Three

          When he arose, he pounced on the earth under the stone. In a digging frenzy, he ripped through hardened soil and threw clumped grass behind him. His hands were breaking open. His mouth could not generate saliva. The sides of his throat seemed to be meeting closer and closer together with every inch he dug into the grave. Blood and sweat dripped from his head, mixing into a sickening concoction that he tasted whenever he licked his chapping lips.

          “What is going on? Why is this happening to me?” Panic was everywhere and soaked into his skin from all sides. “No. No, no…not real…she can’t be dead…. Can’t be… just can’t.”

          Again the wind brought the sounds, this time louder and more resounding than ever before, stopping both his heart and his digging as he listened to the reverberation.

Thwump. Thwump. Thwump. Thwump.

          Then they were gone; leaving him to believe that he had imagined them after all, just like he had to be imagining this dream.

          But he was still forced to dig deeper, and deeper into this crater, this black hollow that had kidnapped his wife; his savior; the one and only person he had ever truly loved on his own. He would have killed or died for her. He would have walked the globe, swam an ocean, or dug to the core of the earth to be with her. And so, he kept excavating the dirt that entrapped her. Hours had past when he finally reached the wooden box, and his hands had very little surface skin left. Soaked with sweat, dirt, and blood, his muscles screamed all of his breaths away.

          “No, no…. Please God, no, this isn’t hers, this cant be her,” he panted. “I was just with her. We made love tonight! Tonight! Can’t be real. Just a dream. Just a dream!” He noticed that the handles on the sides of the black box were not tarnished, but had a luster of pure brass he had never seen so bright before. This casket was new, as if having been recently buried. He pulled open the lid to the casket with little effort and without so much as a squeal of a hinge. Inside was a mound of dirt, covering what had to be a corpse.  There was a pile covering the face, obscuring the entire head. With shaking hands that extended forward from under his eyes as if not his own, stained in dark blood and damp filth, streaked to the flesh with spit and vomit. Cracked and split open along the fingers in blistered gashes, they looked like the hands of decay were not reaching from him, but from under him. He closed his eyes as his the tips of his raw fingers boned into the soil, which felt cool and soft, as if sifted. He could only feel the most obvious features because the nerves in his hands were destroyed, but he felt a large nose, squared at the bottom with a rather short bridge. The cheeks were even and full, stretching straight and unwrinkled from temple to jaw line. Odd shaped mouth, with a smaller upper lip while the lower seemed almost swollen. There were ridges tracing the gentle curve on both the outsides of each one, like stubble the morning after. A very high forehead and a protruding brow crowned the eyes, which were large and more oval than round, while the general shape of the head appeared squared.

          He brushed away what felt like was the last of the dirt, completely clearing the face and forming an image in his mind to prepare himself for his first look. He had finally come to the end. The fruits of his labors were right here, on the other side of his lids. But he knew that the body he just unearthed was definitely not his wife. So then who is it? Dan opened his eyes and that is when he realized that the world had stopped spinning.

          The face in the coffin was his last call for sanity. When he stared into the dead eyes of himself, he crossed over into the realm of unreality and he could almost see time unraveling itself as his body shut down. Stars began to fleck his eyesight and he was too exhausted to fight. He succumbed to the smoggy, dampened layers of cloud that shrouded Hillside cemetery and let it fade him into unconsciousness. At the brim of entry into dream, he could lightly feel the movement of the earth again, rotating at a slow but gradient pace.  Dan took only one fear with him as he crossed over into sleep, thankful to leave the other terrifying experiences behind for a while, and that was the fear that when the earth had started its revolutions again, it began turning the wrong way.