Final

In the darkness, the sound crept upon him from below.

          Thwump. “What the f**k is this?” Thwump. “What is she doing?” Thwump. “Help me. Someone please help me, God! I’m alive, I’m still alive!” Thwump.

          “Dan? Wake up, Dan”

          His eyes opened to an immense circle of light that poured in. It looked fluorescent, like the light bulb of an operating room. “Yes, I am in a hospital! I’m alive. She’s alive! It was all a dream, a horrible dream,” he thought. A deep sigh escaped him and he closed his eyes several times to recover from his stupor. “ My wife is not trying to kill me.”

          But as his eyes focused, he began to notice that she seemed smaller, as if he was seeing her from a distance. The light encasing her began to blur, so he looked beyond her and his heart cinched in place. The dimming luminescence was the moon being pushed behind the clouds, not a lamp in an OR. And she was at a distance, looking down at him from the edge of a hole. Panic filled every corner of his being as he realized that he wasn’t in a hospital after all.

           “ I need you to see this okay?” She said softly as if speaking to a child. She bent down, turning away from the edge of the dismal pit, and came back into view to lean on the long handle of a shovel. In his shock, Dan didn’t even think to close his eyes when the first heap of soil defiled his vision. The burning sensation from the dirt falling into his eyes was overlooked when he finally recognized what that terrifying sound was. It was not the beating of wings- it was the sounds of shoveled dirt.

          Thwump. “Oh my God…” Thwump. “…she’s killing me!” Thwump. “She’s burying me alive!”

          Stacey spoke for the last time. “ I hate you, Dan.” Her words were muffled and stung worse than the suffering of his eyes. And he knew why. He knew what was happening to him now.

          Thwump. Thwump.

 He understood the writing on the tombstone, and he could clearly see the face. It wasn’t his wife that was going to die tonight; it was his wife that was going to kill him. He pictured the face staring blankly back from inside the black box. The look of petrified fear, the emptiness of the eyes, the skin bereft of color, the lungs void of breath – it was his face in the casket.

          Dan inhaled a scream of remorse and the stitches gave way to a blinding pain as the sutures separated flesh from flesh. But his apologies for years of physical abuse and the torment he had learned from his father and bestowed on his beloved were never heard. A pile of dirt filled his throat, trapping his departing breath within him, as the withering sounds of exhumed earth beat like the rhythm of butterfly wings in his head.

Thwump. Thwump. Thwump.

 

 

 

~The End~

-Rg