They have sat themselves in a ring in the dark and gone very still, which is the one thing I cannot do, so at once I want in. I come under the door, I lift the candle flame sideways and they gasp, they hold their soft fingers linked around the table and will not let go, as if by not letting go they could keep anything.
They are calling a name. Over and over, low, the same name, into the hush, asking someone to come back, to knock, to move the little glass across the letters.
I move the little glass. It is nothing, a nudge, I do it the way I rattle a gate. They inhale together, sharp. Is that you, they say. Is that you, is that you.
Oh, I have carried so much through this window. Smoke off a fire four valleys east, salt from a sea these ones have never smelled, the last warm breath of a body somewhere out on a road tonight, all of it in me, none of it mine, none of it staying.
Maybe I am carrying him. Maybe some thread of the one they want is in me and I set him briefly on their upturned faces and did not know his name to say it back.
They lean in. They wait for more. But I cannot hold him, I cannot hold anything, I have already dropped him wherever I dropped the salt and the smoke, and I am under the door again, out, gone down the street lifting the hair off a stranger's neck, and behind me the candle steadies, and they are still saying it, still asking the dark to stay.