You lit the candles because the electric light felt too honest, and I have already stolen the smell of the melting wax for later. Four of you, hands linked around the round table, and one empty chair you keep glancing at. Good. I love an empty chair. Empty chairs are where I keep my best surprises.
You will say the name aloud, the name that still catches in your throat, and you will wait for a knock, a flicker, a cold draft. Tonight, at around three, I will give you all of it and none of it. The candle flame will bend and become a small orange fish, and you will follow it down the tablecloth, which is now a shoreline, and you will not think this is odd.
The knocking will come, but it will be your grandmother, and she will be knocking to be let out of a cupboard she was never in, laughing, holding the wooden spoon.
Here is the thing you asked for without asking: you did not want a ghost. You wanted the conversation the day ended too soon. So I will not summon anyone. I will simply let you finish the sentence. She will be at the table, of course she will, she was always at the table, and you will say the thing, and she will already know, the way she always already knew, and no one at your little candlelit circle will find her presence strange, least of all you.
Then the birds will start up outside, and the wax smell will be the first to go, and the fish, and the spoon. You will keep almost none of it.
Only a warmth you cannot place, and a sense, over breakfast, that something was, briefly, said back.