I press the little lightbulb button on the oven and squat to find smoke swirling like a miniature sandstorm around charred cheese globs of Frozen Pizzas Past. Our current specimen, nearly cooked, looks like it lost a green olive at some point. Another casualty joining the ranks of the underworld, a bottom from which nothing returns. The transformation won’t take but a few days. From plump, juicy topping, to something I could scrape off, stuff in a Ziploc bag, and advertise on Craigslist as REAL AUTHENTIC chunk of Meteor space rock Great Gift for him or her $42.

I keep putting off the whole self-clean procedure thing because it smells like a gas leak and totally smokes up the entire house. Literally every day I beg my fiancé, Emi: to preserve the sanctity of our lungs, let’s run the bastard and go to the nature reserve for a few hours to hike and knock back some club sodas in that shady nook by the lake where all the ducks congregate. There are even some felled trees to lean/sit on and if our asses get tired/sore, there’s a clearing with a park bench dedicated to a kid who died by falling off a hotel balcony on vacation in Puerto Rico. He was so young, I had to look it up.

The dates were inscribed in a wooden commemorative plate on the back rest. Strangely enough, on my first visit, I just so happened to be there on what would have been his fifteenth birthday. He was probably trying to stargaze, or wave to a family member below, already swimming, and dragged a chair to get some height, a better view. Climbed up, lost balance, then toppled over. I knew it was going to be tragic, but holy shit.

I sat on the bench and read an article about him from the local news on my phone. The air was irrationally charged. Electric. Magnetized. Something like a million hidden mechanical springs compressing around this suddenly hallowed grove. The real kicker was, just as I finished the article, sort of letting everything sink in—the coincidence of the situation, the accumulation of energy unknown, maybe a presence—every bird in the reserve took off and flew overhead at once, in a giant quilted swarm of flapping plumage. The strangest hodgepodge chorus of squawks and songs. Swear to God, it was the closest thing I’ve ever experienced to what you could call a sign from above. I get the shivers just thinking about it.

Emi always insists we shouldn’t leave the house with the oven on lest we return to rubble and ash. Or best case, our fire alarm, wailing, annoying every neighbor in earshot. I guess I just have more faith in modern day appliances than her. It doesn’t matter, we’ll figure it out. For now, I already opened the windows and set the microwave fan on HIGH to prepare for pizza extraction, a precaution in case anything catches fire. Treating the symptom and not the disease, as they say.

“Hey,” I call to Emi, who’s in the living room playing the latest Zelda game on her Switch. “Probably about two or three more minutes if you want to get something loaded up on YouTube."

Aside from her fingers on the controller, she makes no movement, acknowledges nothing. No indication that she’s heard me at all.

Slowly, something dawns.

I must’ve fell back and hit my head. Fainted from the fumes. Squatted and had a stroke. It’s the only explanation: I must be dead. Instead of fear, I feel an incandescent truth eat at my tissue. It cleanses me, as if I was scorched oven gunk burning to smithereens. Bit by bit, I feel myself break down and dissolve.

The boy from the park bench appears, a little gauzy, wearing swim trucks with a printed assortment of dinosaurs and a white pool shirt. Perhaps to give me the lowdown, show me the ropes, since he’s obviously been through this before. I assume he plans on accompanying me in my transition to whatever’s next.

He’s sitting on the kitchen floor next to my body with his legs crossed, back against the dishwasher. The real me is hovering above.

The boy says, via some unspoken language beam that makes what would be my forehead, now some ethereal substitute, tingle, thank you for sitting on my bench. I hope you enjoyed the birds, a token of my appreciation.

I try to send back the message: Hello! Spirit guide? Short and to the point. But since I have no idea what I’m doing, I’m unsure if it makes it through. His transmission resumes:

There is a sort of currency in the afterlife that we accumulate when we’re thought of with longing and compassion. Because of you, I was able to purchase six visitations with my family. One five-minute session of disembodied footsteps from the attic, one door ominously closing on its own, one picture of me in memorial nudged off a bedside table, one choppy and distorted voicemail from an Unknown Number, one happy dream for my mother of us sharing a long, overdue hug, and one quick apparition of me kicking a soccer ball to myself against the drywall in our garage. They miss me very much and are all terribly sad I died before hitting just about every milestone a family looks forward to.

I feel my organs liquify from benevolent heat. Again, my would-be forehead tingles.

By the way, the boy says, stop wondering when your fiancé is going to discover your body and guessing how she’ll react. You’re not dead. Just impatient. And, at times, a bit quick to assume things. I have to go now. All time is precious! Even wasted time! Don’t worry!

He soars away, zagging every direction in rapidly increasing intervals like an untied balloon let go at the bottom. My phone timer goes off, alerting me that dinner’s ready.

I feel a tugging all over. Something like a team of sentient suction cups dutifully reattaching me to my previous self. Once the procedure is complete, I stand, moderately startled, and pat down my entire body. I give extra attention to the back of my head, massaging the base of my skull where I fear a hematoma is soon to form. What the hell just happened? As I begin to come to, it occurs to me that I forgot all about the pizza.

I tend to it as fast as possible in my post-concussive state, still trying to ground myself with a flurry of blinks and eyebrow raises. Through the glass, I’m relieved to find that it’s blackened but not yet inedible. I open the oven.

The smoke is crisp as it enters my nostrils, with a faint smell of yeast. I let the warmth scald my face, but compared to what I just felt a minute ago, an omnipotent love-blaze of mercy and absolution, the sensation is largely disappointing. Death, as it turns out, is one heck of a drug.

Before I shut the oven, already missing the aforementioned blaze, I consider crawling inside. Just for one second, completely encircled by hotness. To fly close to the proverbial sun, without it melting my proverbial wings, so to speak. Though deep down I know it wouldn’t be the same.

“Emi,” I say, “it’s done.” But now that I think of it, I doubt she could hear me over the fan.

Paul Rousseau is a disabled writer. His debut memoir FRIENDLY FIRE is forthcoming from HarperCollins fall 2024. Paul's work can also be found in Roxane Gay's The Audacity, Catapult, Necessary Fiction, CRAFT, Pidgeonholes, and Wigleaf, among others. You can read his words online at Paul-Rousseau.com and follow him on Twitter @Paulwrites7.