The first time Frank Adams ingested his wife’s cremains, he sprinkled only a scant quarter-teaspoon over his oatmeal. Such a tiny amount, a pinch, really, he thought, swirling the ashes into the oatmeal with butter and brown sugar so that when he swallowed, he detected only the faintest sensation of grittiness, though even that sensation may have been his imagination. Eating the ashes made him think of his mother, a farmer who had often reassured him that ingesting any animal or plant meant it became part of you forever⁠—her way to make sure he ate his sausage and gravy, even if the sausage had formerly been an affable sow named Pinecone. He had just turned 52, the same age his mother had been when a vessel burst in her head and she had died, slumping over in her pew at Fort Perkins First Baptist as if she had simply fallen asleep while everyone had their heads bowed for the altar call.

Of course, the ashes in the urn had been his wife, dead six months now, not a lamb raised for consumption and wool, but he had read somewhere that cremains were nutrient-dense, or at least not harmful, and he yearned for something of Eva that lasted longer than her scent. Although Frank was not historically prone to emotional displays, at least not when he was sober, he had cried the first time he changed the sheets after Eva died because he could not figure out how to make them smell like she had. Lavender oil, sprinkled on the woolen dryer ball, his daughter told him later. Eva had long ago informed Violet that the smell of lavender coaxed better dreams, and Violet’s explanation made him tear up all over again. Back in college, Eva’s apartment had been littered with moon-charged crystals and cloudy tinctures purported to soothe everything from scraped elbows to heartburn.

The first time he visited her apartment, he said, “I thought you were in nursing school.”

“Yeah? I am,” she replied, her head cocked to one side.

“What’s with all the hoodoo nonsense?” Frank picked up a vial filled with cloudy blueish liquid and shook it. “Like, is this supposed to cure anything, for real?”

Eva took the tincture from him and placed it back on the counter. “That’s for cramps, for women at that time of the month. And yes, I find it helpful.”

Chastised and mildly embarrassed at the mention of menstruation, he shrugged and muttered something like, “Whatever floats your boat.”

After they had been dating for several months, he dropped by one evening to find her arranging pale pink rocks and opaque crystals in a spiral on her tiny balcony. The apartment smelled of fresh black pepper and something raw and earthy, like crushed fig leaves or green cypress wood.

“Full moon tonight,” she said.

Frank, who had just left a seminar on the future of machine-learning and was feeling practically scientific even though he had understood very little of the lecture, rolled his eyes.

“Seriously, Eva, you have to be kidding. This is a bunch of hoodoo bullshit⁠ ⁠…”

She turned to him, a rock the size of a deck of cards in her hand, the fading sun behind her setting her pale hair aflame. She looked as though she were about to smash the rock against his face. Instead, she slipped it into her pocket and they had their first fight, a raging one filled with indignation (her) and self-righteous condescension (him). He woke the next day in his own apartment with a belly full of regret. What did he care what Eva did with her potions and notions? She was a healer (at least, that’s what she had screamed at him when he accused her of ignoring common sense and her own medical training), so why should he care if she contradicted herself by believing in moon magic and actual medicine at the same time? He had been raised to believe in the healing power of prayer, and wasn’t that just as unproven (and unscientific) a remedy as moon-drenched geodes and blended herbs?

He had given her a box of dark-chocolate-dipped madeleines, a bottle of chianti, and a sincere apology. She forgave him, but she never talked about crystals or essential oils in his presence except for the time she insisted on burning a thick wad of sage in the house before they moved in to cleanse the space of “unwelcome energy.” Even then, he had tried (and failed) not to roll his eyes.

Now he couldn’t sleep without the scent of lavender, without Eva.

When their daughter Violet had still lived at home, Sundays were Frank and Eva’s most jealously guarded “we” time, and they continued the tradition even after Violet moved out. After a coffee-and-sesame-bagel breakfast, Frank and Eva would a) sit on the couch while she did a crossword and he watched CBS Sunday Morning with the volume on low, b) go on a meandering walk-hike through Cloudland Canyon or up to Rainbow Lake, or c) have sex. Frank liked the sex-days the best, with their coffee-scented grappling followed by lazing in bed as the sun moved above the trees until it glimmered in the reflection of the mirror above the dresser.

