“Last dream I’d had that I liked,” Amy said in the dark, “I was doing a séance. And y’all were there.”

“Was it about Daniel?” Lyanna said. “Did we reach him?”

“You weren’t there.”

We sat at my poker table. Votive candles flickered in whiskey tumblers we’d drank from. Little fingers of candlelight slipped all over the empty Maker’s bottle. Then a greater flicker: the power came back on.

I went into the den, flipped the record onto Side Two, dropped the needle and adjusted the volume. If you’d turned it up too loud you couldn’t hear anybody talking. Too low and you couldn’t hear it at all for the godlike crashing of rain all around us. Wind actually smacked the house. Slapped it. I’d made a point of moving all the chairs, tables, loveseats, anywhere a body could sit, a safe distance from any window.

It was too bad: when I sat back down you still couldn’t hear it well enough, and we’d needed music on a night like tonight. Rigo had already started talking about his dream so as to snuff out any further discussion of Daniel between Amy and Lyanna. What about Corinna? I wondered. Corinna, my wife. Maybe it was Corinna Amy’d made a connection with. But that was only a dream, so what did it matter? For my handling of the turntable and wondering over Amy’s dream, I’d missed most of what Rigo had told us concerning his own––had missed essential details, tuned in too late, hearing only:

“…and everybody stood looking at me like I was crazy, having baptized the priest.”

“Wait,” I said. “Were you a baby holding him? A baby dunking a priest’s head in church?”

“Were you not listening to his story?” 

This was Amy.

“We were in the river,” Rigo said. “Itchetucknee. We weren’t at church, Paul. There wasn’t any church in the dream. Just the priest.”

I asked him, “A river? Wouldn’t it have been a reverend?”

“I can’t go swimming anywhere around here,” Lyanna said. “Terrified of gators.”

Lyanna was from Minnesota. But she’d lived here ten years, staying after grad school. She really didn’t have an excuse anymore, all terrified of gators.

“It’s not a story,” Lyanna said.

No one knew what she was talking about. I reached for a tumbler of candlelight, spun it a few times, studied it like something precious.

“Amy was like, ‘Were you not listening to his story?’ at Paul, but if it’s a dream it’s not a story.”

“Well I’m just really sorry,” Amy said.

Thank god the front door flew open, Deena arriving, huddled into herself and bundled up darkly like a friar, bounding through the kitchen doorway in flight from the outer apocalyptic roar. The sheer commotion of a person entering a house in these conditions shoved violently at time, extinguishing any present possibility of Amy and Lyanna going at each other. Under hurricane nights things seemed to shift into fast-forward, like watching a time-lapse video. The power’s on. Now it’s off. On again. A window is a window. Now a window is a broken window. Or no window at all. A tree standing and now not. Someone’s alive. Now not. A bottle full and suddenly empty. No worries. Deena brought supplies.

Among these friends here, my house was always the last to lose power. And with far less risk of flooding to boot, farther inland and sitting atop a higher gradient, for what that’s worth in Florida. Maybe a hundred, a hundred-and-fifty feet higher, outside the city in a burg attended by sprawling, arthritic live oak and serrated saw palm prairie, some nearby sapphire-blue springs, and old tin-roofed houses patinated and rust-slashed beneath the crowns of towering elder palm trees. 

Vestiges of a very pretty state are still strewn about. 

Not necessarily safe here at my house—nowhere’s safe—yet the logical refuge for a hurricane party. We’d all gone to college together ten years ago at UF. For various reasons we didn’t get together that often anymore. But we always got together for a hurricane.

♤

“We were talking about dreams we’ve had,” I said. “But they have to be good dreams. What’s the last good dream you had?”

“I really don’t have good ones,” Deena said.

“I hear that,” Lyanna said.

“Amy didn’t get to finish,” Rigo said. “About the séance. I interrupted you. Amy, I’m sorry I interrupted you.” Rigo had always liked Amy.

“You didn’t interrupt me,” Amy said. “I’d just stopped talking.”

“Cups?” Deena said. She peeled and unwound the red wax seal, uncorked the bottle, and slid it to the center of the table.

“Those’re all the glasses I’ve got for whiskey. But we can drink out of something else.” 

It was true. Corrina and I had bought others together, some decorative crystal-sided tumblers. But there were certain things I’d just had to get rid of.

