EXTRACT FOR
The Tombstone
(Craig M. Sampson)

Melanie scurried along to race back to the cemetery in a frantic effort to ward off the panic that was now threatening to overtake her. Her gradual but seemingly unstoppable physical transformation, which she initially was sure had just been her imagination or some bizarre hallucination, appeared to be on a runaway train she was no longer able to slow down much less stop. Each visit back to David's gravesite had been a new adventure in disbelief and denial, but now she knew that what she had once convinced herself as just some teenage prank was anything but.

It all denied any rational or logical explanation but even that was the least of her worries as she leapt from her car and ran up the slight incline that led to the twin stones where David had been buried almost a decade ago now. With her mere existence seemingly on the line, Melanie had bigger concerns at the moment besides logic, reason, and rational explanations. She pumped her legs as fast as she could as the tops of the grave markers came into sight just over the tops of the short shrubs that waved in the breeze.

But even as she gasped for breath and lurched ahead step after step she could not deny that the feeling of her feet physically coming into contact with the ground beneath her was becoming less and less apparent. As she collapsed in front of the granite obelisks, feeling only a slight vibration back as her knees hit the hard ground, and looked at the etching there, Melanie was not sure if she had gone mad or if she had entered some other reality that defied all laws of the world she had known all her life. One option seemed as hideous as the other and she covered her face with her hands, petrified to look upon the familiar stone tablets based on what had been progressing in her life for the number of years.