My Husband Bought My Grave Before He Bought Dinner

by Robert Chase

I found the receipt in his jacket pocket while doing laundry. Plot 4B at Eternal Rest. Paid in full. Timestamped three hours ago. When Graham came home, he didn't hide it. He didn't apologize. He wept, held my face, and whispered that he just wanted to be prepared for 'when the darkness finally takes you.' I'm thirty-two. I'm healthy. But my husband is a crisis manager who spins disasters into sympathy, and he has decided I am dying. Not physically—but socially, legally, and spiritually. He speaks of me in the past tense at dinner parties. He donates my clothes to charity while I'm at work. He is grieving me to death, and the terrifying part isn't that he's crazy. It's that the world is starting to agree with him. To survive, I have to prove I'm alive—even if I have to scream until my throat bleeds.