These didn’t taste like the throats of people looking for blood. They struck Kostya as nostalgic. Maybe they were hungry, the restaurant options in the Afterlife not quite hitting the spot. Or maybe they just communicated with whatever receiver they had available and his happened to be a tongue. He wished there were a way to ask them, to discover what they wanted him to do with these flavors they kept pushing on him, but the moments were so brief, the tastes so fleeting, that often he barely had time to register what he had been tasting before it vanished without a trace.
Most of the time, the flavors were typical - more dead people than you’d think crave some variety of sandwich - but sometimes they were entirely foreign, hailing from cuisines Kostya hadn’t known existed, spices he couldn’t have imagined. Even the obscurest tastes would somehow disclose themselves to him, a metaphysical-ethereal-neural miracle that let him intuit the component parts of everything he tasted.