Persephone Posy looked over the outstretched darkness and let out a scream. It was a loud, knowing, almost giggling scream. The kind of scream a little girl might shriek if she thought her father had come up from behind her to tickle her belly. And, if it had been a moment sooner, that's exactly what would've happened. But somehow her father was gone, and the girl of eleven short years was left alone. At first touch, she echoed her little girl wince and whine--Her scream--But as the hands became tighter around her mid section, and shooting pains exploded into her flat chest, Persephone Posy cried out in pain. She crippled over in agony, her legs collapsing into her ribs, but neither her knees nor her elbows fell into the cold dirt beneath her. Instead, she found herself floating, the pain intensifying as the man-handling claws gripped her tighter. Her mouth became outstretched into an awkward open frown. Persephone Posy had known she was pretty, but at this exact moment, with the expression of real horror spread across her face for the very first time, she was as ugly as a kid could look.

She thought about screaming again, but she found her throat clogged with... with something she didn't know. It was icky and wet, sticky, but not slimy. It wasn't snot, and it didn't taste like blood, but it was lodged in her throat. Suddenly, oozing sops of puss came pouring out her tiny mouth and trickled down the flower patterned dress her parents had watched her open two months prior. It had been her birthday. The thick white foam tasted like acid. And then, moments after it had actually happened, Persephone Posy could feel the hole that had been poked into the small of her back; the gaping, stringy gap in her meat that meant she would die. She felt the cold knife tearing into her, and tears streamed down her eyes. Her eyeliner, something she had only just started wearing, fell down her cheeks in black waves. She heard the cracks and snaps of her muscles and bones and organs coming apart. She saw the blood mix with the puss and, as the moon shone brightly overhead, she went blind, her eyeballs rolling back and receding into the depths of her skull. Persephone Posy felt hot anger. She felt regret. She felt worried about what had happened to her father, but he had already been dead a full two and a half minutes, a knife jabbed through the deep of his throat.

Persephone Posy felt the world close, and everything inside her drain away. Like it had gone swirling down some rusty old drain that had always been there but never thought of. And then, the only thing Persephone Posy could feel was numbness. She didn't care. She didn't think of her family or her friends or the cities full of ash-coloured buildings she'd never see again. She didn't think about God or the Devil, or Heaven or Hell. She didn't think about anything. She saw a white light, and at first she thought it might be the moon, that cratered crescent that hung in the sky like an embarrassing pock marked little boy. Like Dan Markham from her class, whose thick clusters of acne hid his otherwise handsome face. And Dan Markham, the boy she'd spoken to five times, maybe six, was the last person Persephone Posy would ever think of. The light had become brighter. It wasn't the moon, but something special. Something reserved for this moment. Something dead. It was the light of the dead, a hole for the living to pass over and ignore. That gaping hole that everyone knew about but no one could build a bridge over. The cavernous gap that existed between one place and another, no one ever switching sides. The dead white: It was bright terror at the thought of never being scared again. Persephone Posy closed her blind eyes and gave in to that strange sheen of bright light. The flashlight in the dark which had grown from a dot in the distance to a massive cloud of brilliant milky white that overtook what was left of her vision.

Persephone Posy died.