So, there was this little girl’s head shoved face first into the tire tracks in the mud.

It looked almost like a scene from Alice in Wonderland—it was as though the girl were trying to enter the magical kingdom through the deep furrows in the mud left by truck tires. Only I don’t remember the back of Alice’s head being shot clean open or the contents of Alice’s skull glistening under the sky like a crimson flower in full bloom.

The next thing I laid my eyes on was a kid sprawled on his side in the mud. Less than ten feet away from the girl. Bullets had ripped his back open and had spun their way through his guts before exiting his body somewhere around his belly. His intestines flopped out, washed pink by the rainfall that had just stopped a couple of hours ago. His mouth was open a little, just enough for me to see he had an almost goofy-looking little overbite. It was as if there’d been something he had wanted to say before he died but never had the chance.

We followed the tire tracks and arrived at a small village, maybe twenty or so families in size.

A large pit had been dug in the area that could have been called the village green. At the bottom of the pit was a pile of bodies, charred and smoldering, all heaped on top of one another. There was the smell of singed hair and the smell of burning flesh. The heat had caused the muscles of the half-cooked bodies to contract violently, so the corpses were spread out in a whirlwind. Many of the bones were broken, defeated by contracting muscles, and limbs were folded over and twisted in ways no limb would or could ever bend naturally.

Everyone's dead.

Everyone's dead. I open the door to see my mom whose body has just been treated with the cocktail of preservatives, sanitizers, disinfectants, and additives as mandated by law in Washington. The embalmer has made her face up good and pretty, and she's ready for her eternal sleep.

"Take a good look behind you, darling. You'll see all the dead pass by," my mom says to me, so I do as she says and turn around. I see a vast landscape of dead people, grinning and waving at me. Some of the dead are fully intact, others have virtually disintegrated. Don't ask me how I know that even the headless ones are somehow smiling at me— I just know, I can tell, and as I look on at them they casually fiddle around with their guts that are spilling from their bellies.

"Everyone's dead, aren't they?" I ask, turning back to my mom.

Mom nods, and then gestures to me. "Of course they are, darling. Just take a look at your own body."

I look down and notice that I’m starting to rot away. That’s when it clicks that I’m also dead.

Up in the distance, I see a stream of dead bodies— everyone who has ever lived and died— floating gently and inexorably toward their destination, whatever that is. I ask Mom whether we're now in the underworld. But Mom just shakes her head gently. Just like when she used to correct me as a boy.

"No, darling. This is just the regular world. The one you and I used to live in. The world that's always been here right beside us."

Oh, I see, I say. Tears of relief are streaming down my face. I can now recognize some faces in the distance.