Page 31 of Aftertaste

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WHEN THE AFTERTASTE appears it’s just a shimmer in the air, liquid and melty, like someone’s cracked an oven door. An aroma pours out of it, mouthwatering. Soul shaking. Like Reese’s, but also like memories.

You follow it right back to Maura’s embrace.

SEEING HER AGAIN is everything you’d hoped. There’s laughter and secrets and the slowest possible way to eat a peanut butter cup. She tells you everything. That after you died, she screwed up her life. That she tried so hard to help you. That all she wants now is to leave Death behind. To live. To love someone again, this man who makes her full.

She doesn’t want to hold you back anymore.

You can feel it, the moment she lets go, your Hunger spirited away. Chased out by what’s now spreading through your chest: relief, and closure. Love.

You let her go, too.

When you tell her goodbye, when you say you love her one last time, you’re so sure. Stupid hopeful. Convinced this has worked out like you’d imagined, that any minute you’ll be on that train, leaving the Food Hall far behind. Moving On.

Only it doesn’t work that way.

When the Reese’s is done, the wrapper licked clean, you disappear, but you don’t return. You stay in the Living realm.

Helpless, invisible. Unable to leave.

You bang on the veil. You kick. You cry.

But there’s no way back. No exit at all.

No way forward either.

Turns out the Aftertaste you followed here—made from the food of the Living; cooked by someone alive—doesn’t work the way the food of the Dead does. It isn’t anchored to the Afterlife, a product of the Food Hall, a tether to lead you back to Death. This Aftertaste is anchored to Life. To a person.

To the Chef.

And now you are, too.

You go where he goes, can only visit where he’s been. You try to make contact, to chill the air and spoil his food and flick his lights, but you’re too weak for him to notice. The most you can accomplish is to make him taste again, his forehead furrowing when he recognizes your dish, one he thought he’d already handled.

The only silver lining is you aren’t here alone.