Six people sitting in the dark, holding hands, asking the table to speak. I love this, because the table is speaking, constantly, just not in the frequency they mean. That oak surface is a lattice of carbon atoms locked in place, each one jittering around its position at room temperature, a faint thermal tremble that never stops and never will until the wood is colder than deep space.
Put your palm flat on it. You are not touching wood. The electrons in your skin and the electrons in the tabletop refuse to occupy the same space, so what you feel as solid contact is actually two clouds of negative charge shoving each other apart across a gap. You have never touched anything.
No one in that circle ever has.
They are waiting for a message from someone who has died. Meanwhile the candle between them is doing the loudest thing in the room: fusing nothing, merely releasing sunlight that a plant caught decades ago and stored, so the flame flickering on their hopeful faces is genuinely old daylight, escaping.
And the hands. Six people gripping fingers, certain that connection means something has crossed over. Every calcium atom in those knuckles was forged inside a star that detonated before the Earth existed. The iron in their blood, same story. They have gathered in the dark to summon the dead, unaware that they are made entirely of the dead, of exhausted suns that spent themselves so that six warm mammals could sit around a table and ask the universe, please, is anyone still out there.
Someone always is. It is the person sitting next to you, quietly radiating body heat at a steady hundred watts into the cold room, the most eloquent ghost in the house.