sitting in the passenger seat of this stranger’s car.

This stranger whose car hit you not ten minutes ago.

Your mouth is hanging open, you might—you might be drooling?

“I’m fine.” You’re not fine. You’re not fine. You have now pictured murdering this man twice. You are so incredibly distant from fine.

This is definitely just stress, right?

You have had a very very long few hours, days? However long you had lay in the dirt and then however long it had taken to dig yourself out and then however long it took to get…here. Where you are sitting in the passenger seat of a car belonging to a man who you have not murdered.

Yet.

No yet. There is no yet. There will be no killing this man.

Except there will be.

Very soon actually.

Before he starts the car would be ideal, but if you crash as a result it will only be bad for one of you. If the airbag knocks him out all the better even. If the glass of the broken windshield lacerates his throat, that just makes it easier for you. Even if it is a bit awkward maneuvering your body across the center console in the wreck.

The blood is worth it.

Hot and salty and despite the tang of iron that should leave you feeling sick again it is the best thing you’ve tasted in—well at least since waking up. Maybe longer.

Did you even notice how sharp your teeth had gotten?

You didn’t, did you.

That’s alright.

Plenty of time for that later.

@flyingbananasaur / @vampireposter / @gewhanaa / @abalonetea / @leopardsnake-stories / @captain-kraken

You can taste the dampness of the earth with it.

Smell the waterlogging wood that encloses you.

When the first drop saturates into your shirt, you realize you have to get out.

It’s raining so hard.

You don’t want to sit here in the wet in the dark and drown. This is already one flavor of nightmare, you do not need to add another. How long have you been sleeping? Time is never useful in dreams, it doesn’t really matter. You’ll wake up in bed and realize you’ve only been out for a couple hours, no matter how long it takes.

How do you break out of a coffin?

Your brain conjures an image of a woman in a yellow jumpsuit. You’ve never seen that movie, it isn’t helpful. You think maybe you’ve seen another movie—maybe it was a show?—where someone breaks through a coffin, but the dirt had been dry, and he’d had harder hands than you do.

The splotch of rain-damp cold on your chest is getting wider though.

You don’t want to wait and see what happens when the rain gets harder.

Maybe if you break your hand you’ll wake up?

You feel for the seam in the wood you had felt before, figuring it may be a weak point. When you push, both hands, you feel a little bit of give to the top of the coffin. Maybe this won’t be as hard as you think?

You bring your knees up as sharp and fast as you can.

Crack!

Okay.

Okay, you can work with that.

You line your hand up with the little seam as best you can blind, and you alternate—a strike with your hand, a strike lower with your knees, a strike with your other hand—everything starts to hurt very quickly, you feel the rough finish of the wood on your knees after only a few rounds where it’s torn through your pants. The stagnant air now smells sharp and metallic. Blood. From your hands, from your knees.

Your mouth waters.

You feel a little sick.

You keep going.

Hand. Knees. Hand.

Finally one of the impacts is accompanied with a trickle of dirt.

You stop breathing.

Shut your mouth.

And push, hands, knees, top of your head, trying to force the cracked wood to yield.

It bows and snaps where your hands press upwards, you swallow an outcry when the broken edges carve through your palms. Your hands are already wrecked. What’s one more scar in dreamland.

The dirt pours in, you pull it downwards as you try to shift enough wood to sit upright and pull yourself—what you hope but do not know is—skywards. The soil is saturated unevenly and sticks to you, slimy in places, crumbling in others. You should be worried about tetanus. Except this is a nightmare. And you don’t have a heartbeat anyways.

Wait.

Your hands stop their drag of the dirt, you sit still, covered and breathless and silent hearted and—

—bleeding?

How are you bleeding?

It doesn’t matter, just get out.

Just get out.

Screaming fingers and aching arms are the first to break the surface. The rain no longer a roar, soothing on bloodied flesh. You try your best not to open your mouth too soon, but you are still sputtering out bits of mud when your head crests the hole you have dug yourself out of. The first breath of fresh air feels incredible. Sweet and damp and the rain feels incredible and now that you aren’t in the ground you could swear it’s almost warm.

You lift shaking fingers to your eyelids, finding them already starting to loosen up, edges cracking open as the rain hits them. Had they been…glued? Was that something that happened? Is that the replacement for sewing? Or was it just the closest modern equivalent your brain had conjured?

Even the stormy dark feels almost too bright as your eyes open. Seeing your surroundings for the first time. Seeing the surrounding graves.

Your head snaps backwards towards where yours would be.

You see the hole you dug.

The dirt is still fresh, the stone itself is unmarked and smooth.

Is this your nightmare?

Buried alive and forgotten. Nameless and alone.

The loneliness of that concept creeps into your chest.

Sitting in the rain, in the dark that feels too bright, both legs still dangling in your own grave.

You sob.

You scream your throat raw, you curl shredded fingers around your arms and double over until you’re heaving again like when you’d first woken. Stomach still empty, chest convulsing.

You want to wake up.

