Before the Flame Goes Out

“It was so terribly cold. Snow was falling, and it was almost dark.”

That is how they remember the night.

That is how I remember being born.

I am a match.

Not a metaphor. Not a symbol. A match—one small sliver of wood, tipped with sulfur and hope, tucked inside a thin paper box that smelled of glue and pine sap. I was never meant to last. That is the truth of my kind. We are made for endings, for brief brilliance, for becoming nothing but smoke and memory.

But no one ever asks what it feels like to burn.

I lay with my sisters in the box, pressed close for warmth that did not exist. We whispered to one another in the language of dry wood and waiting. We counted footsteps through cardboard walls. We learned the rhythm of the city through vibration alone—the clatter of carts, the hollow echo of boots, the distant laughter that always seemed to belong to someone else.

When the box finally opened, it was with trembling fingers.

She was smaller than the stories say. Children always are. Her hands were red and cracked, knuckles swollen like bruised apples. Snow clung to her sleeves and melted into the thin cloth of her dress, turning it heavy and dark. Her breath came in short white clouds that vanished too quickly, as if even the air refused to stay with her.

She looked at us like we were treasure.

“Just one,” she whispered. “Just one.”

Her voice shook, not from fear, but from cold so deep it had become part of her bones.

I wanted to speak then. I tried to tell her to save us, that we were not worth the cost. But matches do not get to choose their moments. We exist at the mercy of friction.

She struck me against the wall.

Pain is not the right word for what followed. Pain implies injury, and I was made for this. It was more like awakening—sudden, total, impossible to reverse. Heat raced through my grain, faster than thought. My head flared bright, a small, violent star born between brick and breath.

Light exploded.

And in that light, I saw her.

Not the girl she was, but the girl she carried inside her—the one who remembered warmth. The flame I became reached into her eyes and pulled something forward. The street dissolved. Snow paused mid-fall, caught in an amber glow.

She smiled.

It was the first smile I had seen on her face, and it nearly undid me.

In my fire, she saw a stove—black iron, solid, glowing red at the seams. She stretched her hands toward it, sighing as if warmth were already kissing her skin. Her shoulders relaxed. For a heartbeat, she was not cold.

I burned faster, greedier, desperate to give her more.

Matches are not supposed to feel urgency, but I did. I felt the way time pressed against me, how every second of light cost me inches of existence. My body curled, blackened, shrinking into itself. Smoke rose like a question with no answer.

When I guttered out, the vision vanished.

The stove winked away. The smile fell.

Cold rushed back in, crueler for having been denied.

She struck another.

Not me—I was already gone, reduced to a fragile spine of charcoal—but my sister, whose flame flared green at the edge before settling into gold. This time, the light revealed a table laden with food. Goose fat glistened. Apples shone. Steam curled up like welcoming hands.

Her stomach growled. I felt it even as ash.

She laughed softly, a sound that startled her. She covered her mouth, as if afraid laughter might cost something she couldn’t afford.

“I remember this,” she said to no one.

She always talked to no one.

The flame trembled in the wind, fighting. I wanted to reach out to shield it, but I was already becoming less than smoke. The match bent, burned through, collapsed.

Darkness swallowed the feast.

She did not cry. Not yet.

She struck another.

And another.

Each flame was a door she stepped through: a Christmas tree blazing with candles like a constellation pulled down to earth; a room filled with light and singing and the sound of belonging; her grandmother’s arms, wide and warm and certain.

Ah. That one.

That was the cruelest vision of all.

When my youngest sister burned, the light did not show a thing—it became her grandmother. Solid. Real. Close enough that the girl reached out, fingers shaking, desperate not to lose her again.

“Stay,” she begged. “Please.”

Matches cannot stay. Fire is the briefest promise in the world.

But something strange happened.

The girl did not let the flame die.

She struck another match and held it close to the first, feeding light with light, heat with heat. For a moment—just a moment—the night pushed back. Snow melted around her boots. Shadows retreated.

We burned together, my sisters and I, a small rebellion against the dark.

And in that circle of flame, I understood something no match is meant to understand.

We were not her hope.

We were her goodbye.

The cold had already claimed her fingers, her toes, her breath. What we gave her was not survival, but passage. We were the bridge between what hurt and what did not anymore.

Her grandmother knelt before her now—not a vision, but something gentler, something that did not flicker at the edges.

“Come,” she said.

The girl smiled again, wider this time, unafraid. She leaned forward, into warmth that did not burn.

And then—

Silence.

Morning came like a betrayal.

The city woke. Doors opened. People gasped. They clucked their tongues and shook their heads and said words like tragic and poor thing and if only. They noticed the burnt matches scattered in the snow, blackened and broken.

They did not notice us.

That is the final indignity of fire—we illuminate everything except ourselves.

They carried her away. They swept the street. The snow fell fresh and clean, as if trying to forget.

But we did not forget.

Ash remembers.

I linger still in the places where cold bites hardest. In the space between spark and dark. In every small flame struck by trembling hands.

When you light a match and feel that sudden bloom of warmth, when you watch it burn down faster than you expect, know this:

Fire knows why it is born.

And it burns anyway.