Contest: Writing Contest
Prompt: Write a story from the perspective of someone who is dead.
Title: Moving On
She stared out through the hazy film at the world. Moving her hand, she stared at the translucent fingers that flexed and wiggled in place of her own opaque ones that lay on the bottom of the casket.
She stared through herself and down to her body, shaking her head. As the panic set in, she attempted to bang on the roof of the coffin, her hand sliding through the wood with a cold shiver.
As the fact that she was no longer alive sunk in, she started screaming. "Help! Somebody help me! PLEASE!!" The endless stream of pleads streamed from her lips as she convinced herself that she was dreaming.
She sighed and tried to sleep. After all, when you sleep in a dream, you wake up in the real world, right? she thought, so close to loosing it.
When she realized that she couldn't sleep, she decided that she should try to get out of the coffin. She plunged her hands back through the wooden paneling and the rest of her followed. She frowned, this was unlike any dream she'd ever had.
When she had pushed herself to the surface and was free of the dirt, she gasped at what she saw. There were tons of people about the graveyard, all of them staring towards her. She started calling for help again, trying to reach the living.
They all stared straight forward, none of them glancing at her. She wandered through the crowd, trying to touch people, but sinking through them and causing a bone-deep shiver to go through her. She started crying as she stood before her family. Her brother, her mother, her sisters and her father. She cried and wailed as she tried to catch their attention.
No one even glanced at her and, as the funeral come to an end and the crowd started to dissipate, she saw that nobody could or would see her as long as she tried. In stead of continuing with this heartbreak, she found her way to her old room, to her sanctuary.
She floated on her bed and studied the walls, closing her eyes to listen to the sounds of the living doing what they do best: live. She would have become jealous if she weren't so aware of the grief hanging in the air all around the town.
She had been a sweetheart, a town's favorite. She was a roll model to all the kids in town. She was an example of a perfect person. Nice to all, polite, caring, giving, exceptionally good looking, talented, smart. The list went on and on. She didn't; know how she supposedly died, though she was sure it wasn't deserved, her doing not a single bad thing in her life.
She listened to the world going on like it did with her in it, the only difference being the fact that she was no longer in it. She sighed yet again, as she wandered around the town, not allowed to go out of town limits.
She wouldn't think of it as being trapped, no, she would think of it like saying goodbye to those closer before she could go and say goodbye to the world in all. She took her own thoughts, and went back to her house, silently forgiving and apologizing. She went house to house, saying silent prayers.
Suddenly, when she had finished the last house, she could feel something snap and she was jerked about for a while before getting thrown about almost violently. She took a deep, shuddering breath and passed through the town limits without problem.
She then traveled the world; all the things she could never see living. She couldn't get a tan on the beaches of the Bahamas. She would never get to hang a lock on the Pont des Arts. She would never get to go swimming in the Great Lakes. She would never get to trek up the Pyramids.
She shook her head. She couldn't have any experiences the living had; she didn't even need to breathe! Her heart no longer beat. She could no longer eat or sleep or drink. She was no longer human. This was no longer a dream.
She wandered around the world, seeing the sights as she'd planned, not ready to give up on that dream quite yet. When she was done - which was way too soon for her - she let go of the world. She let it live in peace. She accepted that she would no longer be a part of it. She realized that people would move on from her death, so she should too.
And, with one last breath, she let the world go and simply ceased to exist in the world. Moving on to something more powerful and beyond mortal comprehension.
