The grave was the same.
The rain, the cedar, the shovelfuls of wet earth. This time she fought it. She tried to hold her breath the way Ashlynn had. She tried to claw her way up through the mud.
She drove her ruined hands upward into the earth, and her broken fingers bent the wrong way against it. Her nails peeled back from their beds, one after another, until mud packed into the raw, bleeding flesh beneath them. She kept digging anyway. She dug until her fingertips were nothing but torn meat and splintered bone, and the earth above her never grew any thinner.
Her lungs began to burn. She held on. She held on while her chest heaved and her throat convulsed and the pressure built behind her eyes until she thought they might burst. She held on until her body betrayed her, and she gasped, and the mud rushed in.
It filled her mouth. It filled her throat. She choked on it, and every choking breath drew more of it down into her chest, cold and gritty and endless.
