I woke up in the woods, and as I did so I felt as if it was my first day on earth.  I did not know why I was in the woods, or how I came to be there.  After using my fingers to manually pry open my eyelids (both were dried to my eyeballs), I was staring up at the interlocked fingers of the winter canopy (of what forest, I cannot say). My next plan of action was to sit up and begin stretching.  When I attempted to move my head, my neck popped loudly and locked in a position causing me to permanently look down. No pain, though.  I used my stiff arms to slowly pull myself into a sitting position.  Awareness hit me like flashes of lightning, and the situation became more bizarre with each revelation.  I noticed that since I awoke, I hadn’t breathed a single breath of the cold (so cold) and thin air.  A tickle in my nose prompted me to instinctively pull out my handkerchief. I slowly filled my lungs with icy air and then blew my nose.  It felt as though half of the matter in my head blew through my nostrils and onto my hands and kerchief. I stared down to the rustic horror of ants, hundreds of them, as well as matter that resembled dark wood shavings and dried bits of walnut.  That was when I felt my heart jump, and felt every one of its beats after that like a punch in the chest.  Then my sense of taste returned.  I got a conjectural impression that a dung beetle had been using my mouth as an apartment.  How many girls did you bring home you little shit?  I moved my hand to my mouth, mostly to see if there were in fact any “squatters”, when I noticed a difference in the form and texture of my face.  My hand occupied the same space that my right cheek was supposed to, and what I was touching felt more like a small dry sponge than a tongue.  I pulled my hand back, and the tips of my thin white fingers were red with copper colored dust.  Damn dogs… What probably happened was a dog saw me and figured me for carrion.  He put his snout in my face, latched on to my cheek with his yellow canines, and pulled it right off.  Then, I’m guessing he saw my little smelly tenant, and turned away to hunt less disgusting prey.  With this thought, I stopped thinking about my body and anything closely related to it.  I began to wonder how I’d get out of those woods, and instantly had a flash of memory of sitting in front of a warm hearth and smoking.  A slender, youthful lady sat in a chair across from me, quietly reading a thick book.  As I began to fell warm, like I was at home, her eyes rose quickly and stared me in the face, simultaneously closing her book with a loud smack.  The look she gave me was the opposite of my former impressions of this fantasy.  Indifference.  That was not my home and I didn’t belong there.  Then all I saw was gray, which slowly materialized into the shapes of the frozen forest.  I was lying on my side with my knees held tightly against my chest, my arms hugging my legs tight.  My back against a tree.  The forest seemed empty except for me.  I shut my dry eyes and listened to the forest.  Just wind and the slow, stubborn creak of the tall trees.  I lay there as time passed (how much time, is hard to say).  Suddenly, when the forest seemed its calmest, I heard trumpets blasting a welcome.  Not in the distance, but right above me, in my head, all around me.  I saw nothing but bright white, and felt as if submerged in warm water.  I let the water take me in the direction it flowed.  I’m somewhere else now; where, I can’t say (not allowed).  But the tree that supported me tells my story to everyone who passes by the spot I died.