Amy blew out a candle, shucked it from the glass, set it on the table and poured whiskey in. She blew out the rest of the candles. “What do we need these for now, anyway?” She fixed everyone a drink.

“Mine has a little wax in it,” Rigo said.

“They’re not cups,” Lyanna said. “Deena said cups. They’re called glasses. Cups are for children.”

Much of the time folks simply failed to understand Lyanna’s humor. 

There was a smell of blown-out candles. The lights in the kitchen flickered. What you could hear of the music chiming in from the living room ceased entirely. The lights flickered again. We sat together drinking in darkness.

♤

I’d had these stemless wine glasses the color of lapis and now Amy lighted within them the flashing votives and a terrific blue ballet of light pulsed amid the five of us sitting here, and I started talking about my dreams.

After Corinna had slipped on the transom of her friend’s ski-boat, her head hitting the swim platform and her body woodenly turning and disappearing into the bay, found flung against the rocky shore later that evening, all happening while I was away at an outdoor retail expo in Atlanta—I’m an editor-at-large for a decent sporting magazine—I’d predictably suffered some pretty bad dreams involving water. Typically concerning my drowning, Corrina nowhere to be seen. In my experience, dreams are largely selfish, or at the very least over-concerned with the self. But these dreams were extremely unpleasant, what with all the water. However, I’ve always, since childhood, been prone to good dreams. And these were the dreams about which I’d talked tonight.

In the recurring one I spoke of, I was an old-timey radio DJ whose sidekick was an otter who lived in a big bucket of water perched atop the seat beside me, but the otter didn’t talk like I’d wished it would, and therefore I ran the show. Into the studio’s lone microphone I intoned cartoonish whoops, zings, zaps, and other lively sounds. I even utilized an airhorn. At the end of the day, this is what emerged from my darkest recesses.

“Sounds like your heaven,” Rigo said. “But Amy, we’ve still got to hear about this   séance.”

“Not into it,” Amy said. “I’ve lost interest in my own dream. I’d really just rather not remember any of them. Even the good ones. You just wake up thinking, You can’t be serious. It can completely fuck up your day.”

“I have an idea,” Deena said. “Looks like we’re sitting at a séance now.”

“Deena really has a corner on séances,” Lyanna said.

It was true. Deena was the one in school who’d told us absolutely everything about our astrological situations and all the messages sent down upon us from stars and planets. When we’d get together at her place, she’d always whip out the Tarot deck after a certain amount of drinks. Deena sitting here in her long, purple silk scarf and fingernails painted black. She’d taught community ed classes on the paranormal at Santa Fe College. Even dabbled in ghost-hunting, whatever that means. If anyone here knew anything about séances, it was Deena.

“Might as well have fun,” Deena said.

“God, please, no,” Amy said.

“Debbie Downer,” Lyanna said.

“Go easy,” Rigo said.

“I wish you’d all quit,” I said, which gave everyone a start. I’d just needed some air, but you couldn’t really get any now.

All the same I went out onto the screened back deck and the plunging, screaming rain sifted itself into an irritating mist through the fine mesh wire. But still, it was pretty all right here, just taking a beat. The back door clapped and Lyanna stood next to me with one arm hugging herself and the other fishing a cigarette out of her purse. 

She lit up, and I told her, “Right now’s when it’s really, really hard for me not to do that anymore.”

“Fifty percent of why we smoke,” she said, “is getting away from people at parties.”

“I wouldn’t call this a party.”

“Well, we’re missing two people.”

“Was this weird of me?” I said. 

Looking out beyond my backyard was like staring at a broken TV screen with the lights turned off in my eyeballs. I took a single drag off her cigarette. First taste I’d tasted in years.

“Did it make you feel less weird when I came out here too?”

“I’ll have just one more,” I said, and inhaled deeply as the tall palms swung around out there like rubber trees. And then nothing beyond that but the curtain of screaming rain. 

The worst thing about a hurricane isn’t the damage caused or the death toll. It’s that it robs you of the sensations achieved via the common storm. The dramatic percussion of thunder and incandescent wink of lightning like a flash photo benediction. Now I shared these thoughts with Lyanna, and she just shook her head in a way that told me I hadn’t changed since the day she’d met me. She stubbed her cigarette out in the parched soil of a potted succulent. I followed her inside. There was the thing with her and Daniel. But there was also the one night with me. And I couldn’t stop thinking about that as we sat back down at the table with everybody, Deena assembling more candles for the séance.

