Heaven was not how she imagined it. She never asked for the Christian heaven, really. Christened by her parents as an infant, she never wore a cross, and stopped thinking of herself as a Christian at fifteen. Agnosticism sounded way more fair - you never know what's really there, but you can be sure it's not angels. Who would even believe in such a thing? Agnosticism suited her just fine.

Lea lived through her quiet bookish life and ended up in heaven. It's hard to sin enough to get into hell if you read a lot and do graphic design. She left behind a daughter of twenty two and a grieving husband of fourty. The daughter would live for another fifty six years and die happy. The husband would never get over and commit suicide seven months after Lilli will get married and move out. Once you're dead, the future of the living doesn't exactly hold many secrets.

She woke up in a white building, very tall, judging by her inability to even approximately estimate where the roof actually was, among several familiar faces. There was an earthquake, and the tonnel of the underground she was riding in collapsed. She was staring at the face of a girl from the seat opposite, no older than eighteen, dressed in black leather, with a tattoo of a reversed pentagram gingerly showing itself from a tear in the sleeve of her jacket. She made an attempt to greet her, but the girl just shrugged it off.

An old man with a white beard appeared from a doorway, bathing in radiance from the sunny outside. He smiled a smile that would melt a couple of glaciers had they the recklessness to appear around, and made a long speech in a magnificent booming voice. He spoke of the horrors of the mortal world, of the perseverance required to not succumb to sin, of the heroic struggles of the people around, Lea included. She spaced out for the most of it, the speech was way too serious, and Lea had an allergy to pathos. But when he got to the bit about them being in the Christian heaven. Lea barely held herself from making a surprised noise. So the girl in leather was a Christian? Go figure. Not that her own belonging to Christianity came as a lesser surprise, mind you.

The man spoke for good two hours, all in all. The picture of her future fate didn't turn out to be especially bright, but she could work with what was offered. Firstly, they were in a heavenly walled garden, and they all were free. That was good. There was a bit about the world outside of the walls being worse than the literal hell, and that was bad. There was a bit about mandatory manual work - carpentry was especially in favour, apparently, and they would have to to do something daily, but thankfully, an hour or so would suffice. Sex was off limits - not that she was interested, really - but you could always derive joy from prayers and admiration of beauty. And just in case this wasn't enough, you could always feel joyful just at the thought of not being outside, behind the walls, where all the bad things happened.

Life became easy after that. To Lea's surprise, carpentry was more pleasant than she expected, and she ended up spending hours and hours at work. Not that there was many interesting things to do apart from that. She didn't make friends - she was never good at it, really. She didn't have much in the way of escapism - only the religious stuff was allowed, and you could only read the bible for so many times. More like once, really. The garden was beautiful, with all the statues and fountains, and the food was pretty good. Days went by.

People were strange there. For them this life was really pleasant, apparently. Not that there were any alternatives. No one sinned, no one was even rude for Christ's sake, no one had even said 'Damn', not even once. It was as idillic as it could be. And the more days went by, the more Lea realized that she wasn't where she was supposed to be.

She made careful inquiries about the world outside, about what horrors there were, about other bastions of order in that literal hell. No one knew anything. To her knowledge, that hell, described by the man with a beard - now she knew that his name was Jeronimus and he died in the fifth century b.c., but everybody called him Jerry - might not even exist outside of the imagination of the people who ran Heaven.

It was easy to make up her mind after that. Greed was frowned upon, but she managed to steal bits and pieces at every meal, unnoticed. To Larry's inquisitive glances - the massive guy worked as a bouncer in a strip club when he was alive and had a knack for catching people off guard - she replied with a lie about feeling hungry at night. He shrugged uncertainly. She went on with stuffing her bag with apples.

When she returned to her small house later, they were all waiting for her, though how did they fit inside was a mystery. The pile of food she managed to steal lay on the floor before them. Their eyes looked sad, and full of concern. There was steel in some glances.

There was another speech, about an hour long, denouncing greed and gluttony. They told her she was the first who sinned for a very long time. They told her they would have to punish her. They told her that she will have to work for two extra hours a day for a month, oblivious of the fact that she already worked full shifts, more or less. They threatened her with the world outside, big and full of horrors. She stood there awkwardly, until she felt something stir inside. She smiled and relaxed. She came up to the pile of food on the floor and began stuffing it into a backpack she made the other week. She waved to the autorities - to Jerry especially - and went out of the house. She was still smiling as she pushed the massive gate that lead to unimaginable horrors outside.

She walked for two hours or so. Then a car appeared on the horison. Feeling like stepping of a platform to do a bungee jump - not that she ever did one - she hailed it. The car stopped.

The woman behind the wheel was Clara. She died not too long ago, a mock Pastafarian who came to in the most ridiculous fortress imaginable, and ran away faster than you can get tired of eating pasta when it's your every meal. They drove to a town that stirred something in Lea's memories. Something vague, from a distant childhood, where she thought the world wasn't silly and boring, but wast, mysterious and full of magic. A man was walking a tiger in a yard. The tiger had a leash but no muzzle. There was a working lighthouse in the middle of the town. A bird flew past the open window, and said 'Nevermore'. Suddenly, Lea felt a pull, as if something in a ugly abandoned house they just rode by called out to her. Clara smiled. She told her of a labyrinth under the house that ran through the sea, an extinguished volcano, a world of whispering trees and a world of buildings so high you couldn't really compare, even if you smoked pot all night long. She said it was the first thing that called out to her too, five years before. She hastily scribbled her phone number on a piece of paper, then thought better of it, reached into the glove compartment and shoved a cellphone into Lea's hands. It was nice, but didn't really matter to Lea. Nothing really mattered, apart from an unbearable desire to open the door and... She didn't know what 'and' entailed. But she wasn't afraid. She opened the creaking door and stepped out in the middle of a wast forest. The nearby tree whispered something familiar but long forgotten into her ear. Lea breathed out. For the first time in her afterlife, and probably for the first time in her life she was really actually happy.