bringing down the medium's night

Over and over the intimacy I am able to achieve with perfect strangers embarrasses me.

They gather around the table, their hands hang above evocation—hang in trepidation, their mouths round in little Os. The murderous-hearted man in particular.

The séance calls me forward. I am the room’s light. Unlike in life less shy. I wear my dandiest outfit. The leftover Victorian fashion, carried to the wrong side of the pond. My eyes sink into the room, spread out like the aurora borealis.

With one man, I’m held by a familiar tension. First I linger at the back of his neck. Smell the iron and his hunt for gold. A shudder confirms he knows. Breath at the edge of living skin. Those fine hairs the closest I can come to the body’s home. I hover between his legs but comprehend there’s no means for a mutual heat. I dip around the table, take my energy elsewhere.

It’s his lover he’s lost. He and I, we have something in common. He pulls at a black strand above his ear. He thinks of his wife. I straighten my dress.

He embodies what I failed to understand in life. He falls toward me as if I am the lost lover. His receding, greased hairline tucked among curls combed forward. Communication with the spirit world. The psychic sees right through him.

Someday, I think, I’ll be able to leave all this—bored by the redundancy of violence. The way the low lamps stretch out into tomorrow.

Though I no longer need to choose the right outfit. I never mitigate my desire with someone else’s. The man wants, through me, to speak to his lover. I have never been a channel. When the man feels fear, his tell is to massage the layer of his obesity closest to the groin.

The night could be ruined, were it not for a good idea. It’s mostly women gathered around the table, their perfectly manicured toes and nails shine like quartz. Each and every face so bent on grasping what can’t be understood. When my love came for me, it was for the weight of the world I drowned more easily.

This man’s intent is highly visible, and I frighten him with this knowledge. I relay my message, moments he shared only with his lover. Fiber and Sunday and huckleberries. Secret criticisms of his wife. Knitting and needling and nail biting.

In my century it was common to lose so many at an even earlier age. Death was commonplace and so were ghosts. This man, like my love, can’t control his anger. I will turn this man’s fury on its head. And so I’m drawn to him above all this dark room’s misplaced loneliness. If I can turn the fury to fear, his wife might not join me too early on the other side.

Plates spin. Oranges fly through an anxious space. I play the lover’s role and wail dramatically, don’t do it. The tablecloth itself is inhabited by the most unseemly spirits. Many worse than me.

The smell of his sweat. Blood tangle of guilt for what he’s thought. He tugs at the stiffness in his slacks.

After the evening’s industry, the dusk is always drawn. I silence myself and bring down the medium’s night.

Note: The first line of this piece was adapted from a line in Brian Kitely's 3AM Epiphany. "Death was commonplace, and so were ghosts" is a direct quote from the same book.