Flash Fiction: Buried Alive

© Annie Forrest

“Buried Alive” By Brent Leoni

I took Charlie out to the forest for one more experience in the world. I didn’t tell him, but I had decided I was going to let him pass. I wasn’t going to eat him (that’s the first thing my friends asked after the fact). He was inedible. He had been through so much, he made the five second rule sound like it was CDC-approved.

We didn’t go too far—just enough where you couldn’t see the cars passing by. I took him out. “What do you think, Charlie?” I asked. “Can you feel the fresh air sifting through your cornmeal?”

“Do you want to be like me?” he asked.

“Why do you say that?” I asked.

“You’re wearing an orange sweatshirt.”

“What do they say again? That imitation is the most sincere form of flattery?”

I had already dug a three-feet-deep hole so that no animal could dig him up. Charlie could be one with the earth, something he never had the pleasure of being. But it was only when I got home that I realized it would probably take a few months or even years before he would decompose.

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