Midnight

Rose couldn’t see the light anymore – not that there was all that much to see in a graveyard.

Up until this moment, she believed that fire had to be the worse way to die. Now, as the dirt sucked into her body with every breath she took, her mind was securely changed. Suffocation was far worse than anything else in the world. Every time she opened her mouth, clumps dirt fell in. Every time she breathed through her nose, lines of soil rushed into her nostrils. She tried pushing against the soft soil around her with her arms and legs in an effort to get to fresh air, but they only pushed through without touching so much as a hard pebble to grip onto. No rocks or roots, no edges or sticks. Only dirt. She was falling down into the dark.

Rose screamed against it with what little breath she had to spare, the sound echoed louder in her head than it ever would outwardly. The instant her voice bounced back to her from the dirt walls around her, she realized that her valuable breath had been wasted on the attempt.
The dirt was falling in piles on her face, getting into her eyes. She closed them and struggled, trying to find some foothold, some way to right herself and get back to the surface.

Here these, her final moments, she found herself thinking about whether or not it had been wise to wish for this. Even though it was truly what she wanted even now breathing the dirt that would soon claim her. She couldn’t live without Ronnie, she’d said. Her life was meaningless without Ronnie, she’d cried.
Still, at the hour of her death, she wondered if she’d been a touch hasty…

6:00pm

It took approximately fifteen seconds, give or take.
Rose rolled her bloodshot eyes over to the clock on the nearest wall. She’d spent most of the day counting down the minutes as they ticked by, the sound of the second hand’s movement echoing through her bedroom at the rhythm of a metronome. Throughout the rising and falling of the daylight outside her window, different scenarios timed to that infamous cluster of time ran her thoughts. As the last of the birds sang their song of the evening, she realized that it was a lot longer than she ever imagined.
In fifteen seconds, a person could take their clothes off and put them back on again (provided they were in their sweats). A person could paint all their nails on one hand with sixty-second dry nail polish and have them be surface dry before the second coat. A person could chug three bottles of beer and eat four handfuls of Doritos, read half a chapter in a Stephen King Novel and one and a half in a Chuck Palaniuk or Dean Koontz novel, watch enough of a cartoon to see at least ten possibly funny things or a movie and know the names of all the major actors in it…
Fifteen seconds was a long-ass time.