When they woke, sun was pouring through the window of their compartment, and they realized that the train was standing quietly at the end of the line. How long they had been there was anyone's guess; as they scrambled out onto the deserted platform, she wondered if anyone ever would have bothered to wake them, or if they would have been allowed to drift on, unconscious, to the next destination.
Getting a room was more difficult than they had imagined it would be, but they didn't put it together until they boarded a bus headed towards the Vatican, packed with dozens of people carrying large branches of palm. It was strange to find herself on the outside of a metaphor so central to her culture, like a teetotaler arriving in Dublin on St. Patrick's Day, awkward and displaced, intrigued but not really curious, suspicious that she had never really woken that morning, but had instead accidentally fallen into someone else's dream.
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