Being back here is changing me. I can feel it. I’m slowly shedding the doubts and insecurities that grow like warts on your insides as you get older, rising from a breeding ground of multiple failures, controlling husbands, character assessments made by your parents that you never seem to fully escape, and other countless shards of life that get buried in your subconscious.

Avril Island has given me back some part of myself—the twelve-year-old girl I was when I left here so long ago. She didn’t know enough about the world yet to be afraid, she didn’t know enough about people yet to shut them out, and she didn’t know that failure was even a possibility. That girl’s been here waiting all this time for me to show up and reclaim her.

MAY

There are police here. Two of them—a man and a woman. They’re standing over by the record player with June. The male police officer is holding the cord in his hand and examining it closely.

I understand why after I hear June explain how it turned on by itself in the middle of the night. June walks them over to a window and points outside to where she apparently saw someone run off into the woods.

The police ask her some standard questions about the doors being locked, and apparently she’d checked them before bed and they were. They seem to think the record player and stranger are an unrelated coincidence.

The male police officer speaks the most. He’s about ten years older than June and maybe twenty years older than the female police officer. He has that condescending tone that older men in positions of power so often have, mostly directed at women, as though he’s talking to imbecilic children. You can tell he used to be quite good-looking, which never helps in the attitude department. He wears a wedding ring, the skin puffy around it, so you can imagine him taking it off at night and massaging the blood flow back to the area.

Taking in all of these details, I realize I haven’t seen anyone other than June and Ezra since I died. I’m a recluse even in death. Just for fun I move right up close to the female police officer. She shivers and glances over her shoulder, then puts a hand on her utility belt. She’s pretty in a plain kind of way, her blond hair pulled back into a tight bun, no makeup, her body a well-worked-out machine.

The longing to feel the softness of skin, the press of lips, the cushion of breasts suddenly floods my space. How is a dead person supposed to deal with the longing for love? It makes me wish I’d spent more time on it while alive, gotten over the shame and just lived in my truth.