Page 126 of Aftertaste

“I love you,” he whispers now, “like salt.”

She gasps as silver mist begins rising from her skin, as she glows, as she feels the pull back to her body. Back to Life. Her eyes search his, fill with fluorescent tears.

“What did you do?”

And he wants to tell her, to explain, but the words are falling away, beyond his reach. She takes his hand into her evanescing palm.

“Wait for me, Stan,” she pleads. “Don’t forget.Pleasedon’t forget.”

She kisses him again, a kiss goodbye, the kind of kiss he should remember, except he has already forgotten.

It’s on the tip of his tongue, who she is, who she might be, what she means to him, but he cannot recall, can no longer taste, and it doesn’t come back even as she vanishes in a twist of light, dissolves like salt in water, travels out of sight.

LAST BITESPETITS FOURS

Please one more

kiss in the kitchen

before we turn the lights off

W. S. Merwin

“Wish”

SALÉ

MAURA ELIZABETH STRUK—no longer haunted by Hunger—wakes in the walk-in of Saveur Fare, between exquisite trays of house-made custard and the frozen body of the man she loves. She trembles, both from cold and from the toxins in her blood. Her breath comes in ragged puffs, tracing cirrus clouds through freezer air. Her tears freeze solid to her lashes. She isn’t ready yet to leave this place, to leave him behind, and either way, she’s paralyzed, so she stays staring at his face, committing it to memory, recalling the taste of Konstantin’s last kiss.

In time, the steel door of the walk-in swings open, and strangers rush in, all doctors’ bags and sterile tools.

“Pufferfish?” they balk, examining Konstantin, trying to help what can’t be saved, and she only blinks once, very slowly, to confirm.Pufferfish, they write on his death certificate, though it was so much more than that, really.

One of the paramedics gives her a look. Frowns.

“Hope it was worth it,” he says, venomous as the fish, as he moves her to a gurney.

She tries to be.

SHE GOES BACKto school. Gets her degree. Codes a dozen games.

There’s one about the Food Hall, a mission where you help a Chef remember. It wins awards, sells out its copies, but she’s proudest of the way the gameplay screens for suicide, the many lives it’s saved.

She lives in Tokyo awhile. In Melbourne. In Tangiers.

She learns to cook.

She eats. A lot.

She loves but never falls in love again, although this doesn’t feel like loss. Only like waiting.

Mostly, though, she remembers. She takes him along.

Salt reminds her. She tastes it in everything, minuscule pyramids of Maldon, coarse grains of Kosher, perfect pink granules of Himalayan Sea, black flecks of Kala Namak, plain old crystals of iodized Morton’s, the little yellow salt girl on the label. Her favorite is alwaysfleur de sel, its delicate flakes like petals, and as they melt across her tongue she can feel him, their bond unbroken even in death, and in her mouth he lives again, is right there, his aftertaste.

He isn’t here, she knows.

But he’s not gone.