I didn’t know that the air could rot.

Not until I was locked in that box, suffocating beneath one thousand pounds of rain-dampened soil.

The casket was a gorgeous mahogany, lined with Egyptian cotton, 9000 thread count.

Way too extravagant, too expensive, for the dead.

It’s not like the inhabitant of the box could enjoy the luxury anyway.

I was stuck down there. I could not move. I could feel my body, an acute awareness, but one I had no control over.

I was able to see and move my eyes, but that didn’t matter much in the pitch-black.

I could hear as well: the rustling of worms in the soil, the flicks my eyes made when I tried to look around.

And, oh, could I smell. I couldn’t breathe, and evidently I didn’t need to, but that just meant that I was always, always subjected to the odors of that coffin. I could not turn it off.

I don’t know how long it’d been since I’d been buried, but, eventually, the air started to suffocate me.

It got heavier and mustier until every second was torture.

I could feel each speck of dust, I could taste each spore of mold.

Was there even still air in this casket? Or was it all just a thick miasma of rot and death?

I’m here, I’m alive, I wanted to shout, but sound was one boon apparently not given to me.

“I’m going to die here,” I thought, ”suffocating in this Mahogany hell.”

But the longer I was down there, the more time I had to think.

I started to realize, as I slowly became unable to move my eyes, that it was not the air that was rotten. It was not the air that was souring my lungs and suffocating me.

It was my own body, lying in this casket and decaying.

The rustles I’d been hearing had not been the worms outside in the dirt, but the worms who’d made it inside as they feasted on my decomposing flesh.

I didn’t know the air could rot because it can’t.

But I can,

and I was.