What Angers the Dead

“Son of a bitch! I can’t believe they did this to me.”

My shouts and curses were muffled by the— was that velvet?

The inky void is filled with the sound of the friction of my fingers attempting to gain purchase on the soft luxurious fabric, trying and failing to tear through the padding, the first in what will be an arduous journey to exact revenge on the people who have left me in this state.

At last, I find a seam, the scrabbling clawing racket giving way to the satisfying sound of fabric tearing. The velvet rent from the lining makes way for a sudden avalanche of polyester padding to fall into my face. Tucking it off to the side as well as I can, my fingers continue to explore what lies above me and discover a wooden surface so highly polished that the dense grain of the wood was nearly entirely hidden within its slick surface.

I strike the wood with the palm of my hand as hard as the six inches of clearance will allow. There is not even a hint of give to the wood. For all the good it did me, I might as well have been hitting solid stone.

“Hardwood, really? What is this mahogany?”

I relax into the absurdly comfortable bed of my casket fuming over the situation that I found myself in. The slow exchange of oxygen for carbon dioxide in this dark hole in the ground leaves me with precious little breath left to call out my dying lament.

“How dare you waste all this money on a box for me to rot in. You could have cremated me and stuck me in a plastic bag. At least burning alive would have been cheap!”

With the last choking breath in my lungs, I managed to cough out, “I’m going to haunt every last one of you for this!”