“Excuse me?”

She’d been looking for him. Now that she’d found him, she could feel butterflies in her stomach. Or at least where her stomach had been when she was alive. Did she even have a stomach now, or was she just imagining it? Irrelevant, she decided.

“Yes?” he said, barely looking away from his desk.

“Are you…” she stopped. She couldn’t even ask. She was suddenly very aware of her teeth, although they probably weren’t real either. She tried to regain some control. “Are you… Edgar Allan Poe?”

“Yep, that’s me.” He put his pen down and turned away from his desk. She was awed – he looked exactly like his portrait on Wikipedia.

“Wow,” she said. “Just… oh, wow. Listen, I’m a huge fan, and I was wondering if… well, if you’d have a look at this poem I wrote.”

“Not a problem,” he smiled. She handed him a scrap of paper, which he smoothed out with his hands. After a while he handed it back to her.

“It’s rubbish,” he said, turning back to his desk.

“Oh” she said, and she died a second time.