Buried

    “We gonna do this, ain't we, Jeff?" Tommy said, tools in hand. No answer, but he hadn't expected one.

    “Yeah, I guess we are," he answered. "We're gonna spend the night in a cemetery."  

    He tossed his tools over the wrought iron fence. Then with a quick hop he lifted himself over and grabbed his tools. Thick grey clouds covered the sky and a gentle breeze blew.  Perfect weather for working. He started walking

    Row after row of slate grey headstones led him down the gentle slope toward the back of the cemetery. He did t have to look at the names to find the one he was looking for.   Luckily it was at the bottom of the hill and would keep passing motorists from spotting him as he worked.

    “Here we are," Tommy said as he looked at the plot before him. "You ready for this?"

    He took a moment, took a deep breath, let it out slowly.

    “Me too, I guess," he said. 

He punched the tip of the shovel into the dirt and pulled out a large scoop. He tossed it aside and did it again. And again. Somewhere in the distance the faint flicker of lightning went unnoticed as he worked.

    Tommy still dreamed about the funeral sometimes. In his dreams he'd walk up to the coffin just after they'd closed it and hear his childhood friend inside. Breathing heavily at first. Then gasping for air. Then calling out, screaming for help while banging on the locked lid. And as Tommy stood there helpless, the pallbearers would solemnly line up along either side and walk the casket through the door. 

    None of that happened at the actual funeral, of course. At the actual funeral, Tommy just sat there watching motionless as they closed the casket lid. He knew his friend was no longer there. Not physcially. But he couldn't shake the feeling that some bit of his friend was still there, still existed. That his mind was still conscious, still aware that he was being locked up and about to be buried. 

    Tommy had wanted to go up to the casket to say his goodbye's, to see whether he could tell if his friend was still in there. But he'd been unable to move, to go anywhere near the casket where his friend might be calling for help when there was nothing Tommy would be able to do. Not when it had all happened so fast and it still seemed to Tommy like a misunderstanding. Like his friend could walk into the room at any minute because he wasn't supposed to be dead yet. Like he was just pretending to be dead for a laugh. 

    But he wasn't pretending. Not in real life.

    And when they began to lower the lid, Tommy had felt himself begin to panic. To feel like they were trapping him in when he wasn't ready yet. He wanted to yell at them to let his friend out, to open the lid and let him breathe. 

    But he didn't. He sat there in the pew trying to look calm. Inside he was screaming to his friend that he was sorry for what was happening, was sorry that he was just sitting there watching as they were trapping him in the darkness with nothing but his own thoughts for the rest of eternity. And when Tommy wept it was not for the loss, but for the thought of his friend stuck in his coffin with nothing but his own cold, dark thoughts forever. 

    It didn't take long for Tommy to work up a sweat, to be dripping with it. When the first few fat drops of water splashed into the mud before him, he didn't realize it had started raining. He only became conscious of it when he felt the coolness of fresh rain cutting through the dirt and grime on the back of his neck. 

    His arms and back were already sore, but though the hole was getting deep he still had a long way ahead of him. He paused long enough to look at the sky, let the fresh cool drops of rain carry away some of the heat and soreness. Then, despite the screaming in his muscles, he began to dig again. Pretty soon, it was pouring.

    Funny thing is Tommy never let go of that feeling. 

    Or maybe it never let go of him.

    But for months he would lie awake at night thinking about the funeral, about his friend traped in his coffin in the darkness and trying to breathe. He knew none of it was real, that it was all in his head, that a dead body no longer needed to breathe. But maybe they still wanted to.  Maybe somewhere inside, what was left of the person that once was still struggled to inhale, to live.  That was the thought that really haunted him. The nagging doubt that one ceased to exist at death, that their mind still existed somewhere, still aware even while trapped in their own decaying brain. Was there life after death? Tommy couldn't say, but he couldn't imagine that anyone could ever just...stop being. That a mind could be turned off forever and have nowhere to go. That was why he stay awake at night trying to imagine what it was like to be dead. To have no thoughts, no memories, no subconscious desires. 

    It seemed impossible to do, to pretend to be dead. He would try to remain perfectly still, to clear his head of absolutely all thought. But no matter how hard he tried, he just couldn't do it. 

And one night, it became too much for him, this...inability to act out his own nonexistence.  

   And then one night it was no longer enough to just lay still, to clear his mind. That did nothing to help him discover what it must be like for his friend stuck forever in that cold coffin. He had to know exactly what being dead was like if he was going to make his peace with death, his peace with his friends death. He pulled the pillow case from his pillow and slipped it over his head. After only a moment or two it became more difficult to breathe as he began to inhale his own exhaled carbon dioxide. It was warm and cramped and somehow comfortable. And yet still it was missing something. It wasn’t comfortable enough, wasn’t cramped enough. There must be a better way, he’d told himself, something more he could do.

