Remembering The Nameless

Feeling comfort in knowing his wife was below him, he lay on top of her grave, hand firmly planted against the dirt. He wedged his fingers into the ground, soil lodging deep under his nails until they throbbed and turned an off white. He imagined lieing next to her, both rotting together in the dirt for the rest of eternity. Flesh barely clinging to her bones, cartilage detaching from muscle, thinner areas of tissue stripped from the bone, revealing the tendons beneath. What he would give to rip the dirt from beneath him and hold her in his loving arms. But what was truly stopping him? He remembered blood gurgling down her throat, spilling over the rim of her mouth and resting on her bottom lip. He remembered her clinging to the cuff of his shirt, like an infant to their mother, clinging onto life itself. Slipping in and out of consciousness, with flashes of wailing and pleading and incoherent mutters. Her raw scream shooting through his brain. He remembered blubbering at the breast of her corpse, watching the life seep out of her eyes as he wiped the snot from his nose. His chest felt heavy every time he closed his eyes, like an itch he could not satisfy until he saw his wife again. He remembered how everybody stared, eyes digging into the back of his skull like red hot pokers, as a crowd formed around the scene. He remeberd how people stared the same way when he failed to deliver his speech at the funeral, he thought there would be no words to describe the void that gaped open in the middle of his chest, when she left this mortal plane they once shared.