A blue-black pile of ashes swirled in the early-morning breeze under the tree where she had lashed herself. A silver ring on a chain sparked fire from the burned wreckage of a life lived too long, casting like a star in the blackness that was once a sky, infinite, unchanging.

The smoke-ring halo she had briefly worn was riddled by the wind hours before and marshaled off to become a smudge on a headstone in this, the graveyard she visited countless times down the years to bury a friend or lover. This place of the dead was no stranger. It was a place of solace and reflection, a reminder of an eternity of her wretched life immortal, of an unnatural, sinning mockery of life, which she had once loved so much, that all this had seemed like a good idea, all those centuries ago.

(1996, Mel Grubb II)

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