He was handsome, I discovered on the truck ride home. It was an old-fashioned kind of handsomeness, those dark brows furrowed tight, a meanness implicit in the set of his mouth.

The stranger was silent — frowning — his hands clenched tight around the steering wheel. The forest whipped past us, yielding on occasion to fireweed clearings. I spotted an elk through the trees; the idea of a wolf. I had so many questions, and no means by which to ask them.

We pulled over to the right, a gravel turnout leading into the trees. Eventually, a house. Modest and two-story and sifted by sourgrass, the door painted red. ‘For good luck,’ the stranger explained.

I was set out on the porch. Mosquitoes kissed and abandoned me.

‘This is yours,’ the stranger said, and lugged me feet first into a room on the second story. The floors were polished hardwood, the walls spring green. Along the windowsills, pasta jars and jam jars and beer bottles, each one filled exactly halfway with still water, home to a different variety of plant. The windows, tall and screenless, were bracketed by white eyelet curtains, and when the wind blew they touched each other gently. I longed to press my face to them, the clean cotton scent.

I had left a wet trail in my wake, the smell putrid and festering. Briefly, I was ashamed—how I discolored the living world.

The stranger took no notice, and hauled me up onto the blue-cushion rocking chair.

‘There,’ he said, placing my left hand above the abscess. He sat on the footstool across from me and simply looked, looked so long that I grew self conscious. I wanted to tuck back my hair—long since turned to dust—or otherwise turn my cheek—maggot fodder by now. The stranger’s lip trembled. His hand reached out, then snatched itself back. To my consternation, he began to cry.

It’s alright, I wanted to say. It’s okay to love the dead.

–

That first night had been akin to being born. I burst into the world, a deluge of sound and color, time forever punctured by my presence. Even now, laid out on the embalming table, the memory brought with it a rush of unmitigated pleasure.

‘Seven years,’ the coroner told the technician, as he stitched together the open folds of my abdomen, sealing the remaining organs back inside. ‘He got off easy, all things considered.’

The fluorescent light over my head dimmed. My body had been bloated to twice its original size, ankle disjoint from foot, hand severed from wrist.

‘He plea insanity?’ the technician asked.

‘Nope. Said he was in love.’

‘They’re cremating her Thursday,’ the coroner continued, oblivious to my sudden warmth. ‘Folks down at Laurel Hill offered to do it pro bono.’

‘Real, real nice of them.’

‘Yup. And the prosecutor’s gonna scatter the ashes by Kenai.’

I was lifted and transferred onto a steel dolly, the touches brisk and impersonal, nothing like the stranger’s.

‘It’s things like this,’ the coroner said, ‘that really bring people together.’

Together they began to push me away, coldness and darkness descending, and the world once again receded from view.

–

‘Oh, Adam,’ the girl said. ‘What have you done?’

Daylight again; the hours bent and turned, rearranging themselves into more acute forms. She was standing in the doorway, long black hair braided down to her waist. Where she opened her mouth — a gap tooth. So many faces in one day, I thought. So much to recall.

The stranger rolled over in bed, mushing his face deeper into the mattress. ‘Go away.’

‘I would, but there’s a body.’

One eye blinked open. ‘Again?’

‘See for yourself.’

The stranger sat up then. The covers slipped down, a ribcage flashed through cotton. His eyes settled on mine, and something unguarded flickered across his face.

‘She looks tired,’ he murmured. ‘Like she’s been awake this whole time.’

‘You need to put her back,’ the girl said.

He shook his head.

‘I’d just dig her up again.’

She closed her eyes. Her arms were bruised, varicose; just then I realized how young she was.

‘There’s no happily ever after,’ she said. ‘Not with the dead. The body will decompose even faster out in the open. See her liver? The bugs are already having a field day. And the cops, soon enough.’

The stranger seemed to shrink then.

‘I just wanted — ’ he stopped. ‘I just wanted.’

The girl’s expression softened.

‘Wanting is okay,’ she told him. ‘It’s different from having.’

He looked up. ‘Give me a day,’ he said.

A pause.

‘An hour,’ he amended.

She pressed her lips together, a disapproving blade.

‘Please.’

The curtains drifted again. I missed this house already, this old new life.

‘I’m going to run to the store,’ the girl said finally. ‘Pick some things up for Dad.’

The stranger let out a breath. ‘Thank you.’

She was tightening the strap of her purse. She was chewing on the inside of her mouth. She was holding herself carefully, as if bracing for impact, and then she said, ‘I do love you, you know.’ A breath. ‘Not enough, but I do.’

And then she was gone again, an apparition — an almost.

–

When we were finally found, she once again appeared in a doorway. One much farther north, cut from stripped oak and cobbled together with unsure hands. Beyond it lay virgin forest, a green so vivid as to be disturbing.

The police had sectioned me off with yellow tape, stickying various objects in the house with pastel tags. Robin blue for the freezer the stranger had tucked me into during solemn afternoons, soft peach for the stretcher he’d carted me around in on disobedient nights. If our home had possessed its own odd, lopsided beauty, so did its dissection.

