It is four am and I am sitting in front of my computer. I am drunk and sleepy. Earlier in the night, I spilled Kahlua on my jeans and they smell faintly of chocolate, strongly of smoke. It is four am and I have vacuumed my floor. My room is neat and unfamiliar. It smells like artificial potpourri. Real potpourri does not smell like flowers. The dead buds are doused in perfumes. The trick is to make the dead smell as if they are alive, as at an open casket funeral the corpse looks both disturbingly alive and utterly unfamiliar, as though the dead, resurrected, may not resume their former shape but must take on another, the physical being a manifestation, nothing more.

It is all an elaborate illusion.