Blood

It starts with breathing.

The air is stale and musty, like a house locked against the ravages of years. The more I take in, the more pronounced the undercurrent: damp, dark, dank, earth.

I try to open my eyes, but they’re already open. Not just dark here, but black. Blacker than black.

I sit up, or try, because I can’t. My forehead strikes something hard, and back down I go, onto solid wood. Pain, a sharp burst of red. Gritting my teeth, air hissing in and out. I reach up, just to rub the hurt away, and my knuckles rap against that same wood, unyielding, six inches from my face. Maybe, probably, less.

Head throbbing, I run my fingers along the plank before me, and find another, and another, barely touching, forming a low ceiling, definitely less than six inches above. Maybe three. Still, I don’t understand. My fingertips reach between the planks, but can’t get very far. Just far enough to find grit. Particles. I rub my fingers together.

Dirt. It’s dirt.

Still I don’t understand, really, I don’t.

My hands reach to the sides, and find planks.

Above my head - planks.

Bracing against the planks, and pushing down, so that my shoes can find - planks.

I kick out with everything - planks, and that flare of red in the darkness, like blood. I scream. It doesn’t echo. It can’t. It’s reflected back at me, instantly, like someone else is shouting me down. But there’s no one. No one. Striking wood. Clawing my fingers into the crack between, sobbing, pleading, tearing, until something else cracks, and wet earth splashes. Into my face. My mouth.

I’m buried, but not all the way.

Spitting the roughness from my mouth, but I can’t quite do it, not really. It’s still there. I scrub it from my face, crying, but the dirt thumps and crumbles gently around me, off my skin but in my hair. To remind me.

My sobs again, with that flat, false echo.

The air is heavy here. It isn’t enough.

My fingers are slick now. The boards above me are splintered, and slick. I run my hands over them, and I’m stabbed repeatedly, and the particles cling to me, like children, broken, pathetic, orphan children. Every time I touch them, the pain returns, red. I stick my fingers in my mouth. Bloody, ripped nails. Skin torn open. Earth in my mouth again, never to retreat. Never to leave me again.

Earth, wood, blood.

My face is burning. My hands are trembling.

My world is finite after all. My existence.

I don’t know how I got here, locked inside my own grave. Closing my eyes, with blood and dirt in my mouth, I remember someone knocking at my front door. I seem to recall the hour being late, the ruby hour before dark, when the heavens are afire and the earth is burned out. I seem to recall a traveller on my stoop. Even bowed, he overtook the doorframe. Even beneath the hat’s broad brim, his skin seemed silvery, like the face of the moon. His voice…his voice was kind, beseeching, humble. I couldn’t see his eyes, not at first.

He’d asked; had I said yes?

His eyes, when the hat lifted, were worlds removed from voice: too terrible for memory, too terrible to bring back from that dying day.

Had I told him yes?!

I don’t know. It’s too much. It’s all too much. The fires of the world outside, they can’t reach me, not down here in Hell, not in the world of blood and earth.

I come back to myself screaming, and striking, and clawing, in a world of red.

And suddenly, I can’t do it. I can’t catch my breath.

My breath. It won’t come. I can’t. I can’t. Not here. Not down here, in the dark. Oh God, anywhere but here, anything but this, anything but this, anything but this…!

The space between. The clawed-at space between. I shove my fingers inside. Never mind the tearing flesh, never mind the wood only bending. I pull with all my strength. Then, I keep pulling, keep surging, keep straining, keep screaming, I can’t stop, I must not stop, the wood is groaning, the wood is cracking, my skin is ripping away, my screams are ripping away, the wood is snapping, the earth cascades down, covering me, burying me, but not all the way.

Hands. Hands pushing through dirt, still loose.

And breaking through.