"Pigeon Feathers"

"Without warning, David was visited by an exact vision of death: a long hole in the ground, no wider than your body, down which you were drawn while the white faces recede.  You try to reach them but your arms are pinned.  Shovels pour dirt in your face.  There you will be forever, in an upright position, blind and silent, and in time no one will remember you, and you will never be called.  As strata of rock shift, your fingers elongate, and your teeth are distended sideways in a great underground grimace indistinguishable from a strip of chalk.  And the earth tumbles on, and the sun expires, an unaltering darkness reigns where once there were stars."

-John Updike