Women In Horror Month - Kasey Hill

The Living Grave of Flowers
Kasey Hill
 
They grabbed the flowers by the bunch and tossed them down the hole where you lay at the bottom. I’ve never been one to throw a flower in the grave or leave a flower on the casket. I am one of the ones who brings them home and keeps it on display long past the time it wilts, then dies, then dries. I don’t know what it is but there is something beautiful about a dead flower. It’s in the most vulnerable and fragile state. The wrong touch can crumble its petals or its stem or its leaves. Death for everyone, every creature, every living thing is a fragile state of being. However, I do not covet all dead things as I have coveted these flowers on the dresser.
In nature, when something dies, it returns back to the earth. When growing up, we are told from mythology that man was formed from the dust of the earth so when we lay man to rest we lament ashes to ashes and dust to dust because we came from the grave of the earth and return to the grave of the earth. Grave of the earth isn’t how it started out. Prior to living creatures, prior to the advent of a stabilized atmosphere, the earth was a wasteland of fire and lava. It raged in fury almost as if it was incensed from being created to begin with for it too would grow and age and then die. Of course scientists say it will be another 5 billion years before the planet faces its death but to the planet, it counts down its days the same way we count down our days compared to those around us. We see the max age that people can live and hope and pray that we make it that long when babies dies before they even make it outside of the womb.
Death before living is such an existential tragedy. Death. Death. Death. Such a fickle bitch. Is it wrong to call it a bitch when there’s a possibility that Death is in fact a lady? Who fucking cares, honestly. People are offended and pissed off every day. What’s the worse that Lady Death can do? Torture me with death around me? Take me? I feel like I have lived a thousand years and came out still kicking when I should have long ago met my end. Maybe that is my punishment from Death the bitch. I am punished and tortured and I stare into the hole that you have been lain to rest in, tossing in the handful of dirt instead of the flower. It should have rained. Funerals are more appropriate in the rain. The rain is cleansing but instead, we were offered the bitter heat of summer’s end.
You died on my holiday, did you know that? It was the literal first day of autumn, the first day the earth has entered into its resting state, its slumbering state, its suspended state of death. But you are not suspended in sleep like death but suspended in eternal sleep. Sleep. Sleep. Sleep. Death is sleep for the soul as opposed to sleep for the living mind. We sleep to rest, to reset, to restore but in death we sleep to rest our soul, to reset our soul, to restore our soul. Death and sleep. Death and sleep. An eternal slumber. Never waking. Wake. As a child, I thought wakes were where we waited for someone to wake up. My aunt lifting me to her husband’s casket and me asking, “When are we waking him up?” because they called it a wake. And she said he wouldn’t be waking up. Why call it a wake? And as an adult I learned that a wake was created to make sure those believed to be dead were dead so they waited around during a wake to see if the person would wake up. Smart child I was.
But wakes were created long before embalming fluid and embalming fluid now replaces the meaning of wakes and we no longer get the chance to see if the person will awaken or if they are forever trapped in the eternal slumber. Robbing, isn’t it? The mortician robs us of the hope that death is not finite. It robs us of the possibility they will open their eyes or rise from the casket. But instead, we now sit around and watch a body that we know will not move, will not breathe, will not open their eyes, will not stir from the throws of death. Instead, we eat food, we drink alcohol, we reminisce. Oh, how we reminisce. How I reminisce. The unfairness. The utter devastation. Then anger roils and fury boils, and volcanic rage pours and streams as hot tears, steaming and streaming. Steaming and streaming.
And then the nightmares begin. Nightmares. Nightmares. Nightmares. The nightmares have lasted longer this time, you know? I don’t know why, but the nightmares go on and on and on. They used to be nightmares of me killing, me being responsible. Me seeing the life support unplugged and the person dying over and over and over and coming back over and over and over and dying over and over and over. Or me killing over and over and over. Not this time. This time, I am the one dying. I am the one being killed. Murder, death, abandonment. Abandoned. Abandoned. Abandoned. I am abandoned. I am abandoned, and I rot on the inside, but it’s not the same rot that eats through your flesh as larvae squirm and worm through your cavities and orifices. I rot in a living state in places that do not necrose or that do not deteriorate. But I await the necrosis. I await the deterioration because I feel as if I have died a thousand times over, but I don’t take a final breath. I don’t close my eyes one last time. I don’t stop moving. My mind does not stop firing electrical sparks. The sparks. The sparks fire in overtime, and I shake, and my heart beats erratically, and at times, I feel like I can’t breathe even though air moves in and out of my lungs. It’s almost as if I am buried within that casket with my eyes sewn shut and my mouth as well sewn shut so I cannot see and I cannot scream out in pain. Instead, I sit with a face that plays poker, and no one can read the inner turmoil that flows beneath the surface.
