I sat on the bottom step, wishing I could smell Maya's famous Bolognese simmering on the stove, her secret ingredient – cumin – wafting up the steps around me. For a moment I forgot I was dead. Dragging my fingers through my arm caused nothing more than a parting of vapor, like walking through a cloud. I might just as easily have been in a dream – the corners of the kitchen were muted and ill-defined, making it difficult to see the fine lines of the bead board wainscoting that I knew was there. The scene outside the bay window was blurry, like looking through someone else’s glasses, blobs of colour instead of the bucolic hedge of hemlock across the back of the spotted, mossy lawn littered with trucks and wagons and a variety of bright plastic toys. I might have been inside a memory, or a daydream. Or perhaps I was an integral part of the present, and Maya, in flip-flops, faded Levis cutoffs, and a white tank, actually stood in front of me at the stove, stirring. It looked to be summer, judging from her clothing and her slight tan, so I guessed I had been dead about five or six months.
