They have gathered around the small round table and put their hands flat upon it, ten fingers each, and I am holding all of them. I hold the table too, its four legs pressed into the floor, and the floor pressed into the earth, and the earth wrapped close around all of us as it always is.
I hold the candle. I hold the melting wax as it runs down and pools, which I confess is one of my quieter pleasures, watching a solid decide to become a slow river toward me.
They are very still. They are trying, I think, to hold something that is not here. They keep saying a name and asking it to come, to knock, to move the table, to make itself heavy in the room. I have checked. There is no one at that name. Nothing arrives to lean on my hands. The chair the name once sat in weighs exactly what an empty chair weighs.
And yet the woman at the head of the table is bent forward as if she carries something enormous, her shoulders low, her breath shallow. She says she has been carrying him for a year now. I looked. He registers nothing on me. He is the lightest thing in the room, which is to say he is not in the room at all.
But she bends anyway, folding under a load I cannot find, and the others reach across the table to steady her.
I cannot lift what she is carrying. It does not answer to me. I can only do the one thing I have done since her first breath, and her last will be no different: I hold her down against the good solid ground, gently, with all of myself, so that whatever she is bending under, she does not fall.