Open Caskets
the creak of a casket, opening, sounds awfully undramatic: the coffin nails slide out brown and loose on lubricated rust when the wood bends wet with worms. The box is as soggy as the body inside -- curing fetid in its pillow of shadow, wasting but the smell is what gets you: pungent as the green snot and silt cracked out of a sun-roasted oyster shell, and the information you sought out here in the soil is no longer worth chasing so you scrape dirt back into the hole, not bothering to nail the limp box shut, crushing the body…