After Eva died, he found he missed the couch-sitting and leisurely hikes more than he expected, which was not to say he did not miss the sex. He missed it quite a lot, had missed it in the months when Eva was so weak and nauseous that it made him hate himself that he still wanted to lie beside her, to slip into the warm space between her legs and stay there until words like palliative care and accelerated death benefit faded from his vocabulary. Instead, he coordinated with the nurses and hospice people, accepted casseroles and promises of prayer, and, when the house lay quiet and Eva murmured in morphine-fueled dreams, he shut himself in the upstairs bathroom with MILF-inspired porn and tried not to cry out when he came.

Lately, his Sunday breakfast often came from Hardee’s (he was particularly fond of the pork chop and gravy biscuit), but the restaurant was always crowded with old men in unironic mesh-backed caps and he dreaded becoming one of them, reliving the best parts of his life over senior-discounted coffee in a cup with a leaking lid. He was only 52, but his unkempt gray hair and shuffling step marked him as a man aging into loneliness.

When Eva’s death became a when rather than an if, Frank felt his grief transform from a wide lake that stretched around him in all directions and splashed sadness onto everyone who approached to something akin to the Mariana Trench⁠–⁠bottomless, deep, dark⁠–⁠the pressure of which threatened to collapse his lungs and capillaries when he tried to concentrate on anything other than the slow pulse of her breath. He took a leave of absence from work⁠—in theory, to help care for his wife, but in reality, because he was afraid he would miss some critical step in the no-margin-for-error security coding he was managing for his company’s newest client.

But on that Sunday morning, after he ate the oatmeal with the ashen swirl, he settled himself on Eva’s spot on the couch and tried to meditate, a practice he picked up only after Eva had provided him with scientific studies backing meditation as a proven way to reduce stress and improve focus (rather than the new-age nonsense he assumed it was). Ingesting the ashes had helped his disposition right away; he thought of the breakfast as a postmortem extension of their “we” time. He sat in silence, trying to clear his mind and coast on the positive feeling. He imagined Eva’s essence seeping into his blood and bones. Velvety whispers gathered around the edges of his consciousness⁠—murmuring watch out, the world’s behind you. He gave up on meditation and drifted off for a nap.

Two days before what would have been Eva’s 50th birthday and about a month after he started dosing himself with her cremains each Sunday morning, he sprinkled ashes into a scrambled egg and folded the mixture into a slice of white bread. The day had dawned with just the kind of misty sunshine that would have compelled Eva, and, by extension, himself, to trek through the woods up on the mountain. He had not gone on a hike since Eva got sick, and this morning, promising though it was, made him want to go straight back to sleep. He washed the makeshift sandwich down with a tumbler of whiskey, then another, but the grit seemed to stick between his teeth and his tongue felt swollen, foreign in his mouth, as it sometimes did when he drank brown liquor. He opened a book, a slim volume of Baudelaire that he had been trying to get through for years, and stared at the pages until he fell asleep, sprawled inelegantly across the old leather sofa, the third glass of whiskey permeating the air with its odor of oak and bitter honey.

“I can’t believe I had to die before you’d eat me proper,” she said, clear as if she were sitting in her favorite chair, knotting one of the macrame plant holders that Violet sold at the greenhouse she managed in town. The voice sounded Irish to his ears, a thick brogue straight out of Derry Girls, one of Eva’s favorite shows. Her words, her turn of phrase, and even her accent was different from when she was alive, and yet, he felt the voice belonged to Eva in the same way he might identify someone in a dream, even if they looked or sounded strange. A sort of heart-knowledge.

Her presence did not feel like a dream.

Without opening his eyes, he muttered, “Damn delicious.” His voice came out as a rasp⁠–⁠he had not spoken aloud since Violet’s visit the week before. He had returned to work, but he, like the other programmers and tech guys he worked with, was more comfortable communicating via WorkChat or TaskList. He was rarely required to talk to anyone directly, and it was even rarer for him to have to attend an on-camera call, or to actually go into company headquarters, two hours away in metro-Nashville.

Eva did not speak again, but he felt her presence, smelled the sex musk of her thighs. He pushed down his boxers, took his rising dick in his hand, then took care of himself with a few rough jerks. He wiped his hand on a tissue before drifting back into a semiconscious reverie in the warm room filled with dust motes and gray light.

