Six Feet Under

Buried alive.

What a horrible way to go.

Yazz lay there, in her own thoughts. What else could she do? She was hungry, thirsty, tired, mentally, and physically exhausted, and more than anything, she was bored. She hoped she would die of boredom before anything else, anything else would've been more painful. Like many people had, she and her friends had talked about what they reckon the worst ways to die were, it was a morbid subject, but it came up every now and again. Yazz had always been one to argue her point on drowning, others had mentioned burning alive, slowly and painfully bleeding to death, hung drawn and quartered, and being starved to death. It was strange that none of them had considered being buried alive, it had never come up. But now, she was thinking back to those conversations her and her friends had had, how could they have not thought about it? It took a lot longer than the others, you were completely confined, you couldn't move or do anything, you just had to wait, until your body was physically unable to support a life system anymore, which could take up to four days. Four! By far the longest out of all of them. She recounted some of these conversations just to try and pass the time, anything to pass the time. It was difficult to know how much time had passed since she had been underground, it was difficult to know anything. There were many things that Yazz didn't know, she didn't know where she was, she didn't know how she'd got into the coffin, she'd just woken up there. Yazz also didn't know what time it was, or even what day it was, she guessed at Tuesday, it was Sunday evening when she'd been buried alive, intentionally, and although it had felt like weeks had passed, she was still alive, which means she hadn't died from dehydration, and therefore it couldn't have been more than four days.

In her half deluded state of mind, she managed to find the joke of at least I've missed a couple of days of school. Gallows humour, she'd heard it been called before. She didn't even dislike school, but the thought of days off school was something any teenager dreamed of. Although maybe not in this way.

The human body was a wonderful thing, without food it could survive for over three weeks, as found out by Mahatma Ghandi. But without water was another story entirely. Yazz was certain she'd learned in school that humans were at least 60% water, and that without quenching that thirst at all, the human body would fail to keep itself alive after four days. Still a pretty impressive feat, one hundred and six hours in total, of course it was an estimated average, there weren't many willing participants for that particular scientific test.

Hey, come on down to your local GP, and fill out the form to be a part of a one off scientific research project to find out how long the human body will last without water. Sure, you won't survive, but we'll learn a lot, and that's reward enough, right?

Yazz realised she must've been going insane when she laughed at the thought of her own ‘advert’ that she'd just concocted in her head. She shook her head at herself and wiped the ridiculous grin off her face.

So she had been here no more than four days, and the fact that she was still thinking rationally.. Or mostly rationally anyway, meant that she probably wasn't close to death, so it was probably only a couple of days, although it was very, very difficult to tell. In fact, some might say it was almost impossible to tell, unless she had counted every second since she had been put underground. But of course she hadn't, to begin with, instead of counting the seconds by, she had tried everything she could think of to get out, and caused herself a lot of pain in the process.

Yazz had had a few ideas to get out, firstly the people who had buried her had left her fully clothed, including her shoes, which she had repeatedly pounded into the roof of the coffin, with unfortunately no headway. That was her first idea, and when it came to nothing, she got desperate, scratching her fingers on the underside of the door. All she got from that was a couple of splinters under her fingernails, which still hurt now, and a few chipped nails as well. Yazz wasn't the sort of girl that put too much effort into her nails, but still having three of them chipped and two others with splinters underneath them wasn't fun.

After that she'd remembered seeing a film her parents had loved, called Kill Bill, where the main character in that, played by Uma Thurman, was buried alive, and to escape her coffin she used something called the One Inch Punch. Yazz took inspiration from this, and had a spark of hope. She lay her right arm flat to her side, bent her elbow so her hand was pointing directly upwards, stretched her fingers out, and then raised them until they touched the door. There was probably two inches of space between the floor and the bottom of her elbow, which was more than enough for the One Inch Punch. With her fingertips just touching the door of the coffin, she breathed in and out, slowly, psyching herself up. And then as quickly and powerfully as she could, Yazz drew her fingers into a fist and thrust upwards hard, and ploughed her right fist into the door. It was probably the most powerful punch she had ever thrown, however it did not have the desired effect. Instead, she found herself in incredible pain, as she had balled her fist up, her middle fingernail had caught on the wood, and tore. And then when she punched upwards she heard a crack, she thought it was the wood to begin with, and then almost immediately she felt the searing pain. It was unbearable, the most amount of pain she'd ever felt, and in that moment she went to cradle her injured hand in her lap with her other hand, and then curl herself around it, which only resulted in her banging both her knees, and her forehead into the roof of the coffin simultaneously.

More pain.

The pain from her right hand had subsided a little bit, but it was throbbing uncontrollably. She felt around the knuckles on her right hand and came to the conclusion that she'd probably broken something in her hand. It felt stupid to try again, but what other choice did she have. She went through the same process, this time with her left hand, laying her arm down, and then getting her fingers in the correct position, and then remembering about her middle finger nail, decided it would be best to bite the remaining fingernails off, before she went for the punch.