“I found these damn candles,” Deena said. “But you should really organize your shit.”

♤

I’d had all sorts of dying things in my refrigerator. A crisper drawer museum of the wilted. I told Deena I thought I had some sage. Because didn’t you burn sage before something like a séance?

“Sage is really no good, hon,” Deena said.

She then continued to allege with high vehemence the farce that was sage regarding the cleansing of spaces. Of purification preceding rites. She’d expressed a staunch advocacy for cedar wood in these situations yet had brought none, unsurprisingly. Not even Deena could’ve predicted tonight.

Father Rojas, free-spirited priest at my and Corrina’s church, had given me some wonderfully fragrant palo santo after her passing, but I’d burned it all up as a bathroom freshener. 

And I’ve since stopped going to church. Since stopped returning Rojas’s calls.

Deena swept her black-painted fingertips, drawing the sign of the cross in airy pantomime over different parts of the house—most notably the lone window in the space adjacent to ours: the kitchen, the above-the-sink-window. In front of this window, a stained glass peacock dangled from a hook, its technicolor plumage crystallized by the falling rain. One of the things of hers I’d kept.

“First off,” Deena said, “I want you all to know that I, like, get it.” 

Her glare oscillated between Amy and me. 

“Like I said, we can just have fun here, if we want to. It’s best anyway not to call on anybody specific, especially when something’s fresh, okay?”

Mine was the fresher. Daniel passed two years ago, likewise in a violent accident. Daniel had had trouble with alcohol and horseshoed his truck and therefore himself and his entire life around a light pole off Four Forty-One. He’d been bendering at a painter friend’s place in Micanopy one weekend when he and Amy were on the outs. For the third time, they’d broken their engagement. Presently I did not believe in contacting those of the other realm, or at least I’d convinced myself as much in this moment. Yet I’d hoped that if anyone’s spirit did emerge it would be Corrina’s. Not because I wanted that to happen, but because I didn’t wish for anymore mounting sadness on Amy. Sure, Corrina and I’d been married. Sure, Corrina died six months ago––to Daniel’s two years. Mine was the fresher. But Amy’d been living with it longer, and certain things have to count for something.

♤

“To our ancestors,” Rigo said, “we ask that you join us here tonight and we call upon you as allies, friends, neighbors, lovers—”

“Okay, good job Rigo,” Deena said.

“That felt so cool,” Rigo said.

“The apparatus is glowing.”

The whiskey bottle, two-thirds drank now, stood amid a cluster of free-standing candles and the blue-glowing ones in wine glasses. It created an effect. Deena had done a pretty damn good job.

“I feel like we should’ve used the empty bottle,” Amy said, “as the apparatus.”

“Ultimately,” Deena said, “they’ll choose.”

The candlelight swelled, the poker table ignited with its power. Outside, the wind careened wildly and the house lights flashed on and off like the flare of lightning, during which time the record must’ve turned an inch or so—and you could hear it, a single second of sitar drone. Side Two of Revolver.

But now the candlelight dimmed again and all was very dark, and maybe this was some gross gaucherie of mediumship but I’d poured myself a drink from our apparatus of divination. Everyone else passed it around too, Deena’s eyes shut, calling out, “Can you give us a signal? Can you give us a signal? Do you want us to know who you are? If you’d like for us to know who you are, give us a signal.”

Rigo, with great cheerfulness in his heart, cried out, “Make the power go on and off again.” 

“Seems like a lot to ask,” Lyanna said. “Maybe just blow out a candle?”

“You’re all jumping ahead,” Deena told us.

I’d been distracted, ever since Deena had blessed that window above the sink. Our singular vantage of the outer chaos, the crazed rain, the baying wind which seemed to coil about the house and writhe monstrously.

Again the stained glass peacock turned, its dazzling feathers glimmering by this almost sculpture-like mass of candles. Again the power returned. Music filling the room and much louder this time than the weather, the backwards guitar licks and distressed seagull-sounds of “Tomorrow Never Knows,” and now the scratch of the record ceasing its turning. Dark again.

“There’s someone here,” Lyanna said, almost weeping. “A presence.”

“You’re jumping ahead,” Deena warned her.

“Well it isn’t anyone in here,” I said, tilting the bottle. I’d needed ice, and I got up and opened the freezer and fetched a tray. “It’s starting to melt.” I sat back down and drank it neat.

