I. Evangelina thought death would be super terrible; then, she died. When they lowered the coffin into the ground, the coffin was a tidy little space, all firm cedar and clean corners, but eventually the coffin walls decayed into soft mounds of rotting mulch, and the soil leaked in and the worms crept in to nestle under her head. She began to think it wasn’t so bad at all, like a cool Sunday morning spent under the covers, dozing in and out of consciousness, particularly when her flesh slid off her bones and decomposed in pale, folded piles of decayed matter like a bundle of linen. She found herself smiling (the teeth on her skull bared clean), as she snuggled deeper into the earth with the beetles tickling her cheeks. The whole thing was made all the better for the fact that, thankfully, she couldn’t smell anything.
II. Tyrone, too, was really nervous about the whole death thing, particularly when they shuttled him into the fire and the automatic door of the crematorium slid shut. The flames weren’t as mean as he’d expected; they were more like the heat from a campfire while nestled under a wool blanket with a hot cocoa full of marshmallows and cream liqueur. He found himself sighing as the warmth tickled his toes and slid up his knee caps, and when his body dissolved into dry particulates, that felt pretty nice, too, a bundled up and folded feeling, safe and protected, like collapsing upon himself in child’s pose during yoga class.
III. Arturo’s body was never found, and that was all well and good because after getting chased around by that chainsaw-wielding maniac, he really could have used a break. After a long tumble down a ravine, his head found a spot to rest by the creek bed, the milkweed and thistles having caught him before he rolled into the water. His arms and legs were somewhere in the bushes; his torso flopped in the mud under a sapling. And, sure, after screaming his soul-guts out for a while, he was soothed by the trickling water over the rocks, the birdsong, the sunshine. It was like all the vacations he’d never gotten around to taking. So he lounged, warmed by the sun and listening to the breeze. He giggled as he felt the feet of ants and beetles tip-toeing over him, their little pincers like kisses. (They took parts of him to live in their colonies, little chunks of flesh to nibble on, which gave him a glimpse of life better than any David Attenborough documentary he’d ever seen.) Small carnivores snacked on him at night, those coyotes with their soft, wet noses and crows with their feathers brushing against his skull. Soon enough, the ivy grew over him and the soil covered the bleached surface of his bones, and he nestled in, the whisper of grubs and worms soothing him to sleep.
Lorna D. Keach - Writer 