• They lay the small pink and white coffin in the earth. A child lays inside the casket, eyes closed, skin pale in contrast to her dark brown hair. The sound of the dirt hitting the coffin, and quiet sobs from family members was all that was heard. After she was in the ground and they had said their prayers for the girl, a man stayed behind. He stared at the headstone waiting for the bell to ring. Though death was common in those days, he couldn’t believe his little girl was dead. Never to return. He refused to believe such nonsense. He fell to his knees sobbing, his cries of agony echoed through the cemetery. His crying stopped abruptly when he heard a noise… At first he couldn’t figure out what the sound was, but as it got clearer he knew what it was. The bell was ringing! She wasn’t dead! The man started digging frantically at the hard earth. The ground tore away his fingernails. The crimson blood mixed with the soil. He barely got an inch of dirt out of the way when he saw the shovel that the groundskeeper left behind. He grabbed it and started shoveling until he hit something hard: the casket. He jumped into the grave, nearly twisting his ankle in the process and brushed away the excess dirt from the top of the coffin. Opening it ever so slowly, he saw his daughter. She still looked dead. The only way he knew she wasn’t dead was the fact that her eyes were open and she was staring right at him. Her eyes were different though. They were no longer the sweet, light, blue eyes of the child she used to be, but a dark crimson color. Her eyes now snapped down to the blood that covered his hands. She was now sitting up and approaching her father, hands grasping towards his neck. The child jumped on top of him, knocking him over in the process and tore with nails and teeth at his exposed throat, his screams turned into a gurgled cry.