I’m feeling queasy, but there’s nothing in my stomach to vomit up.  Opening my eyes is disorienting, so I close them again.

I open my eyes. Okay, this feels better. I’m in a familiar place. There’s sunlight pouring in through my bedroom curtains, the ones with the border of pale green ferns. I’m going to be all right.

Shit. No, I’m not.  For some reason,  I’m sitting on the floor, and that’s me in my bed, and.  .  .  I’m dead. It seems impossible, and yet I know it’s true. So I guess that makes me, the me that is thinking about this, a ghost?

I get to my feet. It takes a lot of effort, this incorporeality stuff. I feel like I’m drunk, but not the part where you feel good, just the muddled and clumsy parts.

I’m not sure I want to see what I look like as a dead person, but I go over to look anyway. It seems like the thing to do. 

Okay, it just looks like me, only not alive. Not breathing, not moving. I’m lying on my back, with one arm partly off the bed. That looks uncomfortable, so I reach over to move it, and, of course, my ghostly arm moves right through my dead one. It’s not like it’s surprising, just slightly frustrating.

I don’t remember anything that happened after yesterday afternoon. I’m sure I must have done something, but it’s just a blank.  I look over at the nightstand. There’s my calendar, where I always keep it. It has a Post-it note stuck on it, with numbers. It’s my handwriting. I must have written it in that fugue state before dying. 

Am I supposed to solve what this is? Is this a key to who killed me? I go into sleuth mode. There are two numbers. It can’t be a lock combination, and anyway, I don’t think I’ve had a combination lock since high school. 

Maybe it’s a date. How can a date lead to a murderer? I look back at my dead body. I stare at it hard. It doesn’t feel like I was killed. I am pretty sure, as a restless spirit, I would know. Yeah, I did read too many Sue Grafton books, but this is not murder.

And yet, there must be something important about that date, the last thing I was thinking about before I died. 

I need some air. I don’t actually have physical lungs, but I need some fresh surroundings. I head downstairs. I live alone, so there’s no danger of anyone seeing me. The cat does, of course. That’s just how cats are. He seems momentarily curious, and then decides that having a bath in the sun is more pressing. I try to pet him, and he looks up, but my ghostly hand feels nothing.

I go out to the back steps, my usual place to go when I want to think about things. My next door neighbor, Ellie, has chickens, and they are in my yard, scratching for bugs. I always find their murmuring chicken noises soothing. I don’t try to pet them, but then I didn’t when I was alive, either.

Somehow, the sound of the chickens has put me in a meditative state. That reminds me of the article I read a long time ago about how your state of mind at the moment of death is what controls your reincarnation. I’m not even sure I believe in reincarnation. 

Maybe the date was a day of spiritual significance in my life. Maybe I was trying to exit my life remembering my connection to the divine.

The date is May 14^th.  No year. I close my eyes, trying to remember something that happened in May. I feel my connection to life becoming more tenuous by the minute. I keep forgetting things. But all of a sudden, with my eyes closed, chickens busily clucking around me, I’m in a scene from my past. 

It’s spring, and I’m seven years old. I’m standing under the old apple tree in our back yard. Blossom petals are falling around me like snow, and my sister is shaking the tree to make more of them fall, and I’m twirling around in the petal snow and we’re both laughing. Diane and I were good sisters when we were little, then we grew apart as we got older. She’s been gone six years now. Uterine cancer.

I stay in the memory as long as I can stand it, full of the joy of it and the loss of it being gone. Ghostly tears run down my ghostly cheeks. Somehow, I am dissolving into the feelings until that’s all that’s left of me, and then I am gone.

==

Rita: Mom and I were supposed to get together for lunch, but she never showed. I went over there and found her. I called nine one one, but she’d been gone for a while. The EMTs said she probably had a stroke and died in her sleep. 

Tory: Oh, I’m so sorry! Anything I can do?

Rita: No, not right now. It still hasn’t sunk in. You’re the first one I’ve told. I have to take care of a bunch of administrative stuff, getting a death certificate, pay her electric bill. She left a post-it note with the due date, and she put it into her planner.