Waking Up

Flash Fiction 

Lenore had not realized how she had wasted her life. It was June, and she was young, but those facts were not her entire situation. If they had been, things would have been hopeful. Lenore looked at the tombstones around her. She did not know where she was. She had just woken up here. She struggled to remember through the pain of her broken body what had happened. Why was she in a graveyard? She was above ground, she could see that. Was this the afterlife or something?

In the wet grass, she lay still. It was near dawn. She should get up, Lenore thought. But her injuries, the blood all over her body from where she had been beaten made it a comforting thought to just drift into dreams. But to drift into dreams was to drift into death. She needed to find someone and tell them to take her to the hospital. She knew she might not survive otherwise. So, she woke up. 

The last thing she had remembered was accepting a ride from a stranger the night before. But they had never reached the city that she was trying to hitch hike to. Instead, he had pulled over in a deserted cemetery allegedly to go use the bathroom over in the trees. But, then she felt a blow to her head. And now here she was, waking up. 

Lenore pulled herself up and moved toward the road, slowly, so a passing car could see her. She moved away from the tombstones. She moved toward life. Waking up, she realized all the chances she had taken in her sixteen short years of life were a chance she could never take again, not with life. She was done taking chances and running away from those who loved her. She had woken up, if she survived that is. Lenore moved slowly in the dawn, to the main road. Cars were passing. Somebody would find her, she thought bloodied, but awake and ready to live.