The girl’s eyes swept over the scene. When they took me in, she clapped a hand over her mouth and said, Oh, God. She doubled over, convulsing slightly, and I watched with both concern and fascination as a thin film of bile came dripping out of her mouth.

‘Please, take it away,’ she said. ‘I can’t bear to see what he’s done.’

–

‘Don’t mind Leah,’ the stranger said, the moment the front door closed. ‘It’s not you who bothers her–just death.’ He leaned into the crook of my neck, inhaling deeply, and something like rapture passed over his face.

Moments later I heard his footsteps clunking down the stairs. Rummaging, a clatter on the floor. Shit, someone said. A mayfly flitted through my eye socket, drawn in by the smell.

He returned with a navy box in his hands, compact velvet embossed in gold. It opened to reveal a ring: a platinum band, a sparkling, Asscher-cut diamond. Sunlight refracted through the stone, illuminating the room with impossible bands of color. I was enchanted – oh, more than enchanted – I could have had a soul.

‘It’s yours,’ the stranger said. ‘If you want it.’

Up close, he smelled like citrus and just-folded cotton, a compendium of the bright and clean and new. He was the coffin’s opposite.

How wonderful it would be, I thought, to live in you instead.

The stranger knelt. With trembling fingers, he gathered my left hand in his.

‘Oh,’ he said, upon looking down.

My ring finger was missing.

‘I can make a replica,’ he rushed to reassure me. ‘There’s an art supply store down by Kachemak Bay.’

He was interrupted by the sound of his phone going off; whatever he saw on the screen caused him to frown and curse. Hurriedly he shut the ring back into the box — the colors disappeared from the walls, and I was bereft — and pocketed it.

‘We’ll go north,’ he decided. ‘You’ll last longer there.’

The mayfly fluttered out my ear canal, leaving behind the ghost of music.

–

I had never minded death, not the way some people did. Fearing it and grieving it, seeking out every possible way to delay it just a second longer. It was okay, to die. It was something we all did.

In life, I had been an unbeliever. The kind who said, with a certainty bordering on arrogance: what we cannot observe, does not exist. I did not have a body, I used to say. I was a body. But I suppose God does what he will whether you believe in him or not. Seven days after my death, I blinked awake to the walls of the coffin, claustrophobia and the scent of rotting earth.

If there was any meaning to this. If it was a lesson or verdict, reward or atonement — then it was lost on me. I just settled myself as comfortably as I could in my casket, and allowed time to rush through me like wind between the oaks.

–

In the jump seat of his truck, a bouquet of withered lavender was stuffed between my hands. He had draped a once-white dress over the lower half of my body, disguising all signs of decay. As we drove, the fine silk lifted like sails in the wind, flapping against my clouded flesh. It was the softest thing I’d ever felt, the barely-there encountering what had once been.

The speedometer ticked up in steady increments of five. The landscape blurred into one continuous streak, the mountains indistinguishable from the forest, the sky inseparable from the sea.

Slow down, I wanted to say. I am still new here.

The stranger glanced back in the mirror, his face cracking into a limpid smile. My own face was no longer capable of expression, but I was seized by the desire to smile back at him.

Was this what it felt like, to be in love?

We slowed. We came upon a cabin, unfinished. Around us the forest condensed; the branches hanging warm and gleeful in the air. From some harbor of memory, the names of trees struggled to surface.

From the forest floor the stranger collected a bundle of mismatched twigs, snapped them to roughly finger length, and slipped my ring over them. Then he clasped the remnants of my left hand. Tell me if it hurts, he whispered, and stuck the wooden bundle into the lingering stub of flesh. The ends poked at knuckle; one or two reached even the pale web between the ring finger and my pinky.

If it hurt, it was the kind of pain that registered as pleasure.

Next the stranger produced a simple, nondescript golden band, and slid it onto his own finger. He held me as upright as he could, and looked deeply into the sockets of my skull.

‘I believe in the soul,’ he said, the words as sure as any vow. ‘I believe in the part of every living thing that can never be destroyed.’

In the afternoon light, dust motes drifting through air, he looked young, tenuous, and painfully alive. The heart in my chest, deflated and sagging, strained to beat once more.

He leaned forward to kiss me deftly, the taste moist and sweet. Where his mouth touched my skin, I burned. The sensation was like a brand, a memory; a thing that altered you irreversibly once it occurred.

‘You don’t know how long I’ve wanted to do that,’ the stranger said. ‘You can hardly imagine.’

His lips were covered in a foamy, fetid substance, about the color and texture of sulfur. The look on his face was one of infinite tenderness. If a man can love a carcass, I thought, then he can love anything at all. And how good it was to be in the company of something so capable, to be made safe by it.

I glanced down at the ring around my makeshift finger.

I had not minded death, I thought, but there was something to be said for living.

–

It was a routine inspection, the sheriff explained. ‘We got some reports about unregulated fires. People fussin’ about the environment and all that.’ He sounded utterly unconcerned; conspiratorial, even.

‘We’ve been living out here for months,’ the stranger said. ‘It’s bullshit.’

The sheriff made a sympathetic noise. ‘Who’s we?’

