It wasn't what either of them expected. They clung to each other in numb disbelief for a moment, darkness and music washing over them like a sudden rainstorm and leaving them speechless. Heaven wasn't supposed to be like this.

She had always known she was going to Hell. Why not? She hadn't once given a damn, not from the moment she spoke her first word ("no") until the moment she crashed her rattletrap pickup, drunk, stoned, and sleepless, into a pine tree on Elm Street. (Irony, eh? She was always one for irony.) But she'd never particularly cared. Heaven didn't sound like much fun anyway. Clouds, light, God… eh.

Killed in their bed by a falling pine tree. What a weird way to die. They'd known for years that the tree was unstable, but they couldn't convince the stodgy city planning commission to let them cut it down. And now they were stuck here in what looked for all the world (the sky? underground? where?) like a rave the size of a small island. There had to be some mistake. They had promised each other that whoever died first would wait for the other in a cottage by a stream in Heaven. Someplace where the Sun was always rising.

If she had been alive, she would have laughed until she spilled her drink at the idea of standing, light-drenched and dressed in white, on what appeared to be a cloud and cursing at the top of her lungs. But that's what she was doing, because this vast white place was obviously Hell. Her Hell was everyone else's Heaven. Oh, how fucking ironic. Obviously, someone up here had it in for her.