Day 454

The gate at the end of her garden had always been coated in moss.
It was common for the area, something in the rain made it grow like crazy.
Sometimes during her monthly moss-reduction she'd find things she'd previously lost.
Her old hedge trimmers (that she swore she left in the shed), sunglasses, an old bird feeder.

She never dug far, only half a foot or so generally.
Just enough to make the ground safer to walk on - moss could be pretty unstable and squishy.
When she was a little girl she'd gotten stuck up to her armpits in a small moss coated pond.
It had looked just like ground at the time, she promised herself it'd never happen again.

Today she decided to dig deeper than usual - the sinking nightmares were getting worse.
It took her the usual three hours to get half a foot down, left her plenty of time to continue.
She hadn't found anything out of the ordinary so far, just the usual miscellaneous stuff.
Taking a deep breath she prepared herself to dig further, perhaps to the dirt.

The first thing she noticed as she began to remove the moss was the metallic smell.
Next came the gradual change from bright green to deep green to brown to black to red.
This might be normal for the area, so few dug this far down she had no real idea.
She found bones along the way, small at first like rodents but they grew larger as she dug.

Eventually she unearthed a human skull, small but definitely human.
The moss was firmly embedded in it - inside and out - but what scared her most was the hole in it.
Almost looked like someone or something had taken a bite out of the poor thing
She wondered how many more were buried under the moss.

She didn't have to wonder for long as the ground beneath her collapsed.
All her digging had caused the moss to weaken as interconnecting roots had been severed.
Her landing was her end as the sharp bones of hundreds pierced her soft flesh.
As her eyes clouded over the moss began to grow back once more, satisfied for a while.