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like it,” I said. I wanted to say I love it but I didn’t want to sound like I was posing as a human.

    “Hey, hey, glad you like it, Miss Casey.”

    38

    “Do you think we used to have souls?” I asked, thinking about his lyrics—the parade of ragtag souls marching through the town.

    He leaned back and put the guitar pick in his mouth, chewed on it—he liked to chew on things, it seemed. “Yes. For sure.”

    “And do you think people’s souls continue on after they die?” I asked.
    “Yes,
    ma’am.”
    “So then where do you think our souls went if we don’t have them now?”
    He took the pick out of his mouth, made a face at it and flicked it down on the table. “Good question. I don’t know, but I think they must be somewhere.”
    I couldn’t stop asking him things. I wanted to keep asking and asking and find out what he believed. It felt like so long since I’d had a man to ask about anything, one whose ideas I wanted to hear, anyway. “Do you think souls recognize each other, or if your souls connect and when you die, do your souls recognize each other when they meet again?”
    “Well, they aren’t personalities. They’re something else. So I don’t know exactly what remains and what you recognize. But I think there is some kind of recognition, or some kind of connection, maybe? I don’t know.”
    “Because you sort of seem familiar to me,” I said. I was so talkative all of a sudden! The way I used to be.
    “That’s funny because you seem familiar to me, too, girl.”
    “But not like someone I actually knew, more like there’s just something about you.”
    “I know what you mean.”

    39
    Maybe we knew each other when we were alive , I thought. Tthen I remembered something. A band I’d gone to see at McCabe’s Guitar shop when I was a teenager. The lead singer was so cute—I’d been stricken staring up at his big, sexy mouth, his handsome, grimacing face. He almost looked like it hurt him to sing, or like he was having an orgasm. After the show—it was hard to remember much about my life—but I think I went up to him and I think we talked. He’d seemed to want to talk to me but I’d gotten scared and hurried off when another girl came over. (I’d never thought I was pretty back then; now I look at pictures of myself when I was alive and think, not bad—what were you complaining about? Plus I was writing at that time, I cared about things, I didn’t crave the meat.) I’d looked back and seen his eyes watching me still—blue eyes with black Maybelline-long eyelashes—but I only walked faster.
    Now Ed leaned forward and put two fingers on my neck. I thought I felt a pulse there, under his fingertips, but how could that be? I was dead as a doornail. I hadn’t felt anything in years. I was a zombie and that was one thing I knew for sure. The only heart I had was the watch locket around my neck like the one the Tin Woodsman got from the Wizard of Oz. But then I wondered if I’d made the whole thing up—the revenant thing.
    Maybe I was still the same. Maybe I was just broken, but not irreparably. Maybe we all were and this revenant thing was just another trend, like kids pretending to be vampires because they thought it was cool. But it wasn’t cool to be dead. And maybe, just maybe, I was still alive.
    Ed lifted my hand and pressed my fingers against his neck. It felt rough and his Adam’s apple was huge. But he had a pulse, pooling there in the thick of his neck. I was sure of it. He moved his head forward and slid his hand behind my head, under my hair, 40
    grasping the strands between his fingers as he leaned to kiss me. I shuddered with happiness under the pressure of his lips and tried not to smile and ruin the kiss with my teeth. Slowly we slid down until I was lying on the sofa and he was above me and I felt his erection through his jeans. I melted between my thighs. My heart was pounding—there was no mistaking it. He reached up my back and unhooked my bra. Then he