Please, you just want to wake up.

This is not a nightmare.

You are already—have always been—awake.

@flyingbananasaur / @vampireposter / @gewhanaa

You wake up choking—gagging—on cotton fiber and floral perfume. Mouth too dry to do anything other than convulse, chest heaving like your guts are trying to spill but there’s nothing in them. It’s dark, no, no your eyes just aren’t open—lids straining against the pull of something keeping them taught—why can’t you open your eyes?

Desperate to get the cotton off your tongue you lift a hand in the unwavering dark—and it slams into a panel of wood only a few inches above your bed—is it your bed? You thought it was. It’s soft and the sheets feel bunched up like they usually are and—and—why are you fully clothed? When did you go to bed? Why is your ceiling so close and so rough? You’re pretty sure it’s not wood either. So you wriggle your left hand up to your mouth—finding no blanket overtop of you, finding the wall to your left as painfully close and rough as the ceiling—and drag an alarming amount of loose fiber from your mouth, as though you’d somehow swallowed the innards of a stuffed rabbit.

Mouth clear and thankfully starting to salivate, you cough and heave, nothing coming up but the action making you sick to your empty stomach regardless. The air tastes stale. Like you’ve been stuck in your room while sick. Stagnant and still.

The quarters are too tight to get your hand the last few inches up towards your eyes and—you assume—decrust them. Maybe you are sick? You try to raise your knees, stretch your legs—they slam like your hands, though softer for your stiffness, into the ceiling.

This is ridiculous.

You run your left hand along the ceiling above you, feeling the imperfections of woodgrain and the space between panels. This isn’t what your ceiling looks like, your ceiling is paint and plaster, what is this, where are you.

Tight spaces have never made you uncomfortable but this is pushing it. Your shoulders are only an inch or so away from each wall, if you lift your head it hits the ceiling, it—

No.

No no no.

You’re having a nightmare, you realize with a horrid lurch. You’ve had this nightmare before, you think maybe everyone has at some point been terrified of being buried alive. Eyes sewn shut and mouth filled with fluff—but coffins these days are not rough wooden boxes, and you’re pretty sure eyes don’t get sewn shut anymore either. You are having a nightmare.

You just have to wake up.

It becomes clear very quickly that pinching is not going to work.

Maybe—maybe if you just try to drift back to sleep you will wake up in bed, at home, where you belong.

So you lay there in the unending dark.

It only takes a few minutes of this silence to realize that, since that first breath after you’d finished heaving—you have not taken another.

It startles you into taking another lungful of dead air, into taking stock of the rest of your body, what else aren’t you doing that you should? Blinking, obviously, but your eyes won’t open, you can’t help that. You’ve been swallowing since your mouth re-wetted. That’s fine, that’s normal. Your tongue tastes disgusting, like a dozen nights of open-mouthed sleep, like you’ve swallowed something not meant to be swallowed. You remember the cotton smelled of perfume. That’s probably it.

The panic subsides.

Silence returns, this time punctuated by your somewhat off-time breathing. You aren’t just doing it, you’re counting to what you think it a normal amount, then taking another breath. It’s like your brain has forgotten it’s supposed to be automatic.

Just, just stop thinking about it.

The problem is, you stop thinking about it and just stop breathing altogether.

It doesn’t hurt.

You suppose that cements the fact that you’re dreaming.

Of course you don’t need to breathe.

There’s not even enough oxygen in a buried coffin for breathing more than a few minutes anyways.

Just drift back to sleep.

Let the silence take you back to the heavy end of unconsciousness.

…

…where is your heartbeat?

It’s less of a jolt than realizing you weren’t breathing had been.

Maybe because you’ve already decided you’re asleep.

Dead bodies don’t need heartbeats. Don’t need air to breathe. Don’t need eyes to see with.

Still, it’s a little unsettling to realize that for the first time ever, you are in complete silence, no rushing of blood inside your ears to keep you company, no steady th-thump, th-thump, th-thump to count. Regardless, you settle back against the cushion beneath you, glad that at least your subconscious had thought a wood only coffin was too cheap. You’ve got some sort of soft padding to keep your head and ass from going numb for the time being. If you don’t breathe—something you are now realizing is pointless—then it’s almost nice here in the dark. It’s not particularly cold or warm, not humid or dry. Your clothes are soft against your skin, and though your knees and hand are aching a bit from hitting the wood, you feel peaceful.

Maybe you can fall asleep.

Maybe you even do.

It’s impossible to tell if time is passing, you start to count at one point, as high as you can go before losing track or getting bored. You sing little songs to yourself, old murder ballads that seem fitting for this nightmare-turned-waiting-game. You wonder who would have dug your grave. Who would have come to the funeral. You realize with a small amount of upset that it might have been open casket and that just feels wrong. You’d hated funerals and wakes as a child for that very reason. You never liked being forced to sit with dead relatives. With bodies in a box.

That’s you now.

For the forseeable future.

Body in a box.

In the dirt.

In the dark.