Of course Alice has thought about death before. It first occurred to her when she was five. She remembers being taught to recite the child’s bedtime prayer (Now I lay me down to sleep – I pray the Lord my soul to keep – if I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take). “WTF?!” she would have reacted if she’d known those letters and what they meant. It made no sense to her. Even pre-kindergarten Alice understood that bedtime was supposed to be a warm cozy retreat from the exertions of day into the dream-comfort of night – why bring the specter of life’s end into the conversation? Exactly how many kids were going into a sleep from which they would not awake, that caused grownups to teach that prayer?

As she added years of life, she encountered death examples and engaged in death contemplations. First there were the fish in her father’s aquarium, followed by the tiny turtle her folks gave her after the tonsillectomy. Then Skippy the hamster (named for the peanut butter lid he used for a water bowl, a victim of garage heat prostration during the unseasonably hot September weekend when the family forgot to check on him), and the litter of baby rabbits across the street (all born with little blood blisters on their feet, and none surviving the attempts by the father of the house to perform surgery on them).

Those animal deaths impressed all the kids in the neighborhood. So did the demise of Barbara’s grandpa (from an unexpected severe heart attack), the hit-and-run massacre of Dennis’s collie, and finally, awfully, the suicide of Dabney’s mom.

They talked about death. They made jokes about it. Somebody said “Imagine that you’re sliding down the outside school bannister, and all of a sudden the metal rail turns into a razor blade?” and every kid who heard that “ew’ed” and “yucked,” but they all got it. Ever after that, Alice had a creepy feeling around razor blades, and when she learned that some people kill themselves by slitting their wrists, she developed a tender weirded-out attitude toward her own. The skin there seemed so fragile to her, the blue veins too near the surface, her vitality too exposed. Even as a grownup, talk of wrist-slitting made her want to cover her lower arms, and she saw nothing nice about a tattoo there.

Alice is never suicidal but that hasn’t stopped her from considering how she would do it, if. She knows there may come a time in her elder life when she needs to take herself out, and she isn’t counting on American medical expertise to assist her. The most appealing method would of course be an overdose on narcotics, but she likes the effect too much to stockpile the pills (they’re losing their efficacy, she always thinks, and besides that her back (or head, or feet, or neck, or whatever) hurts and the opium would help). She’s fascinated at high windows, sweating and fearing the height and at the same time tempted to just climb out, but she can’t even see herself tandem skydiving or bungee-jumping, so she doesn’t think she’ll ever be able to actually take the step.

Drowning? She can’t imagine the required inhalation of water. Carbon monoxide poisoning? That could be a possibility. But last week she watched an episode of Criminal Minds that featured a guillotine, and now she can’t stop thinking about it.

She did a little research. She knew the device was named for a French man, but that’s when she learned that Mssr. Guillotin didn’t invent it; he was actually against capital punishment and proposed it, in 1789, as a more humane tool than the traditional Breaking Wheel. The guillotine was used for all executions in France from then until that nation outlawed executions in 1981 (the first person beheaded by guillotine in France was a highwayman named Nicola Jacques-Pelletier, in 1792, and the last was one Hamida Djandoubi, in 1977).

The Breaking Wheel was perfectly barbaric. The condemned was strapped onto a big spoked circle and then beaten with heavy objects until death. The spaces between the spokes allowed thorough bone destruction. And pre-guillotine beheadings were rough punishment at best; even an experienced executioner had trouble hatcheting a head off.

The guillotine blade is well-guided and uses gravity. It was perfected by the 45 degree angle; as anyone knows who has done kitchen prep, an angled chop is more effective than one that is perpendicular to the carrot, potato, or whatever needs slicing.

In the beginning, the condemned had to place his or her head on a stump. Later, the stock-like structure was conceived as a refinement. But every image and description of the event has the condemned person situated face-down, with the guillotine blade addressing the nape of the neck.

Not so on Criminal Minds. Their psychopath positioned his victim face up. He placed a bucket beneath the detachable head, and that area was bloody-stained from previous victims, so the face-up view was less messy than the traditional position. But of course that wasn’t the reason. The creep wanted his victim to see the blade coming. The actress in the scene screamed wide-eyed as the blade rocketed toward her.

And immobilized Alice with memory. The picture on her TV screen was shockingly familiar. She’d been standing in front of her gas fire, warming the inside of her robe, and the scene froze her in position, forgetful of where she was, and sent her mind toward a simultaneously vague and vivid recollection.

Ideas teemed. Had she died before? Was she catching the edge of a past-life recollection?

Alice doesn’t believe in paranormality. She’s a rational person and a lover of logic. But she was tossed into a semi-spiritual dream zone for a moment that seemed like an age.

Then her mind regained focus and found words. She realized she had momentarily become the actress. She’d ceased to see the screaming face and had become the eyes watching the blade plunge toward herself. “Shit!” she thought as the metal sliced toward her. “Oh shit. This is really happening.”

It was that stone-cold sober moment when one realizes a bad consequence is about to occur, unstoppable, unwanted, really finally serious. Worse than when a marriage ends and kills the future one anticipated. Worst.

Alice then understood she was recalling her own bad dreams. There had been a few where death was imminent but of course not realized. They’d always involved a fall from great height, into darkness, at first feeling wonderful but then stunning her with gravitational inevitability. They’d always been accompanied with that regretful oh-shit realization that the end was coming. They’d always awakened her to confusion and relief.

Maybe Alice will take herself out with a guillotine. She believes it is the most humane method, and she’s not too worried about the five seconds that scientists say will pass between the severing of the head and the cessation of all brain activity.

Maybe she’ll even position herself face up. People say one never knows what one will do until one is confronted with the actual situation, but that’s not true of Alice. She almost always can predict what she’ll do. She can imagine locking herself into a frame and letting a slanted blade take her out. She knows she won’t scream. And sure as shit, Alice will close her eyes.