Guest Writer: Salvatore Buttaci

Séance

The call came at midnight. We were certain of the time because, almost in unison, we lifted up our bowed heads to the wooden bird stepping out the mechanical door of Mother’s clock, cuckooing the twelfth hour.

All around the dining room table six of us held hands in near darkness. Only a small incense candle burned, its flickering flame stretching human shadows to the high cathedral ceiling.

Just as the clock door slammed shut on the cuckoo, Madam Shasta’s timid, tremulous voice revved into a strong baritone.

“Oh, my God! It’s Robert!” said Mother, quite recently, Father’s widow. We recognized it too. We had heard it since childhood. Heard it till a month ago when he collapsed and died.

“Where are you?” We had heard Mother ask him that same question down through the years. “Robert, where are you?” and Father would toss out another Middle-East archaeological dig, and then as she berated him for his never being home, wept like a spoiled child, Father would hang up the phone. Now, through the Gypsy medium, Father was calling again, this time from beyond the grave.

Father had devoted his entire life to disproving Christ’s divinity. As an archaeologist he excavated his way through Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Cana, even to the shores of the Jordan and the Dead Sea. “When I find that preacher’s bones,” he had said more than occasionally, “I will wave them in the face of the whole world!”

Now the call had come. The moment of truth. Madam Shasta puffed up her ample chest, reminiscent of proud Father during one of his rantings, then exhaled a vociferous growl that caused all perspiring hands to shake loose of the séance circle. The connection, however, remained intact.

“I was wrong,” we heard Father say in between the snarls and howls and gruntings of the beasts now echoing in the room.

The candlelight illuminated Mother’s beaming face. “There is a Heaven!” she said, clasping her hands in seeming prayer.

Then the snarling beast spoke to Father in a human voice. “Move along. You had your say.”

“Robert! Robert!” Mother cried out, but like in days of old, Father did not respond.

Madam Shasta clutched her red-scarfed throat like a woman choking on fire. Her tongue lolled out the side of her open mouth, then coughed her lungs clear of brimstone ash. When at last she spoke, it was her own accented voice consoling Mother. “Oh, yes, I can assure you, Mrs. Carr, there is a Heaven.”

© Salvatore Buttaci 2010

Salvatore Buttaci is an obsessive-compulsive writer who writes everyday. His collection of 164 short-fiction stories, Flashing My Shorts, is available from http://allthingsthatmatterpress.com or from http://amzn.to/Flashing-My-Shorts

FLASHING MY SHORTS (by Salvatore Buttaci)
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