When Rhiannon opened her eyes again, she found herself in a coffin. Dark, narrow space, a wooden smell, – what else it was if not a coffin.

"Auch!" The woman turned around and bumped her head.

"I am alive," followed a late realization. Her voice sounded dry, low and she didn't care it sounded dry and low.

"I am alive! Suck it, death!"

Weak laughter echoed through the coffin, laughter and then clothes rustling around.

"They stitched me well," Rhi gave her approval. "Very... well?"

Her fingers couldn't find a scar. What to search for she knew extremely well, and yet couldn't find it. In fact, the search proceeded too easily.

"What..?"

She felt it. Where the sense of touch should have been all lost, where her nerves should have been numb and deaf, she felt it.

It cannot be.

A twitch, a flutter ran down her back, down her legs.

How..?

"The bullet... did it... did it un-mess me up? My spine, did it hit my spine?"

Shock, joy, trepidation rushed her in a rising tide, strong so nearly paralyzing the woman anew. She laughed and at the same time she cried. Eight years! It had been eight years since she got anchored to wheelchairs and disability benefits! Eight years since she had changed medical practice for research! Eight years since!..

Hurt and sadness stabbed her heart, freeing her from the rapture.

Control breathing, rein the brain, suppress the animal. The mantra helped. Rhia breathed deep and reassessed her status.

"God I hope they postponed the burial," she murmured, set her hands against the coffin lid, and pushed.

Effortlessly, the lid gave away and fell aside with a thud. Light poured in the coffin, not bright or dim, simple light of grey clouds high in the skies. Rhia squinted and pulled herself up, avoiding the welcoming embrace of thorny branches. A naked tree gloomily scratched her white clothes and retreated when moved away.

Buddha statues stared down at the woman, ancient and coarse. They filled her sight on the left, statues both her hand-size small and tall like giants. Muddy plates were laid on the altars, some of them broken, some not; all filled with foul and dusty offerings. On her right, there were more coffins of all forms. They were grouped under naked trees in disarray, guarded by crosses, tombstones, and memorials of all shapes and origins, most of them unfamiliar.

With a snap in the neck, Rhiannon turned back to the left, goggling in a perplexed gaze. Behind Buddhas stood Greek gods – those she recognized. Behind them stood more statues in all shapes and forms. Shiva meditating in a lotus pose, dog-headed Anubis watching invisible sinners, and many more.

Somehow she didn't recognize it as the cemetery she had put down in her will. Slowly the woman tried to get from the coffin. Her hands pushed the wooden side, legs still unmoved: she simply forgot to use them. Her eyes fell down.

"What..?"

Those hands weren't hers. When Rhi brought them closer she found no sign of veins or tendons. The fingertips were smooth like glass and resilient like rubber or plastic. Those were hands not of a human or even a cadaver, but those of a manikin. The skin color was also wrong: Rhiannon loved her dark brown skin, a mark of her mixed descent, but this skin was light grey.

Hurriedly she looked under all over her white funeral clothes and verified her whole body was one of a manikin. She could start working on a podium marketing the promising acquisitions right away.

Rhia touched her face, her narrow altered face. It had pointy cheekbones and a thin nose. The perfectly rounded eyes were dry: she might have cried a minute ago but there were no tears. With horror, she moved her hands up, feeling up the barren skull without a single hair.

"Is this the afterlife?"

From the time she had been first explained the principles of God Rhiannon had been an atheist through and through, yet such a seditious idea found its way into her tremulous mind now.

"Is that guy..? Here?"

After one thought another caught up as Rhi remembered the burglar she'd killed, suddenly feeling sick and gross with herself – more so than after the act of killing in self-defense. The queer world wobbled and she vomited.

Well, nothing came out from her stomach. Perhaps it was all phony too.

If it's the afterlife... what about that hallucination? after a second thought, a horrifying third came along.

Did Jon... saw me dying?

"Please, whoever you are don't let Jon see me dying as well! Anything but that!"

Rhiannon screamed; her jaws clenched from a desperate, powerless grudge against the world.

Click-click.

Now then, it wasn't her. It floated from behind, sounds of something clacking on the rocks, it sounded so clearly in the noiseless world it sent shivers down her manikin skin.

With another click-click, Rhiannon turned around slowly. Click-click. A skeleton walked slowly, pieces of grey flesh clinging to its bones here and there. It had a single piece of dark cloak covering its body and a rusty shortsword in its hand.

Click-click (those were calcaneus bones in unison with metatarsal and phalanges meeting half-buried road slabs, or so helpfully prompted the brain to stupified Rhi). The skeleton walked leisurely, however, in its gait Rhiannon only saw imminent malice. An unknown before fear froze her for a few moments, enough for the out-of-a-movie thingy to shorten the distance between them by a few meters.

"No... no!"

Instincts finally kicked in, the animal she had been so fine at suppressing, and Rhi tossed herself out of the coffin. With a crackle skeleton's head followed her; Rhiannon could almost see something in the darkness of its eye-pits when her right leg stumbled over her left leg and the woman fell.

She rolled down a small mound her group of coffins around a tree was standing on; rocks and debris stabbed her in various places. Beaten up all over, Rhi stifled a groan, lifted herself up, and implied to run but mostly crawled away, between a large memorial and particularly big tombstone covered with pictograms. There was a stone wall her neck-high: it wasn't a problem for her trained hands when she finally managed to stand up on her unsteady legs.

Rhiannon got over the wall and landed face and chest down. The punch knocked the air out of her lungs. Fortunately, it was plain earth underneath and she didn't break anything. This time, she allowed herself a moan before opening her eyes and greeting another skeleton.

This skeleton walked from behind a half-destroyed statue. It looked completely the same, only armed with a short spear. Also, it appeared much closer to Rhia than the first skeleton ever was. Close enough to...

Swish! The spearhead bolted down and pierced her chest. Rhiannon stared at the shaft in terror and denial.

Excruciating pain reached her then. It grew from a small bud of hurt into a flower of agony and swirling lava; it was burning, gnawing, chewing her alive. Rhia screamed, birthing new waves of pain herself, red fog clouded her eyes. A torturous infinity later she felt the blade of hell pulling out, draining her life itself away, leaving her to writhe on the cold ground like a worm. A horrific, blinded infinity later, the spear pierced her throat and severed her spinal cord.

Death claimed her swiftly.

When Rhiannon opened her eyes again, she found herself in a coffin.