One half of the coffin lid was open, and her torso was visible from the waist up. Her skin stretched tightly across her brow and wide forehead, which tapered into a dried-out, autumn field of brown stalks of hair. Her cheeks had caved in, and her eyelids spanned precariously across sinkholes. She was desiccated, a dried-out insect. How long had she been dead? The heavy-handed application of foundation makeup did not add health, weight, or life to her face. She did not look like someone sleeping peacefully, nor did she look like an uncanny, waxy mannequin. The coffin was too big for her, and she receded into the plush lining. She wore a prim, long-sleeved navy-blue dress. Her hands were folded over her stomach, and her fingers and wrists were skinnier than mine. I hid my hands behind my back, afraid I was seeing a future snapshot of my own grotesquely thin corpse. My initial spark of discovery at witnessing life’s most final, physical mystery was extinguished. I wondered how old she was. Twenties? Early thirties? What had it felt like when her heart stopped beating? Did she register the last thump? Did consciousness cease with a final darkness or was there darkness first, then a sensation of ebbing away, of falling, or was it a lessening into becoming nothing, which wasn’t a becoming, then? You couldn’t become nothing, could you? Whatever the nature of the transition (from living to dead), it was something no one could describe because there was no one around who had fully experienced it. I knew that was trite, but why didn’t we talk about this more? How was it not part of our constant, daily discourse? How was this a natural thing? How was this allowed and tolerated, never mind celebrated? I wanted to know what had happened to her and I wanted to know her story even though the ending had been spoiled. How could any of our stories mean anything when we knew the inevitable end? I didn’t want to be there anymore and didn’t want to look at her anymore. But I still looked. I memorized her face, the whorls and folds in her right ear, the lines that were there in her skin and the lines that weren’t there but should’ve been. The longer I stared the more I expected her eyes to open. Her eyelids would audibly and dustily creak and crinkle open. I saw it happening, and they revealed two empty sockets, or maybe her eyes had gone white, a terrible white like the rolled eyes of an attacking shark or swollen spider eggs ready to hatch, and the worst part was I’d feel them seeing me. They’d always see me. And I was the baby rabbit again, and if I didn’t move maybe I’d avoid the gaze. I was barely breathing, holding my breath, trying to save it, like a miser hoarding coins. I looked left and right to my clubmates, trying to break out of the spell, but spells could only be broken with the right words. Should I ask if either of them had seen a dead body before? For as awful as seeing her body was, there remained an I’m-getting-away-with-something feeling, a not-quite-schadenfreude sense of Thank God I’m not you and you are not me and when we leave this building we’ll talk louder and laugh harder and run faster and whistle past all the graveyards.