Dawn would come soon.

I closed my eyes, unable to worry or care what would happen to me when the rising sun touched my flesh. It seemed simpler than being rescued. If someone found me, how would they fix me? I’d been damaged beyond repair, gutted like a fish.

I thought about what Nathan would think when he went upstairs and found the apartment empty. Maybe he’d think that I’d turned my back on his friendship again. Or that I’d been so angry with him that I’d returned to the man who’d killed his son.

Would he spend the rest of his life hating me?

Something soft and cool brushed my ear, a breeze in the windless night. I opened my eyes. All around me, the alley grew dim. Colors bled together into shapeless blobs that darkened with the rapid deceleration of my heart. The pain in my chest ebbed into a warm, focused feeling that lifted my whole body from any sensation.

Then the space that separated the shapeless blobs got smaller and smaller as the darkness became absolute. In the distance, I saw a point of light. It swelled and spiraled toward me.

In medical school, we’d been taught the Kubler-Ross theories of death. A glimmering tunnel, all your relatives and the deity of your choice waiting to welcome you.

When I’d gone on to my internship, I’d heard the nurses talk about “The Man at the End of My Bed,” a vision they claimed patients always reported on the night of their death.

Both versions of dying had been terrifying and alien to me, looming in the future like a standardized test or a root canal, something unpleasant you couldn’t avoid. What I was experiencing now was peaceful and gradual, my senses dropping away one by one as the intense light widened in my fading vision.

Instead of seeing heaven, I saw the alley and the street beyond. At my feet, I saw my lifeless body, torso splayed open like a macabre storybook.

I wished I could see the world around me all my life as it appeared now, painted in the washed-out tones of a watercolor. Suddenly, where the sidewalks had been empty before, pale shadow forms drifted aimlessly in an eerie ballet. A big orange tabby cat jogged down the alley, pausing to sniff my body.

The animal’s vitality and life took my breath away. The shadows spotted it at once and reached their long fingers out to touch it before it hissed and ran back where it had come from. I wanted to follow it. I needed to touch the cat and feel the life there. But something held me down like an anchor.

A pull at my spectral chest reminded me that my body still had breath and life. I wanted to just die already.

So this is what it’s like to become a ghost.

I heard Nathan’s voice. When he passed the alley, he stopped, sniffed the air.

He howled in fury.