Akasha opened her eyes to what she assumed was either a wonderful hallucination, or heaven-though she had always imagined heaven to be golden gates and golden bricks, golden angels, and the golden smile of God, like she had been taught in Sunday School as a kid.

This wasn't quite golden. Sunlight shown through the vast canopy of towering trees, vaguely gold. Great, green, flowering vines wrapped the tree trunks in their beautiful embrace. Birds chattered as they pitter-pattered, jumping between branches, softly shaking leaves free that fluttered down through the beaming radiance of the sun. The light touched her face, and it was warm.

A leaf fell down, down, twirling, spinning, dancing in the breeze. It fell, and fell, and came close enough that she could see its veins, spreading outwards from the stem, and the way the tips curled inward. It fell further and further, and she could see just how vibrant of a green it was, and then it brushed the tip of her nose, slid down the side of her face, stroked the skin of her ear, and she knew.

This was real.

She sat up slowly, taking in the forest surrounding her. It was beautiful. The trees were tall and vast and unlike anything she had seen at home. Their roots drove deep beneath the soil. Along the ground were flowers-green in color, almost too plain to take notice of, if it weren't for the bright red center of them. As she looked they seemed to twist towards the sun, baring their petals to what light they could get.

The flowers looked… oddly familiar, but she couldn't recall where she had seen them before.

A twig snapped beneath her hand. She was startled at the noise. Her eyes darted to where her hands dug into the dirt beside her. She distinctly remembered painting her nails black the night before, remembered how just that morning she had chipped the paint off of her pointer finger trying to open a new box of cereal. But her nails were bare, cut short, and her fingers were covered in dried mud. She sat up fully then, lifted her hands to rub the dirt off onto her shirt and realized she wasn't wearing one.

She was completely and utterly naked.

Akasha's heart raced. Why was she naked? Where had her clothes gone? Why was she in a forest, of all places? Where was her nail polish, or her pants, her shirt, her winter coat? Why wasn't she cold? Where was the snow, the bridge, the river, the car, the water, the ice, her mom, how was she still breathing, how was she alive-

Where was Amaryllis?

She stumbled to her feet quickly and began to walk, uncaring of the direction. If she had woken up naked, in a forest in the middle of nowhere, then Amaryllis was likely there too, right? They had been in the back of the car at the same time. They had held hands.

They had died, together.

Amaryllis had to be there somewhere.

Akasha called out her name. "Amaryllis! Lis!" But no answer came. She walked, and walked. Stubbed her toe on a tree root so hard that a nail split in two and blood poured down the sides of her toe. Tripped while trying to keep the weight off of her afflicted foot and slammed her knee against a rock so hard that she felt the bruising ache in her teeth. Scraped her arm against the bark of a tree. Hissed at all of the burning cuts on her shoulder. Tried not to care that her entire body was bare to the elements, to the bugs, to the world, to whoever she might run into, if people even existed in this strange forest. "Amaryllis! You jerk, you asshole, come out here right now!"

But there was no answer. The further she journeyed through the trees, the further she felt from herself until she finally sat down in the grass, pulled her knees up to her chest, stared down at the way the blood had begun to flake off around her toe, and cried.

She was overtaken by her sobs. Each gasping breath she took became harder than the last. Her heart pounded, her vision began to shake, to turn white. There was a sharp ringing in her ears, so loud that she had to slap her shaking hands over them to keep from crying out. It felt like eons before the world stopped spinning, and before her soul began to re-enter her body. Akasha gently laid on her side and watched an ant crawl from the tip of one blade of grass to the other, stared until her eyes crossed and her vision blurred. That's when she heard her crying out.

"Akasha," came Amaryllis' scream, muffled by the distance between them. "Mom! Dad? Akasha!"

"LIS!" Akasha took to her feet so fast that her head spun. "Lis! Amaryllis! Can you hear me? Amaryllis!"

No answer. It was quiet long enough for Akasha to begin thinking she had been hearing things, when Amaryllis' voice came again. "Someone! Please, anyone, help me! Mommy! Daddy! Akasha!"

"Lis, I'm here," Akasha sobbed. She roughly ran her hands over her matted hair, and turned her head in an attempt to listen closer for her sister's voice. "Amaryllis, I'm here! I'm right here! Keep talking, please, I'll come find you!"

She could hear her tears the next time Amaryllis called out. "Please! Please, I'm scared! Mom! Dad!"

She turned left and right, ran forward, listened for a moment, ran back where she came, but her sister's voice still sounded so far. She dug her nails into her palms and curled her hands into tightly balled fists. Once more, please, she thought. Just one more time, Lis. I'll find you then. I can find you then. Please!

Akasha closed her eyes to her surroundings and waited. Her breath came so quickly that it burned through her chest. The leaves stopped their rustling, the birds grew silent, even the sun seemed to stop shining in that moment as she listened, and waited, and hoped to hear Amaryllis just once more.

And heard nothing at all.

She panicked. Without waiting any longer, Akasha took off toward where she thought Amaryllis to be. Ran as fast as she could, ignored the aching in her calves and the heaviness in her chest; ran until she could no longer feel her feet, or her chest, or the tears that spewed from her eyes. All the while she cried out for Amaryllis, screamed her name until no sounds made it past her dry lips and her throat became sand.

Eventually she stopped running, stopped crying, laid upon the grass beneath one of the vast, towering trees, and as she closed her eyes, hoped that they would never open again.