    Tommy dug hard, straining against his overworked muscles, fighting back against the rain as it pooled at the bottom of the hole. The rain turned the dirt to mud and made it a bit easier to dig back out, but it also made the sides of his hole loose and let mud slide in from the sides so that he had to keep digging it out and tossing it to the side. 

    It had taken hours and hours of hard work.  The sky was completely dark now except for the occasional blue flash of lightning up in the clouds.  But finally his shovel struck something solid. 

    The scraping sound like metal against rock let him know that he had finally reached the burial vault. He grabbed the pick axe from the edge of the hole being careful not to pull any mud back in. He was almost there now. He lifted the axe over his head and brought it down. Then again. And again.

    The first cardboard box he had slept in was just big enough for his head and shoulders. With a small pillow and a piece of fabric stapled to the inside, it was almost like being in an actual coffin. From the shoulder up, anyway.

   He used to keep that cardboard box under his bed and pull it out at night to sleep in and wonder if that was really what it was like to be dead. But when his mom cleaned out his room and threw it away, he had found a bigger box, a better one that covered half his body. And eventually he found another one that would fit his legs. It had to be about as close to the real thing as you get without actually being in the real thing, he thought. 

  And yet...

  And yet something was still missing. No matter how close it felt, it wasnt the real thing. And no matter how close to real it felt, how comfortable he had become sleeping in them, he had come no closer to making his peace with death, to discovering what it felt like to lay dead in a box without thought. Every night that he spent inside those boxes still felt like an existential nightmare of awareness, of consciousness, of thought and darkness. When his family began to sense that something was wrong, they thought it had to do with his friend, with his inability to process, to grieve. But it wasn’t that at all. It was the feeling that he would never know what the real thing was like without going through it. 

   And that’s when he had the idea.

   Lightning struck as he finally broke through the cement barrier and saw the coffin laying underneath. He was so tired he already felt like the living dead, but this was it. He pulled the coffin lid open and peered inside.

   The skin was pale and sunken in. There were large brown holes full of old, dried out muscle. There were areas that had fallen away, that had peeled back from the bone from age and gravity. Most of the hair and fallen out.

   And yet there were some places that still looked remarkably familiar.

   “Hey there, Jeff. Good to see you again,” he said. “Looking as good as ever,” he wanted to say.  But though there were parts that still looked like Jeff, it didn’t really look like Jeff at all.  Didn’t even look human at all. He just looked...empty.  

   Lightning flashed again, close by this time, and he remembered how tired he was. How ready to figure out death, to find a way to conquer it in his own small way. 

    “Sorry, Jeff,” he said.  “I’m coming in.”

    He stepped down next to his old friends corpse.  “Mind scooting over just a bit?” he added as he slipped in beside the body. 

    He had expected to feel like he was talking to his old friend again, like he was picking up right where they had left off.  But it didn’t feel that way at all.  What it felt like was that he was talking to himself.  He almost felt silly for talking to Jeff at all. 

   But never mind.  He still had his business here.  He had to work and struggle to get his legs in and then to maneuver so that he could fit in without cocking his neck at a weird angle. He hadn’t realized how little room there would be with in the casket with a corpse beside him, but he was eventually able to bring the lid slowly down.

    It was completely dark and Tommy felt a strange rush of dark excitement. He tried to be still, to clear his mind, but he couldn’t believe he was finally doing it.

   “Here we are, Jeff,” he said. “I’m finally going to learn what it’s really like to spend the night in one of these things. To be dead.

   “Although, it is pretty cramped in here. How do you do this?” He tried to laugh at himself, to feel more comfortable with taking to an empty body.  But the laugh came out weak and lifeless. 

    It was dank in the coffin and smelled like an old swamp. He was suddenly aware of how thick the air was, how he almost had to swallow each breath to get it down. And he was beginning to choke on the taste of it.

   He struggled to turn a little more, to get a bit comfortable as he waited to get used to the air, but his arms were screaming with pain and one of his legs was beginning to cramp. He started to get nervous, to get panicky. 

   “This isn’t as easy as I thought,” he said. “I’m going...I think I’m going to have to sit up for a minute, get some fresh air. It’s just...this is not working like I thou—.”

   He put his hand on the lid and was about to push up whe he heard the thump. He wondered for a fraction of a moment if someone was outside, if they had somehow spotted him digging and come to see what he was doing.  But he had no more than began to experience that cold and ugly thought when he had an even worse one. He hadn’t just heard the thump. He had felt it. And it had been strong, heavy.

   Realizing what had happened, he bang to push as hard as he could against the lid, but it barely moved and only just enough to let some of the wet, sticky mud slide in beside him. 

   The rain, he thought. The mud. He hadn’t even thought about it even as he was digging mudslides back out of the hole. 

   He slammed his hands against the lid, but it didn’t move. There was another thud as more mud came down on top of the casket, sealing him in. 

   He pounded against the lid for what seemed like forever in a full panic. And the last thing he remembered doing was laughing until he no longer even knew why.