I stared down at my empty coffin. It shone wetly at me in the faint light from the open door above. The chill, damp autumn morning was trickling down into the mausoleum and damned if that silk-lined steel box wasn’t looking good and cozy right now. It was a dubious gift to receive from anyone, and ten times more so from her.
There was a gaping hole in the wall. A hole just big enough for the coffin. The words inscribed above it in looping script were chilling.
Jessamy Stone
1990-____
He tried.
That blank space after my birth date stared me strait in the face, like a solemn minister at Sunday service.
We all gon die someday, Jess. Question is, what’re you gon do with the time you have left? Father’s grizzled face, five years in the grave, is as clear to me as the day he’d told me that, preaching his last from a hospital bed.
If a man like that could just up and die, right in his prime, what’s to stop me doing the same? I looked around the small underground room and couldn’t help but wonder how soon I would become a permanent resident here. Soon, if she had her way.
In the meantime, I knew what I would do with the life my father had given his to save. The fight would cost me, there was little doubt of that in my mind, but I would fight. And now if I didn’t make it, all my arrangements were already made. Maybe she’d even visit my grave now and then. Until then though, I would do my epigraph proud.
I would try.
YOU ARE READING
Etch-a-Sketch Litterature
Mystery / ThrillerA series of short sketches of stories I have yet to man up and write. Each "chapter" is completely unrelated, so the lack of continuety is to be expected.
