PARTY LINE

Whenever someone says hello, I pause before I say hello back. They may be speaking on their phone, or perhaps to a dead relative in the room. Then there is always the possibility that they are not speaking at all  - that the dead relative is saying hello on her heaven phone, and not to the hello-speaking gentleman behind me in his freshly-pressed gabardines who passed away so many years ago - but to a friend who died earlier still, before the invention of the telephone, who is pleased as punch to receive a telephone call as a gift from the future telephone-toting dead, although she still doesn’t understand how this visit is any better than sitting down for a chat with a cup of coffee and a piece of pie, which is to say, someone is saying hello, because there it is, hello - but it appears that no one is here in the room saying this, at least to me, and so again, I pause.

                                                      from THE PINKY EMBRACE (2015)