An Excert
Edith stood on the edge of a freshly dug grave looking in. It was a new grave; still unoccupied by the corpse it was intended for. Today, it was just an empty, rectangular hole in the ground, six feet deep.
It didn’t look that deep to her as she stood upon the edge. Edith Elizabeth Harris, everyone called her Edie, was five feet, two and a half inches tall, only a few inches shy of the depth of the grave. She wondered how hard it would be to get out if she jumped down into it.
It was summertime in Bemidji, Minnesota and school was out. Edie would be starting the sixth grade once the school year began again. She made it a point to correct her parents every time they called her a fifth grader.
She lived out in the country, about six miles outside of Bemidji proper and one of her favorite places to play was the cemetery that was directly across the gravel road from her house. Her closest neighbors lived about a half mile away in either direction. The neighbors to the east were old and didn’t have any school-aged kids. The ones to the west had two boys, but both of them were a good bit younger.
She was an only child but her mother still referred to Edie as her first. Since she didn’t have any siblings or neighbors and both of her parents worked, there was no one else to play with. She was usually on her own when it came to occupying her free time. She didn’t mind because she had a wonderful imagination and a free spirit, and she always seemed to find enough trouble to get into, all on her own.
Today’s trouble came in the form of a rectangular hole in the ground that was six feet deep. Before she had a chance to think about it too hard and possibly reconsider, she jumped down into the hole. She landed softly in the loose dirt that was left in the bottom, bending her knees to cushion her fall. When she stood up erect, she looked up and realized that the hole seemed deeper from the bottom then it did from the top. She could just barely reach up to the edge of it.
She didn’t really know if she could climb out, but she didn’t even try to yet. She’d never been down in an open grave before, even though she lived this close to a cemetery. She also didn’t know how long it would be before she had this chance again. No, she was going to stay here and take advantage of the opportunity.
It wasn’t that she was morbid or macabre. She didn’t wear black or dress Goth. She was just a normal, curious twelve-year-old girl.
She wondered what it would be like to lie down in here. It was certainly roomy enough to. She decided to try it. She scooted over to one end and sat down in the dirt before lying back.
She closed her eyes and folded her arms across her chest, fully stretched out, imagining that she was dead and resting in a coffin. She thought about all the people who would come to her funeral. She could see her mom and dad, and all of her relatives. She could picture Mr. and Mrs. Lunsford, the neighbors to the east. She could also see Billy Martin, a boy from school she liked, although she wasn’t sure that he’d even noticed her. He would certainly notice her if she were dead. He would recognize his lost opportunity and cry at the funeral, throwing flowers on her casket as they filled in the hole with dirt. At least that’s how she imagined it.
Edie opened her eyes and looked up. The hole looked a lot deeper when she was lying on the bottom of it. She admired the workmanship of the gravediggers. She couldn’t believe how smooth and straight the sides of the hole were.
It was then that she saw it for the first time and her breath caught in her chest. There, on the side of the grave was a coffin, or at least the corner of one, poking out through one of the dirt walls. It was the casket from the grave beside this one and from the way it looked, it’d already been in the ground for a few years.
Edie, who’d never suffered from claustrophobia before, suddenly felt that the grave was closing in upon her. She couldn’t breathe and her palms were sweating. Fear encompassed her and she knew that she had to get out of this hole.
That was the last conscious thought she could remember while she was in the grave. She couldn’t recall standing up or even how she managed to scramble out of the hole. Before she knew it, she was out on the soft grass, running for the gate to the cemetery as fast as she could. She just wanted to get home.
As she ran, she was certain that she could hear someone behind her, breathing down her neck. She didn’t look back. She was too afraid of what might be there...