‘Me and my wife.’

‘Not a lot of girls who can hack it in the backcountry.’

‘Not a lot of girls like her.’

Most of me was listening to this from the floor of the truck, where the stranger had shoved me unceremoniously as soon as he’d spotted the blue-striped SUV on the service road. He’d grabbed what he could, but a forearm lay forgotten on our bed, and I was struggling with my incompleteness. My skull had ended up squashed facedown, so I could see nothing but black. It smelled of rubber down here, mint gum and absinthe.

‘So I’m just gonna fill out the form, say I checked out the cabin and — ’ the sheriff’s voice was growing closer, ‘—the surrounding area, Christ, man, it smells like something died in here.’

‘Been a while since I cleaned my truck.’

‘Your wife,’ the sheriff laughed, ‘must be a saint.’

‘She is.’

‘Shit. She got a sister?’

‘None living.’

‘Too bad. Good ones are always taken, that’s how it goes — ’ he broke off suddenly, and sucked in a breath.

‘Now, brother,’ the sheriff said. ‘Don’t tell me that’s a body in your backseat.’

For a moment, the stranger said nothing.

‘And what if it is?’

The sheriff set down his clipboard, and sighed. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘Did you kill her?’

–

‘Can I tell you something?’ The stranger asked me this on our wedding night. His hand—warm, dry, the thumbs still exceedingly opposable—rested upon my shattered hip, the crickets chirping like a pulse in the night.

‘I know it’s wrong.’

I was lying on the woolen rug, admiring the slanted alpine roof above us. I was listening to the slow, drawn-out rhythm of the stranger’s breathing, and imagining it as my own.

‘I’m going to hell,’ he admitted. ‘I don’t want to, but I am.’

Hell is just a story men tell, I wanted to reassure him. But I couldn’t be sure; I’d never made it that far. Death was a vast universe; a final kingdom; and I had only ever brushed against the edges of it. Of what came after, I knew as much — as little — as he did.

Carefully, the stranger cupped his hand to the side of my face. His thumb came to rest just over the opening where my mouth had been, pressing gently on the shriveled flesh.

‘I just couldn’t bear to think of you alone down there.’

He moved towards me in the darkness, and for the first time since my death, I ran with living blood.

–

On what had to be Thursday, I was transferred to a wooden box and shipped to the crematorium. The furnace awaited me, a three-hour process of combustion which would render my body into ash. Whether I would survive it, whether this meant freedom or annihilation or both, was another question entirely.

Just don’t let it hurt, I thought, as the box began to slide into the oven. The engines firing, the anticipation of heat. Whatever comes after this, I just don’t want it to hurt.

In the instant before the flames engulfed me, I thought of the stranger.

Something in him had been extinguished, when the officers broke down our door. He was mute as they yanked him into handcuffs, almost willing as they pushed him into the dirt.

I caught one last glimpse of him, before they zipped the plastic over my skull. Hunched over in the back of the police car, the rise and fall of his chest the only proof he was alive.

It was difficult to tell, what with the windows tinted blue, and that old-fashioned handsomeness to distract me — but I thought his expression might have been one of relief.

–

There is no sleep in death. But some nights, if you are lucky, past lives return and collect in you like rainwater. The night the stranger brought me home, I was gifted a flood. Oh, I had received small handfuls of the past before — debris of a time known as childhood, shrapnel lives I could have lived — but nothing like this. Discarded sunsets, unending roads. The true and all-consuming fear of dying without love.

Mostly, though, I remembered the end. The hospital facing the sea, the walls white as honey. Nurses panicking and doing their best not to show it. The doctor panicking and making this widely known. I knew, then, that it was coming. Despite the lime tint of morphine, and the pain splitting apart my center, I struggled to open my eyes.

One last time, I remember thinking. I want to see the world one last time.

–

It was all happening as it should have, dark and quiet beneath the ground. Iridescent beetles traversed my bones and the roots of yet-to-be redwoods delighted in my organs. I’d just gotten used to the larvae, inquisitive as they were, when the soil around me churned. The casket lid opened. And the stranger’s face emerged above me.

To see after so long was blinding.

The stranger set down his shovel. Sweat dripped from his temples onto my body, clean streaks amid the dirt. He shucked off his gloves. His hands were calloused, marked by crescent-shaped scars, but when they wrapped around my wrists they were warm.

His right arm hooked itself beneath my spine. His left gathered my pulverized knees. Tugging gently, stopping on occasion to recover a limb or adjust a lopsided foot, he reaped me from the earth.

In the distance, a dark jagged line on the horizon — mountains, I remembered. The word was mountain and the meaning — uncertain for now.

The stranger collected my skull, and hung it artlessly onto my neck. There was a large crack in my pelvis, I was missing the fourth finger of my left hand. My flesh, the texture of soap, left dark stains on his clothes.

I was more whole than I’d been in a long time.

The stranger cradled me to his sternum, surrounding me in that same impossible warmth, and no one had ever held me like this. Not even as a child.

‘It’s been so long,’ he murmured. ‘It’s time for you to come home.’