Four billion years to build these eyes, and you are using them to look for us in the dark.
Us. The dead. The lungfish who first gulped air at the drying edge of a pond, dead. The shrew who ran under the feet of things with teeth like doors, dead. The woman who cupped the last coal through a wet season with her own breath, dead. We are all dead, child.
That is the one thing every runner in this relay has in common. We did the hardest thing there is, which is to hand the torch forward and then let go of it, and you have lit candles and sat in a ring and asked us, please, to grab it back.
We watch you hold hands around the table. Good. Warmth passed between palms, that is the oldest fire, that is the woman with the coal, that is right. But then you close your eyes and go quiet and wait for a knock, for a cold breath, for a name spelled letter by letter across a board by fingers you are pretending not to move.
We are not in the knock. We are in the fingers.
We are the calluses on the hand you set flat on the table. We are the fear that made your neck prickle when the candle guttered, the same neck-prickle that saved the shrew, working perfectly, wasted gloriously on a draft. You are the safest survivor in the whole line, so safe you must invent ghosts to feel the old cold, and we could weep with how funny that is, how well it means we did.
Ask your questions. Wait for your sign. We will not knock.
We are already answering.
Every breath you take in that dark room is us, still going.