Thereafter No More

All she could do was swim through the dirt, that rumbling voice echoing in memory. It's presence a beautiful stain on her soul. On her flesh.

Then her fingers felt sod. The cool dew damp of grass brushed her fingertips and elation poured through her. She pushed higher, upwards, feeling the earth against her skin. Her arms pushed out from the ground, and grasped the grass around her. Higher, further, until she pushed her head out into a cool moonlit evening.

She took in a gasp, but her lungs didn't shift. Didn't move. The fleshy petals pushed out from her mouth and let out an inhuman shriek that sent a late night bird flapping away in panic. Higher Heather rose, until her breasts were exposed to the world. Whatever world she was in. She looked around, bits of dirt crumbling off ashen skin, and saw tomb stones. An entire field of tombstones. She blinked, until memory came rushing back to her.

On the back roads, dark. Departing a lover's place. A man, shrouded in shadow. The anger in his voice, the gun in his hand. The flash of the muzzle and the pain in her head before there was only peace. And a farm amid ever changing crops. And the arrival of the sinister being that claimed her as its own. Its puppet, its perverse agent. Its whore.

Heather clambered out of the hole she'd dug, and looked about the graveyard. Not a soul in sight, she was alone among the entombed dead. She turned and looked back at the weather gravestone sitting by her hole.

Worn and starting to fade with the ravaged of time, Heather stared at her name carved into the stone.

End