Page 70 of Aftertaste

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.

FLEUR DE SEL

THE LEASE WASsigned.

In a few shorts months they’d have menus. Dinner service. A bona fide grade A (Viktor would make sure) from the Health Department. They’d have butts in chairs. A bar with bartenders. A reservation book. A kitchen spitting tickets out for orders and waitstaff and Konstantin helming it all. It would be an actual restaurant. Made to bring back actual ghosts.

It almost didn’t feel real.

Maura was coming over to help him celebrate (This calls for a toast! Dinner at your place?) and Kostya was peering into his fridge (someone had to come resuscitate this thing; food was rotting by the hour), trying to determine what to make her. He’d asked what she was in the mood for, and the answer was typical Maura:Something that thrills me.

Their relationship didn’t quite feel real to Kostya either.

Since the tattoo parlor, they’d spent most of their free time together, hours of witty banter and great food and multiple—ahem—courses, with no indication that Maura wanted to slow down or just be friends or see other people. It was almost the opposite; she couldn’t get enough of him. If he were a different person—someone allergic to commitment; Frankie,say—it would have shot up red flags, triggered an analysis of her as a Stage-Five Clinger, a plan for escape, but Kostya reveled in the attention. He’d never felt so wanted.

They traded secrets, shared parts of themselves other people never saw. He, peak boyfriend material, had brought her kid sister back from the Dead. Sure, he still had no idea what had happened when she returned—but then, he hadn’t asked. Because he respected Maura’s privacy! He trusted her! She’d tell him when she was ready. Which would probably be any day now; she had a drawer of things at his place, after all. And he—the height of intimacy!—had left several knives and a carbon steel pan in her kitchen.

He was falling, hard, and he wanted to tell her. To show her.

What he cooked tonight had to be special. Food that would let him reveal himself to her, not just the chef part, but all of him. Who he was. Where he came from. What he believed in.

Food could do that. It could tell stories. Not just cuisines or component parts, but histories—of the people who’d prepared the dishes, the way they evolved them over time, the way they made them theirs. Leaving behind a recipe was a way to be remembered and savored and loved even after you were gone. A way to live forever.

When Kostya ate the food his dad had made him as a kid, it always felt like he was still there, right in the room, his hand guiding Kostya’s as he chopped dill or scooped sour cream, his bright laugh just out of earshot, ringing out behind a door. A meal could contain so many things he couldn’t say, every bite a way to travel through time.

He shut the refrigerator and opened a cabinet.

There was an embarrassment of spices, assorted cans (tuna, black bean, coconut, condensed milk), a half-dozen dry grains. And then he saw them—Morello cherries in a jar.

In their current form, they were too sweet for anything other than an old-fashioned, but before they were preserved, they’d been sour. Deliciously tart.

He knew immediately what he should cook for Maura, the journey he would take her on.

They could make them together—varenyky. Thin-skinned dumplings bursting with lightly sugared sour cherries, their warm, dark juice flooding your mouth. Or the cheese kind—soft, sweet kernels of curd luxuriating in a pool of liquid butter. The meat ones, his dad’s take on pelmeni, beef and pork and black pepper and onion, boiled first and then pan-fried, brown and crispy, doused in a poultice of white vinegar and sinus-clearing Russian mustard and thick sour cream.

Hell, he’d cook all three.

They used to make them in the summer, Kostya and his father and mother together. A weekend-long event, kneading the dough, mixing the fillings, shaping and pinching and sealing the delicate pouches by hand. They used to make hundreds of them the first hot weekend of the season, freeze them in bags to eat year-round. An assembly line—his dad rolling the dough into rounds the size of his palm; a small Kostya spooning fillings; his mother’s fingers white with flour, her fingertips flitting in and out of a water bowl, crimping the sides. He hadn’t thought about it in years.

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