I know the spark will eventually return to normal. I know my inner spark will eventually return to normal. But for now, I am in a living grave as a living dead person. We are often told that from the moment we are born, we are dying. Morbid, right? But in that morbid sense of intellect, they are right. Every day we live and breathe is a day that we get closer to whatever day awaits us whether it is the day we are born, the next day, the next week, years down the road, or when we are in our 100s. We are always dying. As our body grows, it is growing toward death. That is our end game. To live, breathe, and await death. It’s the moments between birth and death that define our life. And those moments can be filled with whatever we want them to be filled. Whatever we want. Whatever we want.
You… you lie in ceaseless slumber where you are not moving, where you are not breathing, where you cannot see, hear, taste, touch, smell. You cannot see your body in the grave. You cannot hear the cries at your grave. You cannot taste or smell the putrid estate of being you now exist in. You cannot feel the touch of hands that grasp at your body as they heave in cries. And all of this goes around and around and around, as the circle is unbroken. Circle of life. Circle of death. Circle of grief. And I can’t help but think of how you looked in that final breath where all your senses screamed one last time as you slowly drifted off in warm heat flowing through your veins. That final breath, that final smell, that final taste of bile in your throat, that final sound you may have heard. Did you hear anything? Did you hear Death? Feel her, see her, smell her, taste her, touch her, sense her at?
Death. Death. Death. Lamenting sadness in death. Crumbling flowers. I want to preserve the flower as you have been preserved, but even embalming fluid will not keep your skin from slipping off your body. You will desiccate. You will bleed the fluid as if you were bleeding blood through an open wound as you air dry. You will become brittle and turn to dust as the grass of the earth above your resting place slowly eats the nutrients your body releases as it decays. I guess you are a flower. A flower plucked from its roots and placed in a vase to drink what water we give it like our own embalming fluid, but even flowers that are not cut from their stems wilt and die. Their petals flutter to the ground just as they flutter from the vase. They dry out. They desiccate. Your body is a flower, and your casket, the vase and the embalming fluid, your liquid of life to try and keep you from turning to mulch. But everything turns to mulch. Everything ceases to be and dries up. Everything slips off into the circle that remains unbroken until the end of the earth. We are all flowers with our tap roots still rooted in life while your taproot was uprooted in death. So, as your skin slips, your petals fall. As your skin dries, the moisture from within the stem dries. And as you desiccate, your chlorophyll no longer keeps your cell walls together, and you brown and crumble.
Maybe that’s why we throw the flowers in when they lower you. Because the flowers are you, and you are the flowers. Wilting, dying. Florists preserve flowers for wreaths, you know? They spray them to make them last long enough to make it through the week for the ceremony and for the grave display. The flowers just want to quench their thirst. Their thirst for water, the sustainability of their existence. They thirst for life, just as your body thirsts for life. Their life is water, your life is blood, but you have no blood, and they have no water. They’re just preserved as you are preserved. They are put on display just as you were put on display. We care for the dead the same as we care for flowers. We yearn to keep the beauty of beautiful things even when we know that beauty dies and you have indeed died just as the flower has died.
And just as one decorates a garden with ornate objects to bring it more life, bring it more characteristics, we decorated your casket. We chose the color, the style, the engravings, the inlaid cloth. We chose what to put in there with you: the pictures, the totems, the jewelry, the pictures, the vestibule of things we intend to send you off with. Cigarettes, moonshine, liquor, chewing tobacco, the things you love. It’s the things you love in hopes that what we place are somehow representative of us climbing in with you, laying to rest with you, buried with you while we walk around still full of life, while a piece of us is still buried with you. We walk around alive, but at that moment in time, we died with you. We walk around alive, but the piece of us we laid to rest of you forever lies at the bottom of a hole that was dug with a machine and then filled with the fill dirt and rocks pulled from the depths of the earth.
The depths of the earth are like the depths of the ocean no one has ever explored before. It is unknown, unseen, unless explored and when explored, it's mostly to inter those who have passed beyond, and we fondly think of existing in the clouds, in the space outside of our world that we know more of than what lies beneath our dirt and our waters. We know more about what’s outside of our world than what’s in our world and we think that the afterlife is resting within the stars we admire in the vast space of sky above our heads that twinkle and glean at night. But even all of the exploration of space we do by vehicle, by person, by telescope, that part of life is just as unknown as the vast depths of the earthen dirt and the watery oceans.
