On day seven hundred and twelve, Adam Saylor decided to live.

In the unfathomable irony that had become his life, it was also the day he died.

*******

Megan was standing over the kitchen counter, brandishing her mixing spoon with the flourish of a conductor’s baton, generously ladling the thick batter onto the steaming waffle iron. She smiled as she clamped down on the handles, tightly cinching the cast iron plates with a familiar hiss. Adam sat, eyes fixated on the steady pattern of her movements; his heart weightless in his chest, until as always, the scene evaporated before his eyes, and again, she was gone.

“Mr. Saylor, can you hear me? Mr. Saylor?”

The smell of a hospital is unmistakable. Adam recognized it instantaneously as he was slowly roused from his bleary slumber. He awoke, eyes still heavy, limbs tucked too tightly under coarse sanitized sheets. He slowly inhaled the mingled aroma of antiseptic and sterility, faith and fear.

“Can you hear me?” a strange voice was anxious, pleading.

He’d let them wait, he was in no hurry to come back and whoever it was, had destroyed one of his rare and all too brief moments of unadulterated bliss. For that split second, between deep sleep and consciousness, he could forget that she was gone. For that instant, it was just another Sunday morning and they were making breakfast.

Some nights they might be at the cabin, sometimes driving along a lonely road: in the really good ones, Adam revisited one of their tequila filled romps from their week in Cabo, but if waffles was what he got this time, he would be happy to take it. The dreams were the moments he lived for. The dreams kept him alive.

“Mr. Saylor” the unfamiliar voice insisted.

Adam reluctantly opened his eyes and for the first time in over a year and a half he didn’t see the same four walls around him.

“Can you hear me?” a stranger hovered over him, enveloped in aqua surgical scrubs, brows knotted in genuine concern.

Adam nodded to the obvious delight of, according to a laminated i.d. card, one Dr. Connor. He squinted against the fluorescent glare and struggled to sit upright when a shooting pain struck his left side, immobilizing him instantly.

“Please be still” the doctor urged. “You’ve been, injured.” Adam closed his eyes, sinking deeper into the over-bleached linens.

It had been almost three years since Megan’s murder, almost two since Adam was charged and sent to prison for it and everyday in between he struggled to wrap his mind around what had happened. None of it had made sense. None of it was real. But that’s what the wrongly convicted always said. He shared quarters with three hundred and fifty innocent men.

Every one had a story and Adam had analyzed every detail of his, however minute, however seemingly trivial, rerunning the events in his head, like a continuous roll of aged film footage. He had little else to do as his painful days droned on mercilessly, but relive the fleeting days before it had happened.

Only two seemingly innocuous things had struck Adam in any way as peculiar. The first was a postcard from the local library:

“Hi Dr. Saylor” he had addressed Megan teasingly one afternoon, tossing the mail on the kitchen table

Her perplexed expression cued his explanation.“Library says you have three anatomy books overdue” She chuckled, mumbling something about incompetence.

“thought you might be giving up horticulture for a career in medicine.” he amused himself.

The second was a phone call from his best friend Rick:

He had called to borrow his pressure washer. “Little lady wants the deck washed”

“no one says little lady anymore, Rick, but sure, its in the shed.”He didn’t mind, at any given time they had half of each other’s tools in their basement.

“Thanks bud, see yaaa” Rick signed off, “have fun at the cabin” The cabin?

Megan had convinced Adam to go the cabin only half an hour before. This weekend they had agreed to stay home, attack the list of unfinished household “projects” that seemed to grow exponentially.

“But we only have a few weekends left” Megan had coaxed him. “The projects can wait.” Plus something about some god-awful quilt show Megan insisted she drag him to.

“Great” Adam had sneered, teasingly “ a bunch of leftover old dirty fabric scraps sewn together. Whoopee!”But Megan had sat through a night of ultimate wrestling for him. Quid pro quo.

Two days later Megan and Rick were dead and Adam may have well have been.

In the odd hierarchy of prison life, Adam was able to fly below the radar, neither befriending nor antagonizing his fellow inmates. His erroneous conviction of a violent double homicide allowed him some security from the more benign criminals, and having no affiliations with organized crime, gangs, or drug cartels, the more dangerous ones had no real use for him.

He went through the motions of survival. The tedious rote of meals, work detail, and his own internal dialogue occupied his waking hours. It was nighttime that was interminable, when the icy arms of loneliness embraced him, when minutes ticked by, slothful like hands on a dying clock. Sleep often eluded him, replaced with the ghastly wails of inmates and cold metallic echoes, sounding off the cinderblock caverns.

Adam was in the hospital three weeks before he learned that he had, in medical terms, been declared dead while undergoing surgery for multiple stab wounds. For over two and a half minutes he had, unbeknownst to himself no longer existed among the living.

Adam snickered at the paradox. For some reason that, of all mornings, he had felt remarkably alive, renewed, as if something outside his control would occur that would change the tack of his life’s storyline. That day, for some reason, Adam wanted to live.

“Because you technically were deceased,” his lawyer stated, “ you, in literal terms have served out your ‘life sentence’. Of course it‘s unprecedented” she continued, citing various terms, cases and legalise, “but we may have a case, you know, double jeopardy. I have all my colleagues working on it. The press is all over it.”

She continued in a hushed tone. “Off the record, what did you see? Light, a tunnel, Great Grandma?” Adam chuckled.

Sarah, his lawyer had rallied for his innocence against insurmountable odds these two years; against iron clad evidence that had appeared from nowhere, for which Adam had no fathomable explanation. Throughout it all, although she had never claimed it outright, he knew she believed him. It was her job, but she had believed him.

“No white light, music, overwhelming love?” she asked, a little too eagerly.

“Waffles” he responded. “ I saw waffles.”

**********

Three hundred miles away a young couple walked into a local Waffle House.

“They’re staring at us” the man whispered, still hesitant to venture out in public.

“Relax” the woman hushed, “no one is interested in us.”

They slithered into a booth towards the back and ordered breakfast. The man grabbed a folded newspaper left behind by a previous patron, flipping it open to page one.

“good, don’t have to buy one” he attempted a smile. The woman rolled her eyes.

He paused, absorbing the events of the world with a detached amusement, sipping at the coffee that had appeared before them.

Suddenly he choked and with his hand trembling, clanked the cup back into its saucer, its scorching contents sloshing onto the tabletop.

“What is it?’ The woman peered over the rim of her cup.

“We’re in trouble” he gasped almost inaudibly, “Big trouble.” he slid the newspaper hesitantly across the greasy tabletop.