Today I am a Dead Man

I woke up in a coffin - it was quite odd considering the last thing I remember was telling a joke at this year's office christmas party.

I suppose it was a heart attack - my mind grasps the thought as I stare at the cheap satin lining. The air is thick and dusty, but my lungs seem to have forgotten how to breathe. So there I sat listening to nothing, smelling nothing but dampness, and staring at what was practically nothing.

I congratulated myself on not going insane - for people waking up in coffins are always go insane. They scratch and claw and scream their dead little head off.

Not I. No, I lay in quiet dignity. In my coffin. My narrow, tight, dark, creepy coffin. It's sticky warm inside my finished tomb - and yet I do not sweat in my primped suit. I could feel an inordinate amount of gel fixing my side part. I hate gel.

Time ticks by slowly, or quickly. I don't really know. It's a bit irritating, this coffin. My mind is stone at the bottom of the well...

I rap a knuckle on the coffin lining, I hear a dull thunk.

I know that no one can hear me. No one. Maybe worms, and a beetle or two.

Oh god, no one can hear me. No one.

How boring.

What a close call - I almost lapsed into insanity.

This coffin grows smelly. I just realized it. It's far more pungent than when I woke up. Wetter too. I shuffle, muscles feeling like wax. I get an odd sensation when I do that, like I'm... oozing. By now my eyes have adjusted to the darkness, I don't know how much time has passed, but I can see clearly now. And one look makes me wish I wasn't.

I was, in fact, oozing... all over my coffin. My skin dripped and sloshed off and muscle was mush between sticky skin and dull bone.

Now I lay here rotting.

Too much time has passed - I'm probably dust by now. My present is too far in the future - I can't keep up.

But then, my brain stopped working ages ago... that's why they put me in a coffin.

Because I'm a dead man.