On Monday, he woke late and grimaced. His skin smelled sour, his hair looked somehow both oily and dry. If Eva had been there, she would have told him to take a hot shower⁠—his preferred method of dealing with everything from headaches to malaise. He stood under the water waiting for the steam to clear his head, but all he could think about was how Eva used to make him green tea with a hunk of ginger root whenever he was in danger of dropping into one of his funks. He did not want tea, or whiskey, or a nice walk in the woods; he wanted her, and he did not want to wait until Sunday to be with her again. All day, he debated whether or not to dip into the urn. His screen blurred before him.

On Monday evening, he sprinkled ashes on his linguine like a dusting of gray Parmesan and carried the bowl of pasta to the den, where it had been their habit to watch the prior evening’s episode of Game of Thrones over some sort of pasta or grain bowl. Eva was always a big fan of themed dinners⁠—meatless Mondays, taco Tuesdays, Sunday suppers. When Frank used to travel for work, he found himself adhering to the same dinner schedule, and, even now that he was alone, it seemed a habit he could not⁠—or perhaps did not want to⁠—break. As he slurped the last noodle and HBO queued up the next episode, he felt her again⁠—a warmth that took hold in his chest and spread down until it collected, concentrated, in his lap.

“Eva, is that you?”

“Frank, my love.”

Again, her voice, which seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at the same time, more purr than intonation. No brogue this time, but no Appalachian lilt, either. “You sound different from before,” he said. He did not examine if he meant from the day before or from when she had been alive.

“How am I different?”

Frank felt a pressure against his crotch, though he couldn’t tell if the pressure was from his erection straining against his briefs or a glowing warmth that seemed to fill the space around him.

“Your voice is different. Silkier, or, oh⁠ ⁠…” he stuttered, and stared down at his unzipped khakis. He did not remember pulling the zipper down. Eva used to joke that her next embroidery project would involve pillows cross-stitched with reminders like “Frank, Zip Your Pants” or “Frank, Take Your Meds.” He tucked his dick in an uncomfortable position upright against his belly and zipped his pants.

The voice, again, “It’s hard here, to remember myself.” Then, after a heartbeat, “Show me.”

Show you what, he thought. Then, with inspiration that felt like his own, he scrolled through his phone until he found a video he had taken a few months before Eva died. She was forming Sunday meatballs and singing along with The Velvet Underground, her voice uneven and slightly raspy from pollen allergies, wearing only cotton underwear and his old Journey T-shirt. She stopped singing and gave a mild shriek when she caught him filming, then approached the phone lens with her outstretched hands covered in raw ground turkey and sticky breadcrumbs.

“More,” the Eva-not-Eva voice said.

Frank found the link to the video of Eva’s last birthday party. He cast to the TV and wondered how different the celebration might have been if they had known she would die before her next birthday. She had not been diagnosed yet, though in retrospect he could see the signs. Her skin, which had always been pinkly pale, had taken on a yellowish hue. Her unpredictable period disappeared for months before returning with such force that he found her curled on the bed in tears the morning of her party. She blamed perimenopause for her pallor and bleeding and crushing fatigue. By the time Eva went for her annual pap smear, the cancer had devoured her cervix and was working its way through her abdomen. On the screen, the undiagnosed Eva sliced into a Funfetti cake and laughed at something Violet said off-screen. She turned and looked directly into the camera, her pale blue eyes shining, and winked.

The room was too warm, and his penis was softening. He yawned, stretched⁠—he always felt so sleepy lately. He drifted off before the on-screen Eva opened her gifts. When he woke, the video had ended and his pants were unzipped, his briefs pushed down, his penis shriveling in a room that had gone cold and damp, as if a dew had settled over everything while he napped.

On Wednesdays, his daughter Violet visited. She always brought some sort of baked dish or picked up something ostensibly healthful, like a Taziki’s family dinner, in the hopes that he would be able to have not just one, but two or even three good meals. Violet, much like her mother, offered solace by feeding people, and the two of them had been planning a cancer survivor’s cookbook until it became apparent that Eva would not. Survive, that is.

