It's not that the dead people are coming back, it's that they're coming back so young. Amazed to be alive again, I guess, they spend all their time laughing, chattering and singing the old songs. On Sundays I see them promenade down Concourse street in bowler hats and silk scarves, or drive by the house in coaches pulled by glossy, sweating great horses with fancy women clinging to their arms.

The schools are full. Traffic is unbearable. You can't go out without seeing them everywhere, getting jostled. Hearty hellos. All the generations, a flood of them. And more appearing every day, always at the same place -- the train station. They usually have a bag with a few things in it, some clothes and maybe a harmonica or a comb or a cigar box full of photographs and letters. They're exhausted, have to go to bed and sleep for a week before they can even speak. Some are kids, some are adolescents, some are adults. Some are even middle aged. You get the rare one who's old. But they're always in superb health and, after they've slept it off -- slept off the death thing -- they glow with life, they emanate joy. Some stay with relatives, some have taken over the abandoned factories and are fixing them up into apartments.

My own mother -- I remember her waving me off to school at the door, my first day, and when I turned for a pleading look back she was nuzzling my Dad's shaven cheek. And I remember her dying, a cough-wracked skeleton under the stiff sheet. She grabbed my arm and dug her nails in so hard the welts stayed for weeks after. I love you, she wheezed, and I said, Oh, oh, oh -- my chest bursting -- I love you, Momma, I love you, Momma.

God. God. I did love her, didn't I? And I suffered after I had to bury her, all those years

back. And now here she is again -- dimpled, her hair a sun-halo, swinging under the big live oak in the yard! Laughing as she flies up from the ground. I give her a push and then stand aside, sweating. Irene, she insists I call her. This smart, insidiously lovely little girl -- her eyes full of sea fragments, her lips shedding smiles like rose petals.

My wife, ex, is on the other coast, my children don't talk to me unless they need a loan. Yet here's this sly ingenue, right out of the creased brown family photographs, asking for a glass of milk and a cookie before she goes up to bed. In the grainy cold of dawn I wake her with a shake of the shoulder and she pouts: I'm cold! Turn up the furnace! So I have to shovel coal. 6:00 AM. A retired man! She wants to play with my pocketwatch. Complains if I fix her the wrong lunch. Stomps her feet. When she's mad her eyes turn greener.

One afternoon, near the beginning of the invasion, I was sitting on the porch chewing and spitting into a coffee can when I saw Dad coming down the street -- a slick, handsome boy of about nineteen, in chinos and a baseball jacket. He smiled as he climbed up the steps, extending his hand. His eyes looking me over. Son? I jumped to my feet, knocking over the can -- spilled black juice everywhere. Dad watched me with a smile as I cleaned it up, then winked and slapped my arm. He stayed for a few hours talking about the past and left before supper, saying he had a hot date. I haven't seen nor heard rumor of him since. For all I know he went back East.

It's an odd thing -- you hear no word about the Beyond from any of them, ever. If I ask my mother -- Irene -- what it was like, what is out there, she stares at a patch of space. Tranced. Then she jumps up and runs outdoors to play with Grandpa Denny, who is in shorts and a torn shirt and is carrying a bamboo fishing pole. I sit on the porch, blinking, watching them dash away through the haze down to the stream for minnows.