"The Box" A Poem of the Undead by Victoria Grace

It was so hot,

and her throat felt raw.

She felt a burn in her belly

and couldn't believe what she saw.

Her bed was a box,

and the box went down deep.

How long,

she wondered,

was I here, and how long did I sleep?

It couldn't have been more than a few minutes

since I was sitting at the kitchen table,

drinking coffee,

eating eggs.

Couldn't have been a few minutes,

since I was thinking

what to pick up at the grocery store tonight,

and rubbing tired legs.

But then her vision went dark

and she woke up here,

how, why where--

what's filling this box up and choking her

is her fear.

Try to stay calm,

she tells herself,

relax.

Try to think back to this morning

before life went black.

Her body was healthy,

Her day was going fine,

She had no enemies.

She's trying so hard to remember the 

hour, minute, second

that she came to this calamity.

Her hand touches her arm,

it's surprisingly waxy and cool.

She doesn't know what time it is

or what day.

She wonders,

Can this be some joke, prank,or April Fools?

She's trying to remember,

but it's so dark in here she can't think.

She can't cry, though she wants to.

She can't even blink.

She's like a block, a piece of wood

that's been thrown in the trash--

forgotten, discarded, as meaningless as ash.

She takes another breath,

and starts remembering images on a screen,

she thinks....

Yes, the news!

She never paid close attention,

all the sadness in the world just gave her the blues.

But she does remember rumors and rumblings

of something that came on the world quick.

She's remembering little by little,

that some people were getting quite sick.

She knows there was sunlight through her window,

it was a beautiful day.

And she wasn't really worried, it wasn't her problem,

it was so far away.

Now that she knows where she is

and feels that burning inside growing strong--

she thinks that things have fallen apart.

She feels changed, she feels wrong.

Falling on the cold tile floor flashes through her mind;

vomiting out eggs and blood, her back buckling, sharp pain in her spine.

She was screaming

SCREAMING

for her mother and God.

The sunlight through her window

was turning off and on,

the overturned table she fruitlessly clawed.

That was the last thing she saw

before she woke up buried down below.

It all seems so near

yet so long ago.

She feels around the coffin,

trying to get a sense of her space.

She wiggles her toes,

and feels that same chill on her face.

She is ravenous,

the only thing she wants is food.

She starts clawing desperately at the coffin lid,

beginning to understand what she may have become,

its meaning and its magnitude.

No matter how long she scrapes at the lid,

she keeps at it in frenzy, new needs she is crying for.

She'll eventually reach the surface

and see the ravages of this undead war.