For the first time in her life, Yazz took to her own fingernails with her own teeth. It felt disgusting, it astounded her that some people couldn't stop themselves from doing this. It almost made her wretch when she bit down on what must've been dirt. Eventually she got rid of her last three fingernails, and decided she could leave the thumbnail as it was, it wasn't in the firing line. So she replaced her hand, back into position, again took a deep breath, and in one smooth swift motion, closed her hand into a fist, and shot her hand skyward.

For the second time in what could've only been a few hours, Yazz found herself in extreme agony, and for the second time, Yazz headbutted the door of the coffin. In her current state, she still managed to think to herself “its lucky no one saw that, that would've been embarrassing”, and despite herself, and despite her two suspected broken hands, despite the rising headache after headbutting the coffin door, not once, but twice, Yazz realised she was laughing. It wasn't because she found something funny, it was because there was nothing left to do, what else was there, but to laugh at that little sarcastic comment her brain had decided to make even after all that pain.

She remembered in the film, Uma Thurman's fists were bloody, but she continued to punch until she broke through the wood and clawed her way out of the six feet of dirt she'd found herself under. Yazz didn't think she could put herself through that, not yet, she wasn't desperate enough. She knew no one was coming to get her, but at this point, she wasn't desperate to break her hands more.

Shortly after her few failed attempts to escape, it became difficult to breathe, unsurprising really, considering she breathed hard while trying to get over the pain of her fists, as if that was going to heal her quicker. Silently she cursed herself, and allowed her breathing to become more shallow, and maintained it like that for as long as she could, before she had to take a deep breath. Although each time she took one, it felt like there was less and less air to breathe in.

She must've fallen asleep, because she didn't remember moving her right hand onto her stomach, so she'd just woken up, what did that mean?

She'd slept.

Okay, but for how long?

Who knows, it could've been a matter of minutes or hours, there was literally no one person in the world that could tell her how long she had slept for. She realised that one of these times she fell asleep unknowingly, it would be the last time she would ever fall asleep, and she would not wake up from it.

She had been hungry before obviously, but not like this, she had never felt pain like this before. The cramps she got were difficult to describe. It was like a knot had formed inside her stomach, and every now and again, randomly that knot just decided to tighten itself for no apparent reason, other than to cause extreme, never felt before, pain. She had had some of those cramps recently, she couldn't remember when, time seemed to go slowly, or quickly, she couldn't work it out. It was a strange sensation, with no light coming into her coffin, she couldn't see a thing, which also meant she had no way of knowing the time of day, and therefore no idea what day it was, or how much time had passed. One time she counted all the way to ten thousand, just because she could. It was incredible what time to yourself in a small space did to you. She could slowly feel herself going insane, which was a difficult realisation to come to, and even harder to go through.

So far, in her time underground she had burst into tears three times, and she wasn't normally the type of girl to cry, under these circumstances however, she was willing to allow herself to shed a few tears. She had kicked the roof of her coffin countless times, not to try and get a breakthrough, literally, not anymore, now it was just purely out of frustration. Many times she had screamed at the top of her lungs for a solid minute, not even saying words, just trying her best to get some kind of response, from someone, anyone.

The thing is, she didn't know where she was buried, if she was in a graveyard, she may not be that far down, and if that was the case, maybe her screams might be heard by someone visiting an old relative or loved one. Although if she was thinking completely rationally, she may have put herself in the position of a person she might be able to get ahold of, and how, if they were visiting their loved ones, and suddenly heard screaming coming from underground, it was highly unlikely that their first reaction would be to dig down and find out where it was coming from, more likely to scare them away. Forever. That was all in the case of her captors being stupid enough to bury her close enough to the surface to be heard, and in a public place. No, it was more likely altogether that she wasn't buried in a public graveyard. She had probably been buried in a private graveyard, or somewhere completely different, and unrelated to burials.

It didn't matter too much, because after her last screaming fit, her voice had completely gone. She'd tried to scream again, but her throat had dried out, and with no water, she was unable to moisten it up ready for another spin. That had been a while ago, again, she didn't know how long ago, but it wasn't recent, although she could still feel how dry the back of her throat was. She tried to swallow, to get some moisture, but there was nothing there, and she ended up gagging, and then coughing, and in the process, headbutting the coffin again, which all in all made her throat and head feel a whole lot worse.

“Nice one” She said, out loud to herself. Or she tried to, her voice didn't work properly, it came out more like “ice n”. The raspiness of her voice surprised her, she knew it'd be bad, but, that bad? No, she hadn't expected it. She thought she'd at least be able to get out those two words. She felt defeated, and drained, it was as if trying to talk had taken the last of her hope and energy, all in one. She started to cry again, not like a out loud wailing cry, more like a quiet, subdued cry, she hadn't intended it, the tears just started to roll down her cheeks, she realised that this was probably a turning point in her mental state, and decided to close her eyes, unintentionally she start to think back to what had happened in her life, to bring her to this moment, a week ago, she was a happy eighteen year old, in her last year at school, enjoying school and her home life, and now, here she was, probably with her loved ones worrying sick, and looking all over for her. How had it all gone so wrong, so quick?