My vision swam strangely. I looked up at the sky; it was a vivid dark purple… like looking at a photo taken at night that had been overexposed.

It was night again. I must have slept through the day.

“I do it often enough,” she said. She looked down at me expectantly. “Well? Are you going to stay in that coffin forever?”

“My eyes are… wrong,” I said, squinting and rubbing my face.

“They process light more efficiently now. It’s fine, darling, you’ll get used to it.”

A wicked smile crossed her face for a moment and she snapped her shovel in two like a matchstick. She threw away the metal end and held the wooden shaft over me. The break had turned it into a perfectly sharp spike.

“Get that thing away from me!” I hissed, recoiling from the stake. Instincts I had not had before warned me of its danger. The wood itself seemed to radiate the promise of death.

“How do you think he felt? Before the end?” she asked. Her eyes were laughing but her smile was predatory. “Is this what you would have wanted?”