A Single Shallow Breath

I can’t feel my hands.

It’s the only thought she can get out, the only thing she can process, the simplest set of words she can string together in the moment. The world is suddenly dark, so dark, and she could swear that just a moment ago there had been more than this, the crushing weight of invisibility pressing her down.

I can’t feel my feet either.

She kicks and struggles and her toes meet hard wood—couldn’t this sort of thing break a bone or twelve with ease? She wouldn’t know. All she knows is that she has to go up, past the wood and the weight and the awful dreadful suspicion that there is nothing else for her broken spirit to feel.

What can I feel?

Any other day, it would be a simple question with a simple answer. But she can’t feel, she can’t see, she can’t know what this is or how deep she is. She scratches, fights, claws her way forward, pulls a deep breath into depleted lungs and forces a response to her own question.

Nothing.

She looks down at her own body, her hands just as unfeeling and lungs just as empty as before. There is no longer the weight of burial dirt and splintering coffin wood to battle, no fear of invisibility or numbness to push her forward.

What am I?

Is she…free? Untethered? Set loose? She doesn’t know. She stands, stares down at the grave before her. The heart she had in life would be beating out of her chest now had it followed her into death. But now she only sighs, a single shallow breath to welcome herself to the afterlife.

A ghost has no use for feelings here.