Graveyard Shift

I don’t know what you think, but Halloween is becoming like Christmas, starting earlier every year. I’ve only been dead for a short time and enjoy the peace of the graveyard; it’s different for corpses like Rip Van Winkle, who slept for twenty years when he was alive and missed the American Revolution—he likes to keep up-to-date.  

Just after midnight, the dead were settling in under their mud roof, and something was shuffling overhead. It sounded like badgers rooting in the weeds between gravestones, but I was curious. I shifted the lid of my coffin, sat up in the mound of dirt, and there they were: the undead.

‘OK,’ one of them said. ‘It’s time for our practise run. I need you all to rise from your coffins.’

We moaned and groaned but rose up anyway. After all, it will soon be Halloween.

Kim M. Russell, 12^th October 2026

This Monday I am hosting Prosery at the dVerse Poets Pub, when we write very short pieces of prose or flash fiction that tell a story with a beginning, middle and end. They can be in any genre but have a limit of 144 words; an additional challenge is to hit 144 exactly. The special thing about Prosery is that we provide a complete line or two from a poem, which must be included somewhere in the story, within the 144-word limit. The line(s) may be broken up with punctuation or capitalization, words can be added to the beginning or end, but not within the given line(s).

Badgers led me to a poem by Alice Oswald, entitled ‘Body’, and I chose the following lines to include in our Prosery:

“the dead were settling in under their mud roof
and something was shuffling overhead”