Jeff Mount

Joe's Bad Shortcut

Joe blew it, again.

He was having a great time at the bar but had to go blow his entire paycheck on Video Poker. It only took him a half hour to lose it all.

He felt so pathetic he decided he didn’t deserve a ride home from his friends so he told them that he was walking home. He left the bar downtown and headed for his house which was about a 10 mile walk.

It was late at night.

He headed up Taylors Ferry Road, telling himself what an idiot he was as he was kicking rocks. He glanced over at Rose Meadows Mortuary and Cemetery up on his left and decided that cutting through there would be a huge shortcut.

He walked straight up the driveway and climbed over a short iron fence. The top of a pointy fence post caught him as he climbed over and ripped a hole in his khaki pants.

There was a layer of fog blanketing the rolling lawns of the cemetery. Grave stones of all shapes and sizes rose from the mist, making him think of miniature skyscrapers like the ones downtown. He was reminded of the money he  just lost. He felt sick and doubled over with disgust and then heaved and gagged and vomited by a tree. He didn’t notice that he had vomited on a grave site.

He composed himself and stopped leaning against the tree, then started walking across the cemetery again, hoping he was going the right general direction. Joe needed to piss so he took his pants down and urinated, not noticing that he had just pissed on a grave site.

He buttoned his pants back up,  jumped over a rhododendron bush, then walked down a slope towards a large laurel hedge that he would have to somehow climb through in order to get out of the cemetery and back to the main road which would lead him home.

Joe heard some laughing and talking over to his right somewhere. He stopped and looked. By the moonlight, he saw two people with shovels digging and laughing. They stopped and took drinks out of cans. Joe snuck a little closer and hid behind a large oak tree for a better look.

They stopped digging and slapped hands with each other. One said:

“Fuck yeah, dog, we know this was a rich ass bitch so lets see what kinda goodies she has for us in there!”

They were going to dig up the corpse and strip it of valuables.

Joe was no angel in society but he was sickened by their plan so in his drunken state he decided he needed to intervene.

He stepped out from behind the oak tree and said, “Knock it off and get the fuck outta here or I’m gonna’ call the cops!”

One of them immediately started running towards him and lifted his shovel in the air. The other one jumped out of the hole in the ground and started running towards him as well. He turned around and ran, then grabbed his cell phone out of his pocket and dialed 9 then dialed 1 and before he could dial the last 1 he felt a thud on the back of his head and everything went black.

He heard cards shuffling and realized he was passed out in his cozy bed at home. His friends were partying and playing cards in the living room. He smiled. The shuffling noise got louder. He opened his eyes, realizing he was not in his bed at home at all.

It was completely dark. He felt things poking into him all over the right side of his body. The realization hit him like a cold ocean wave. He was in a coffin with a decomposed body and was being buried alive. The shuffling cards noise was dirt, being tossed down on the coffin. The sound became more and more muffled. Joe figured that there was quite a bit of dirt above him now.

He had been stuffed into the coffin and there wasn’t much room to wiggle around with a skeleton next to him. Panic and claustrophobia enveloped him like a suffocating pillow. He couldn’t inhale very much air. He thrashed around and bumped his head against the top of the coffin. Hard. He put a hand on his head, feeling wet and sticky blood.

He pushed with every bit of strenth he could muster. Tears were streaming down his face. He noticed he was screaming. He felt the panel above him move ever so slightly and gave it another push with everything he had. He pushed the panel up a bit more and felt dirt falling all over him as he managed to lift and open the panel fully and climb out. He noticed that the two men must have abandoned the re-filling of the hole because there wasn’t much dirt above the coffin. Joe thanked God for whatever happened to provoke them to leave. He let out a cry of joy at his glorious freedom.

His head was pounding so hard. It really hurt but he didn’t care, he ran over towards the big laurel bush on the perimeter of the cemetery and tore a path through it and ran down Terwilliger Boulevard towards home.

Joe got home and told his roommates his story. They didn’t believe him. They thought he just tripped and fell and hurt his head. They all laughed, pretty soon Joe was laughing too. He played cards with them. Some attractive ladies Brian had brought back from the bar were there too. One of them started giving Joe a neck rub as he laid down a royal flush and took everyone’s money. He drank expensive cognac and smoked some good weed then retired to his bed with the girl and had amazing sex. He passed out blissfully.

He woke up suddenly in the middle of the night and opened his eyes wide. Something was not right. His bed felt too hard. It was cold. He reached over towards the girl. Her arm felt too hard. Joe was still in the coffin. He realized he had passed out when he bumped his head in there and had just dreamt he had escaped. He cried out and tried to push the top panel. It didn’t budge. Tremors of reality washed all over him. He screamed as loudly as he could until his throat hurt so badly he couldn’t scream anymore. Then he just cried. 

Alle Rechte an diesem Beitrag liegen beim Autoren. Der Beitrag wurde auf e-Stories.org vom Autor eingeschickt Jeff Mount.
Veröffentlicht auf e-Stories.org am 22.01.2009.

 
 

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