At his request, Violet would also bring Cupcake, an affectionate border collie with the same kind of heterochromic eyes, one ice-blue, the other doe-brown, as Violet herself. Twenty minutes before Violet was due to arrive, Frank looked up from his screen⁠—he often worked in fits and bursts and was known to lose 16 hours in the echoing world of security software. His daughter’s visits forced him to break out of his own head, to look up from the screen, to think about the world that still stuttered on, whether he went out into it or not. The lid to the urn where Eva’s ashes were kept was ajar, and the house smelled as musty as his college apartment. How long since he had gone further from the house than his mailbox? He raced around opening windows and straightening throw pillows. He replaced the lid to the urn and had just swept some of the scattered ashes around the base of the vessel into his palm when he heard Cupcake’s familiar whine-bark and the back door opening.

Violet sang out, “Dad, it’s me! I brought spinach lasagna.”

Frank did not want Violet to come into the den to see him brushing traces of her mother back into the urn, and he did not feel right just dusting Eva against his khakis, so, on impulse, he tossed the ashes into his mouth and licked his palm. Cupcake bounded into the room and pressed her snout against his knees. He bent to pet her, and she licked the side of his face. “Good girl, who’s a good girl,” he murmured. He heard Violet in the kitchen, placing things on counters, the click-ticking of the oven as she turned it on.

Cupcake stiffened, and she gave a low, rumbling growl⁠—the kind she usually reserved for bearded men and people wearing hats. “What is it, Cuppa?” he said. The dog’s hackles stood, then her growl faded to a low whine, her tail tucked close, her ears switching between alert and laid low. Despite the breeze from the opened windows, the room was too warm.

“Dad, where’s your olive oil?” Violet called.

Frank straightened and walked toward the kitchen, but Cupcake seemed glued to her spot in front of the mantel, staring toward the far corner of the room where Eva used to keep her embroidery basket and a messy stack of books in an ever-growing to-be-read pile. The week after she died, Frank dumped the books and embroidery materials in a brown grocery bag and stashed it all in a closet, afraid that if he left her possessions as they were that he would never move them and the corner would become a dusty shrine to the quiet joys of a dead woman. He had not touched them since.

“Dad, did you hear me?” Violet said.

A wind ruffled the curtains, Cupcake let out a yelp-bark, and the room seemed to lighten. Frank passed a hand over his face and answered, “I just ran out.” He did not add that he had used the last of the good olive oil the day before, when he made soft-shell tacos with ground turkey, shredded cheese, and ash-speckled sour cream.

Violet mumbled something that sounded like, “Knew I should have⁠ ⁠…” before he heard her rummaging in the pantry. He joined her in the kitchen, where he saw that she had made a too-big-for-two-people lasagna in an 8 × 8 pan. A head of romaine and an English cucumber still in the cellophane sat alongside a spill of cherry tomatoes that Violet was methodically slicing into halves on Eva’s scarred wooden board that made everything taste like onions. Frank surveyed the meal and caught himself wondering if he could sneak a sprinkle of ashes over his slice of garlic bread before recalling that he had just licked some from his palm. Perhaps, he thought, that would be enough to beckon forth night dreams of Eva.

He tried to pay attention to Violet during dinner, to ask questions about her new position at Green Thumb Nursery, to nod and smile when she talked. Violet was prone to periods of sadness and withdrawal, just like Frank, but, unlike her father, she was practical when dealing with the human condition and strove never to slide down into the darkest places, had always managed to keep a firm grip on reality. When Eva’s condition took a turn for the worst, Violet had made an appointment with her gynecologist to get a pap smear in case cervical cancer ran in families, and, while she was at Dr. Mitchell’s office, requested a prescription for Lexapro to help her through the coming months.

Over dinner, as was their custom, Frank and Violet ate portions of the lasagna with a glass of wine each, then ate the dressed salad from their lasagna-smeared plates. For dessert, they usually finished the rest of the wine while watching an old episode of Seinfeld or playing a round or two of gin rummy. Frank ate quickly and tried not to glance at his watch to see how much longer he needed to be present before he could go into the den, draw the curtains, and slip into a dark sleep where Eva would visit him, pulling him up and into her as he dreamed.

“Dad, did you hear me?”

“I’m sorry, honey, what was that?”

“I said I can’t stay long⁠—I promised Vonda I’d drop by to help her pick out a color for the kitchen.”

“Oh, that’s okay. It’s been a long week and I’m kind of beat,” Frank said.

“Dad, it’s only Wednesday.”

“Exactly.”

Violet rolled her eyes. “I was thinking, maybe we could take a trip to the Glen next month, spread Mom’s ashes.”

