Candles

They were always talking. They almost never yelled but they always talked. They sat at the kitchen table and talked in such calm, precise tones that Mary could practically feel the ice in their meaning sliding unhindered across her face. She could taste the distance between them that grew every time they talked.

It would have been better, she thought, if they were shouting at each other. At least when they were loud there was fire, there was feeling, there was desire for change. This cold numbness that had suffused them was worse than any burning could have been. It made Mary gray and exhausted just living in the same house.

She couldn’t exactly pinpoint where it had started either. If she had been able to blame either one of them it might have been easier. Maybe she could have brought her own spark of anger and defiance to beat the cold back. But no, her parents had contracted this disease simultaneously for all that Mary’s astute eight years could tell her. Neither one of them was the culprit, but she could feel both of them hurting with the purity of empathy only small children and gods can understand.

Sometimes when the ache inside got too much to bear Mary would put on her stuffy purple jacket and boots to tromp outside into the fields of grass and hardy winter flowers that lay beside the house. More than a couple of hundred feet from home she couldn’t hear the talking anymore, and so the cold inside would begin to lose its grip on her. The cold outside helped too, the teeth of the wind on her face would draw out sparkling power and joy she always worried she’d forgotten before she went out to play with that howling friend.

When she lay down in the crackling frosted grass and breathed deep it felt like she was breathing in the whole universe. The sharp scents of the half-tamed wild spiraled through her up into the sky, and as she breathed out each of the countless stars would twinkle in appreciation.

Mary heard her classmates call them the sky’s lightbulbs, but she hated that idea. Lightbulbs were cold, and plastic, and impersonal. They lit up her school with an uncaring light that always seemed to pulse right behind her eyes when she forgot herself and let her thoughts trail over to them. A lightbulb didn’t care about the smell of crushed grass.

Mary liked to imagine instead that they were candles lit by all the people that came before her, letting her know that whatever now felt like, there was warmth and fire out there in the world, and she would manage to find it again. Tiny wavering balls of warmth and belief standing tall against the encroaching cold of the world in their very own stuffy purple jackets.

And just like that she knew what she had to do.

Mary jumped to her feet with a windmilling rush of energy and danced around in a great circle, laughing for the sheer simplicity of it. For when the stars themselves have seen fit to give you the answer to your problems, what else is there to do? She gave a wordless cry of delight, knowing that her friends would understand it for the thanks it was, and began dashing across the frosted night time field to the dusty old tool shed out behind the house.

It wasn’t easy for half numbed eight year old fingers to drag open the protesting shed door, and it’s cold metal seared into her when she touched it for too long, but Mary had a star’s purpose now, and she would not be deterred by such mortal concerns. Puffing, scrabbling, laughing for the pain and the feeling of it, she dragged the unhelpful thing all the way open.

The old shed had no windows, and so the stars and moonlight could not penetrate. It was dark inside, the dark of the underside of a child’s bed when the nightlight goes out, the dark of the bottom of a coal mine, the dark of a lightbulb when all its fake energy had been used up.   

Mary looked into the darkness and felt it clutch at her chest. It wasn’t that there was anything to be afraid of, it’s that there was nothing to be afraid of. And nothing is one of the most fearsome things in the whole of the universe, as any child or prophet will tell you.

And yet, Mary had a quest, and so like any good hero she ventured forth into that nothing. She did not do so bravely, for bravery is naught but lack of fear, any fool can be brave. Instead she was courageous, because her parents needed her, and she would accept nothing less from herself.

She had seen what she needed earlier today when she fetched water from the shed for her father, but lost in the nothing it seemed to evade her grasp. Hard unforgiving edges and coarse splintering wood poked and prodded at her as she dug through the piles, urging her to give up this madness, but she would not be deterred. Finally, hours later to the child, but perhaps minutes as the stars counted them, she emerged with a heavy pair of black iron cable cutters clutched in her scraped up triumphant fists.

Carefully, slowly, softly now, for though she did great good this night she somehow knew instinctually that she did not want to be caught, Mary slid around behind the house itself. Kneeling, with the approving light of her thousand-thousand friends looking on from above, she reached down with the powerful tool in her hands and with a grunt of effort and the strength her quest lent her, she sheared through the gray electrical cable behind her house.

Everything went dark then, but not the nothing-dark of the shed, in this dark her friends gleamed somehow even brighter above her. They guided her as she dropped the cutters and dashed wildly around to the front of the house, bursting in the door to the stunned silhouettes of her parents still sitting at the kitchen table.

“Mama, Papa,” Mary cried with an uncontainable smile, tears standing out at the edges of her cold-roughened cheeks. “The power’s out, we need to light candles!”