Is it confusing?
Not in the ways you intend it to be.
Is it even remotely interesting?
No.
Would you be interested in reading more of this character/storyline?
No.
I answered all three of these questions by the end of the first paragraph. So let's begin.
CHAPTER 1: A DEATH BY QUIET WATERS
Naming chapters has fallen out of style, and will generally be seen as gauche. If your aim is to one day be a published author, you aren't helping yourself here.
I was killed today—murdered to be precise.
A declaration like this needs to be punchy. "My name is Gerald Strauss. I was murdered today." Bam. Leading off with a bang. Great.
What you do here instead is lead off with a whimper. You correct yourself in the second sentence, and at a moment that shouldn't require clarification. This tells me I'm about to read a lot of prose that isn't sure of itself, that dithers and dodges and doesn't trust my intelligence. And lo -- I'm right.
However, I’m not sure preciseness matters much in this place.
The word you are looking for is "precision." And precision is the theme of today's critique. Your writing is imprecise. It's puffed-up and uncertain, filled with solecisms, and lacking direction.
Or was years ago that I had died?
I don't know. You haven't tethered me to anything concrete, I have no characters to envision or a setting to imagine, so how can you expect me to care? What response can a reader possibly have to this question, other than a disinterested shrug?
You expect to instill a sense of mystery in your reader without doing the legwork necessary to create a mysterious circumstance. Not a good sign. If I was not critiquing the story, I would have stopped reading here.
In any case, it must be said, that it was an uninspired murder, and with luck, the papers found it as dull as I.
Your sentences are often mostly filler. Here is a good example. "In any case" and "it must be said" are useless qualifiers. They add nothing. One should hope you're only telling us what must be said -- that is the point of storytelling.
"With luck" is a cliche. Why is what the papers report a matter of luck, anyway?
Compare: "It was an uninspired murder. I hope the papers found it as dull as I did." (I will let you figure out on your own why adding "did" to the end of the sentence is necessary.)
Only then, perhaps, would the preceding circumstances, which I find quite ridiculous, stay hidden.
The preceding circumstances were ridiculous, you say? Quite ridiculous? Maybe you should let your reader be the judge of that. Instead of expending all this energy on summarizing what you are about to tell us and how we should feel about it, just cut to the chase.
These are the thoughts, in as clear a manner as I can muster, which traveled in quick flashes in my mind, seconds before my death.
Your sentences meander. Of course these are your thoughts. Of course you are relaying them in as clear a manner as you can muster. Do you need the word muster to modify "can"? Isn't a flash typically "quick"? Don't thoughts usually occur in the mind?
The problem is precision. You don't trust yourself and you don't trust your reader. I am going to harp on this until you internalize it.
…The noise was sounded five times…
If I have to critique you on the level of "watch out for passive voice!" then there is such a gulf between you and creating anything remotely publishable that your best option is to ditch everything you have and start over again.
Time, as they say, slowed down, and a second lasted thirty.
As they say. Drawing attention to the cliche will not make your reader forgive you. Especially when you draw attention to it with another cliche.
I laughed at the thing, even as a small patch of forehead tightened into a sore welt.
What sort of wilting lily get a welt from a grasshopper?
The summer breeze of the Midwest pressed on my moist skin with a bracing touch, a caress from nature on a tired body.
Not every noun needs an adjective. You create such clutter like that. If you want to set a pastoral scene, you need to do some work, you can't just throw in "summer" and "moist" and "bracing" and think your work is done. There is no shorthand for good description.
chemical fiesta
Kill me.
a poor position in which to be for a mouth in the woods
What are you thinking? This reads like a parody of over-description.
Through some act of fate or meaningless chance
Over and over, these meaningless qualifiers. You could cut your word count in half without even beginning to address the deeper problems of scene-setting and storytelling this piece suffers with.
The rough seed prodded the walls of my throat
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
“Oh, fuck off.” I had said between a laugh and a cavernous, post-violated.
A cavernous, post-violated what? Your sentence loses track of itself midway through.
There was movement in every space my eyes could see.
I want you to think about what you're doing with your descriptions. Because you think this is describing something, but it really isn't. It's describing nothing at all. There is movement, and it is everywhere. But what is moving? Where? All the reader sees is a formless nothing-space, filled with moving nothings. The reader sees nothing because you haven't given us anything to see. Only in the following sentences do we receive the details of what is moving, where, and how. These sentences would function just as well whether this one is there or not. And since that's the case, you should get rid of it. It's just a bunch of extra words for your audience to skip.
A smile stretched across my face
"I smiled." Just say "I smiled." This is neither cute nor clever. It's annoying.
scrunched
Consider: would a man who uses words like "alight," "absurd," "preceding," and "subside" use a word like "scrunched" in the same passage? There is no consistency of voice here.
faint trace
Why not just "trace"? Precision. Let your nouns and verbs do your lifting for you when they can.
a river creaked, providing a silent undertone
Did it creak or was it silent? Precision.
like a CD of natural sounds to help with insomnia
Tacky.