Frank had put off spreading Eva’s ashes for months, well before he began incorporating them in his diet, and the thought of tossing them out now made his scrotum tighten.

“I kind of like her here, with me.”

Violet opened her mouth to speak, shut it, then tried again. “Dad, do you think that’s what she would’ve wanted?” She glanced around the kitchen, taking in the loaf of bread moldering in its plastic bag on the counter, used coffee cups that filled the sink, splatters of red sauce staining the cabinets.

“You seem like you might be slipping into one of your funks.”

Frank shrugged. “I’m fine.”

Violet turned her gaze to him, her brow creased and her eyes wide with worry.

“Really,” he said. He made the tcht-tcht sound to call Cupcake to his side. Cupcake perked her ears, but she stayed in her spot next to Violet’s chair.

“Just think about it, okay?” Violet said. She covered the rest of the lasagna with foil before gathering her tote and calling for Cupcake to follow. Frank waited until he heard her car drive away before he closed the windows and drew the curtains.

“Eva, you there?”

The whole house darkened and grew warm as the sun set. Frank drifted into an easy sleep on the sofa, waking sometime deep in the night feeling raw and depleted. His unfinished wine gave off an acrid smell, as if it had turned in the hours since he had opened the bottle. He took the glass to the sink, then, shrugging, took a sip, which he promptly spat out. How could wine turn to vinegar in the space of a few dark hours? He poured the rest of the bottle down the drain and wondered why he didn’t notice it was off before, why Violet, who loved a glass of good cabernet, hadn’t said anything.

The next night, in the liminal space before sleep, he whispered, “You’re not Eva, are you?”

“Don’t I fuck like Eva?”

“No.” The room was silent. Down the street, a car backfired. Frank spoke into the dark, “Eva and I didn’t fuck, we⁠ ⁠… it was different. Quieter, but good.”

A soft rustling sound, and then, “You want to cozy cuddle? A sweet coupling? You want to play missionary?”

“I⁠ ⁠… yes. Yes, I want that. The way it was with Eva.”

Even as he spoke, he could feel the lie, or, not a lie exactly, but not a full truth. He wanted both, like all men. And women, too, he supposed. He was silent. Thinking, waiting.

“I knew you would call me back to you.”

His balls and heart seemed to meet in his stomach, and his mouth went drier than it had the first time he ate the ashes straight. Violet had been right⁠—he had gone back to the dark place, the deepest “funk,” where real and shadow worlds blurred. Eva had always pulled him out of it, with her easy laughter and lavender-scented sheets.

“No,” he said. The darkness in the room came together, took on form. “No,” he said again, but softer, already defeated. Tumbling curls, swirling skirts, full breasts, just like his dream-girl had looked in college, dark in all the places Eva had been light.

“Get out,” he said. His voice was weak, unconvincing. He almost lost himself before, when he stopped going to classes so that he could fuck in the dark with a woman who seemed insatiable, a woman none of his friends ever met.

“I can look like her, if you want, but I’ll still fuck like me. Isn’t that what you really want?”

He shuddered, aroused despite himself. “Please. Just leave me alone.”

She was fully formed now, the shadows falling away like a cloak dropped onto grass. He lay on his back, tears leaking from his eyes. She climbed atop, and he wished it did not feel as good as it did.

He didn’t remember falling asleep, and he would have written Lil’s visit off as another dream were it not for the way his skin felt tracked with touch. Did he cause this? Beckon the-almost-but-never-quite-forgotten shadow-woman back by consuming the dead? He longed to slip back into that obsessive darkness.

He sat up in bed, and he had a sudden urge to hurl the urn, ashes and all, out the window. Instead, he called Violet and made plans to drive out to the Glen with Eva’s ashes that weekend. After he hung up, he took a Ziploc and scooped a teaspoon of ashes into it, then carried the baggie to the closet. He felt like an addict hiding his desperation stash, and it was all he could do not to gorge on the ashes, choke himself with handfuls of incinerated bone that tasted like sand, let Lil take him, drain him, leave him for dead. His hands trembled as he pulled Eva’s books and embroidery basket from the back of the closet. When he opened the basket, Eva’s smell of vanilla and vetiver overtook him, and he paused, let the scent float over him, protect him. He tucked the bag of ashes between bright skeins of floss, under a half-finished canvas that depicted clusters of violets in shades of pink and lavender.

God, he missed Eva, but Sundays were so lonely.