I don't know where I've been or when now is. I only know time no longer has meaning for me. It's too tightly folded. I can't unravel it any more than I could unravel one of my mother's embroideries.

All I can say about 'when' is that it's All Hallows Eve on this planet, and I'm a hallow, a grave soul.

I'm standing in front of the house where I died.

It looks as if he's found a new tenant for the ground-floor apartment, someone with a child. There's a scuffed, second-hand Big Wheels on the porch and new white curtains on the windows.

I'm not wearing shoes, so I can feel the road's dirt between my toes. In fact, I feel the dirt through my toes, too. And I feel the Indian Summer breeze passing through all of me.

It can't be too very long since I died or the house would look different -- older. The paint would be peeling. The trees would be even bigger or dead and gone. The giant oaks still stand. Their leaves still fall in piles like an ogre's golden horde. The child that lives here now runs through them laughing.

That's not good. That's something I have to correct. Not the laughing. I mean it's not good that a child lives here.