“Like, one fucking time,” Amy said.

“Three,” Lyanna said.

“Shut up.”

“All of you,” Deena said. “All of you need to shut up.” 

Deena, her eyes hard-shut and wrinkled, formed her hands into twin pistol-shapes and pressed her pointers into her temples, summoning some distant memory.

The power fluttered on and off, strobelike. Dark again.

“I think it’s him,” Lyanna said.

“Not good,” Rigo said. “Not good.”

Amy got up and shouted, “You crazy fucking bitch.”

The window above the sink exploded. A mammoth, almost unbelievable crashing, and the wind sucking itself inside and peeling away the magnetized contents off the face of my refrigerator: photos of my nieces and nephews, wedding invitations, take-out menus. I raced to the pantry and tore away a large, orange trash bag, one with a jack-o-lantern’s face like you’d use storing leaves in autumn. Not necessary here in north Florida, but the Dream Disc Jockey in me likes a trash bag with a face.

Moments later, Deena held the thing against the window frame, fighting against the screaming flurry, the piercing rain streaming in. I secured the bag with a staple gun. Then we fastened three, four more trash bags. I was reminded of a less fortunate time in my life, much younger than I am now, in which I’d had no choice but to utilize this method on a car—but with duct tape. Same smiling bag. Now the jack-o-lantern’s face rippled and slapped horribly, undulating as though it were laughing at us. Throughout this frenzied undertaking I’d many times kicked at some strange obstruction, some figure getting in my way: on the kitchen floor lay an incredibly tiny, petrified man with a pointy beard, a pointy hat.

After I’d had a chance to stand idly, to breathe, to think—

My neighbors, the O’Learys, a friendly yet reclusive couple in their seventies, had over many decades decorated their yard with such an ensemble of lawn ornaments it produced an absurd, almost carnival-like affect. Tonight the hurricane had raised a garden gnome heavenward, hurled it through my kitchen window.

♤

I would’ve barely noticed the power coming back on if it hadn’t been for The Beatles, and in what I’d perceived was in good taste I hurried into the den and raised the needle and turned the whole system off. Lyanna was out smoking again. Deena had pulled an Irish exit. I’d give her a call and make sure she got home all right. I started sweeping big daggers of glass off the kitchen floor and, under the spell of some brief whimsy that’s so precious and holy to me, I thought: what a perfect setting for a séance, mid-hurricane. The power flaring on again, off again, the terror of rain and the wind’s supernatural hymn—it’s like hosting your own little haunted attraction. Amy was sitting at the poker table by Rigo. She’d been crying. She held Rigo’s hand. She’d been holding his hand for how long I don’t know.

Lyanna came inside and we all just sat for a time in silence. Amy started blowing out all the candles.

“That was stupid,” Lyanna said. “Stupid of Deena.”

“You all know the drill,” I said. “No driving, please.” 

The wall clock said one AM. Everyone knew where to find a place to sleep here, and it had occurred to me that this might be the last time they do. More and more as each year passes I think, This could be the last time.

I laid a quilt over the couch for myself and turned on the stereo system. Some quiet listening to lull me to sleep. As the other three started upstairs, Lyanna, to whom I’d lent my bed, trailed behind and turned and gave me a sort of look, and I thought: Okay. Maybe. Even the meanest among us needs somebody to lay with.

♤

Deena had mentioned something earlier about following a séance with corporeal activity, to shake it all out with motion, what with all that sitting still and engrossing one’s self with reaching at what’s beyond. But before I’d made any kind of decision I needed to go back outside for some of that sweet hurricane air on the screened back deck, whereupon I pinched Lyanna’s cigarette butt out of the succulent soil and lit up, gazing upon my backyard all harried by the monster of weather. The soaking grass and giant ferns and flowers thrashing about, a long row of tall palm trees bent like archers’ bows, and the mammoth live oaks squatting upon the horizon, trembling under the cover of pitiless night. Corrina’s stained glass peacock lay out here in the grass, darkly iridescent, and I thought I might, someday soon when the sky clears, stand it upright in some way or another, and the garden gnome who’d so grandly entered my life could join the peacock, and I’d continue assembling others in my backyard. A pumpkin face, a baby baptizing a priest, a talking otter. In competition, or perhaps kinship, with my neighbors across the way.

 ♤

August 21, 2025