Six people holding hands around a table in a dark room, asking the dead to knock twice. I don't laugh at it. I know exactly what they're doing.
The candle in the middle is the tell. Somebody insisted on real flame instead of a bulb, and now they're all leaning slightly toward it without noticing, the way everything leans toward the only warm thing in the cold. One woman keeps her eyes shut and her lips moving. The others watch her face for a flicker, a sign, permission to believe the person they lost isn't just gone into the dark and staying there.
Up there you learn how much dark there is. The Earth is one lit thing in a black that goes on with no floor and no far wall, and the light comes off it in a thin blue skin you could scratch through with a fingernail. Everything anyone ever loved is inside that skin. Nothing has ever answered from outside it. I looked. That is not a feeling, it is the report.
So I understand the table. Six people who cannot accept that the dark keeps what it takes, spending an evening trying to get one syllable back across a distance I can tell them is not crossable. It doesn't knock. It never does.
But they came. They lit the flame, they held the cold hands on either side of them, they said a name out loud in a room where saying it hurt. The dead didn't answer.
The living, though, all six of them, sat there in the one warm circle for as long as the candle held, and refused to let go.