As the rushing train ran its course, Alice thought that she would have more poetic thoughts brewing in her mind than last week’s grocery list and her cat’s face. It was the end; she was all dried out. There was no more room in her heart for fear, only exhaustion. The gristly remains she would leave behind on the tracks would be gone in a few hours, crushed to pieces by cold steel and hosed away by a crew of unlucky maintenance workers. Or maybe they didn’t care – it was easy enough to pretend that the pieces of meat belonged to a cow, or some goat dumb enough to cross the tracks at the wrong time. But all that was over now.

The unending cycle of agony, self-pity, and vitriol had finally ceased to exist. Alice was dead, and that was all she wanted, really. A clean emptiness made her chest feel light and her heart whole. It was an approximation of happiness. She always had to rely on approximates; a yardstick for happiness was relative, and quite frankly, she had never had much experience with the real thing.

Being an artist was supposed to be a liberating and soul-enriching experience, but sometimes Alice felt that with each animal she forged and sculpted, they took a piece of herself with them. And the more beautiful they were, the more they took. Alice didn’t want to disappear. But she didn’t want to stop, either. In the end, she took the coward’s way out – a poor compromise that made everybody feel unresolved.

But it would have to do. There was no way back now, anyway.

Alice opened her eyes. An alien sky greeted her and beneath her grew the greenest grass she had ever seen. Alice closed her eyes, then opened them once more. The vision did not go away; it was real. It was also beautiful.

Gradually, her senses came to her. She heard voices nearby and turned her head. There were people. They were talking, and Alice decided to speak up as well. Her throat was less hoarse than it had always been back on the mortal plane, but a certain roughness still blurred the edges, the mark of smoking unfiltered cloves for years.

Still lying down, she spoke to the others. A man had asked whether they were in heaven, and she couldn’t help but smile.

“Heaven’s really boring, isn’t it? They didn't even bother to welcome us.”

She eyed the woman nearby; full of energy, for someone so newly dead. The man seemed a more somber sort.