And those depths are just as deep and dark as the corners and shadows of ourselves. Our insides float like space and flow like water, and our souls twist and curve and reach like trees to the sky, but there is no sky within. There’s just emptiness even though we are full of organs and blood and tissue and bone wrapped in flesh made from stars that exploded and settled as carbon particles within the soil of the ground we walk upon. We tread upon the soul of the universe and we breathe in the soul of the universe, and we feel the soul of the universe as it slips through our fingers as grains of sand on the beach. We contemplate the vastness of the universe when, deep down, we know we are the universe, and the answers lie within the very core of our own unexplored philosophical bits and pieces we still don’t understand. We know how our parts function and work, but we don’t know why they do. We don’t know why our brain is wired to send the short electrical bursts between neurons that fire and spark and tell our heart to beat and our lungs to breathe, and our mouths to move to speak. We have yet to discover the whys of our own existence and our own working and animated organisms combined together to create the human body and convince ourselves we know the answers to the expanses of the universe or even the depths of our oceans.
But instead of knowledge and wisdom or intuition and clarity, we are left with a haunted graveyard with skeletons and ghosts that live within and beat as one with our body as we remember those we love who have moved on from this world but also left us incomplete and needing more. We need to know more about the afterlife because those we have loved, like you, are in the afterlife if the afterlife really did exist, as opposed to the atheistic view of nothingness and emptiness, much like our own insides of nothingness and emptiness. Those graveyards moan and groan like the bones creaking and aching within our skin. The sun rises and sets, but it’s a black sun that offers no light or brevity. And that graveyard full of skeletons that should fill a closet instead fills our minds, and we are haunted by the past instead of being set free. The ghosts roam wild and harrowingly, and they shout and murmur, screech and whimper, howl and mewl, wail and whine, all the while as we try to drown them out with TV and music and running and food and all the things that allow us to enjoy a fulfilling life, a hopeful life, a life that ignores the loss and grief that plagues the center of our brain, the center of our hearts, the center of our solar plexus.
And as the ghosts plague us, their bodies lie in a graveyard outside while they exist in the graveyard within us. So even in death, they are alive. They have a voice within our head; you have a voice within my head. I hear you. I see you. All of my senses are filled with you, and you are dead, but yet you are still alive. How can that be? How can you be both dead and alive if there is no afterlife, as some believe and if there is an afterlife? The afterlife is meant for the dead, but if you are live energy, then how can you exist in a place of wretch and rot and decay and desolation unless the afterlife is not actually a place or a spiritual plane but a place the living have created from their own energetic essence that holds you there so you can be felt and so you can exist in the graveyard between our ribs and heart. A graveyard that grows flowers and weeds but the weeds aren’t weeds but beautiful wildflowers and herbs and things we have been told are weeds, which are in truth beautiful in their own reason of existence. Like a creeping vine that weaves around the porch rails or sides of buildings, clinging to them for life and hard to pull away because they have tiny little hairs of roots that grasp onto everything, and latch on to live. They need to live and thrive to live, and those vines, they have a purpose, and they form a hedge, and that hedge rides the astral plane, and the astral plane is just a jump from the celestial realm where both heaven and hell battle for your soul even though hell isn’t real and just a subconscious creation of humanity that believe it into existence and only we can break free from it in death. But our souls, when we die, they latch onto the living, and we continue to live like a vine, and I feel the vine of the dead weaving through my being and those tiny hairs grasping at my heart, and my ribs, and they latch, and they create the graveyard, the living grave of death.
We are walking and breathing, and we are in a living grave of flowers. And the flowers are posies and daisies and tulips.

Kasey Hill has lived in Franklin County, VA, for most of her adult life and is a versatile writer known for her work in several genres, including urban fantasy, horror, thriller, paranormal romance, and metaphysical/New Age topics. She has authored both fiction and non-fiction, with a particular interest in Wicca, specializing in Trinitarian Wicca as the historical archivist with an upcoming historical account of the shift from polytheism to monotheism in Abrahamic religions, where she has published non-fiction works exploring the subject. 
Her fiction often dives into the supernatural and the macabre, blending mythological elements with modern storytelling. She has published multiple novels, poetry collections, and short stories. Notable works include her Guardians of Light series in the mythology fantasy genre, and her poetry that has received recognition for its depth and emotional resonance. As she grows in the horror genre, she has a particular penchant for Southern Gothic storytelling, such as her Adult Horror novel Devil’s Claw and her Young Adult horror series, The Whispering Spirits featuring The Haunting at Foxwood Village and Dark Coven. She has several Horror short stories circulating for anthologies and Ezines featuring her unique style of worldbuilding. 
In addition to her writing, Kasey Hill has also contributed to the Wiccan and occult community through her non-fiction work, making her a multi-faceted author with a broad range of interests and expertise. 
www.kaseyhillauthor.com
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