Desire

For an hour, Tom had been given the chance to bring his dead father back into the world of the living.
A whisper of snow touched the cold window.
The enormous house creaked from a gust of wind that seemed to come from nowhere.
“What?” I asked.
“I didn’t say anything.” Behind my back, by the fireplace, Charlie Simmons calmly shook popcorn in a large metal bowl.
“Not a word.”
“Damn it, Charlie, I heard…”
Stunned, I watched the falling snow cover distant streets and empty fields. A perfect night for pale ghosts who peek through windows and wander around the house.
“You imagined it,” Charlie said.
“Imagined it?” I thought. “Can nature itself speak? Does the language of night, time, snow exist? What is happening between the mist out there and my soul, which is here?”
For somewhere in the darkness, it seemed, unnoticed—unlit by the kindly light of neither the moon nor a streetlamp—there settled on the ground an entire civilization of pigeons…