The Little Match-Dweller

It was so terribly cold. Snow was falling, and it was almost dark. This would not have been trouble, had the flower pot not been knocked from the sill.

The culprit, a child, gazed regretfully at their blunder, then flung out the food trimmings into the street. They departed from view with a fwump from the window. A few moments later, a scowling old cricket emerged from the dirt that lay scattered in the snow. He stared with displeasure at the broken shards of clay.

Mr. Cricket, you see, had been nestled in that pot, where he intended to sleep until the planting of the daisies. This heralded the new year’s first days of spring. Exposed, however, in a cold as piercing as an earwig’s pincers, he would not even make it to the new year’s first morning. To make matters worse, his stomach roused to life with a cavernous grumble, as always when he woke from hibernation. This was usually surrounded by fresh, budding foliage. Not ice and snow and cold, cold, cold.

“Quiet, you!” the miserable cricket demanded of his stomach. “Does it look like spring? I need a new shelter…” His stomach growled again, low and angry as the wind. “Though a bite to eat would be nice,” he conceded.

Mr. Cricket spotted, then, the trimmings laid out in the snow. Left behind, he mused, by the same clumsy creature that had caused this predicament! Still, he would make what he could of misfortune.

He scarcely took three steps toward the food when a frenzied jumble of fur beat him to it. As quick as the chirp from his throat, the scraps were all gone, the rabbit and squirrels leaving nothing for Mr. Cricket.

“They didn't spare a crumb!” he said. He felt as bitter as the winter chill, which, to his surprise, brought a sudden flush of warmth.

Mr. Cricket gazed up at the window, which he noticed was crooked and slightly ajar. And so, with little else to do, he hopped on the sill and squeezed through the gap.

The family who lived here was well-to-do and the whole house was very made up. The Christmas tree was tremendous, but what impressed him most was the squat iron stove in the center of the kitchen, where all of the warmth seemed to emanate from. With a low, relaxed sigh, he settled underneath it, as snug as a bug ever was. Then the woman arrived to take the goose out of the oven. She opened the door, and the heat that poured out nearly roasted him as well! Just short of being seasoned and stuffed, he fled into the dining room, where a splendid buffet was laid out on the table.

Mr. Cricket could hardly believe it. There were potatoes, parsnips, puddings and pies. It was almost too much for a cricket to choose from! But as he, like most insects, loved sweets most of all, he hopped up next to the mince pies first, which were perfectly portioned for an insect his size. He could already taste the spiced fruit on his tongue. But when he reached for a pie with the cutout of a star, a small pair of fingers took hold of it first. The child looked astonished, though not displeased, to see Mr. Cricket at the table with them.

“Look!” they cried. “A little cricket has joined us for dinner!”

“Oh, no,” said the father. “No bugs on the table.”

He shooed Mr. Cricket, who had hardly touched the floor when the cat set upon him. It would’ve gotten him, too, had he not reached the couch in the Saint Nick of time, where the fat thing got stuck underneath it. It proceeded to yowl and howl and bawl, and Mr. Cricket had hopped up into the tree by the time the woman got it unstuck.

She cradled the growling thing. “Now how did you get caught under there? I suppose it is dark. I’ll go and light the candles.”

She set the cat down, who prowled away and seemed to have forgotten Mr. Cricket in its anger. He sighed and relaxed, laying down amongst the ornaments. His eyes drifted close. Unbeknownst to him, of all the candles that were strung throughout the Christmas tree, the oblivious woman had decided to start with the one that was right underneath him. He came to as the country’s first crick-on-a-spit. With a holler, he leapt from the tree to the window, where he cursed the whole house as a vision of Hell. Then he set out to make his own home.

Mr. Cricket soon found the perfect building supplies. In a corner formed by two houses, one of which jutted out further on the street, he came upon a pile of matchsticks. They looked like they’d all been used up at once, then discarded. A recent hollow in the snow suggested someone had been laying there. A child, judging by the hollow’s small size, who had then been carried off, as evidenced by the commotion of footprints. The child’s family, Mr. Cricket assumed. He hoped they’d teach them better than to waste a perfectly good set of matchsticks.

“Such wasteful creatures,” he muttered to himself. “With these matchsticks, I shall build myself a house.” As soon as he said it, the wind’s chill pierced him like a knife, and he quickly got to work.

Mr. Cricket tried gathering the matches into his arms, but there were too many to carry at once, and he certainly would not survive two trips there and back. Then he noticed the matchbox, which the wind had blown a few yards away.

“That is just what I need!” he said gladly.

He went to grab it, but found it too heavy to move, despite being empty of its advertised contents. He peeked inside, then scrambled back as a shivering beetle peered out.

“You’ll die out there in that cold,” said Mr. Beetle. “Come inside. There is plenty of room!”

Mr. Cricket, after everything he’d been through, did not care for the thought of sharing.

“Why would I huddle in that worthless little box when I can build myself a house?”

“You are building a house?” said Mr. Beetle with hope. “Are others invited to shelter there?”

Mr. Cricket rolled his eyes. “Oh, sure,” he said. “Everyone’s invited. How about you go ahead and tell the whole neighborhood?”

To Mr. Cricket’s vast alarm, he lunged from the matchbox to shake his hands. All four of them!

“I will,” cried Mr. Beetle, “Bless you, Mr. Cricket. I will!”

He flew off on a pair of shiny wings. Mr. Cricket looked at his hands. No wonder beetles like him were called chafers! He brushed them off, along with the faintest notion of guilt. Why should he feel owed to help others, after all the help others had been to him? Bearing this logic like a necessary burden, he plodded through the snow with the box full of matchsticks weighing heavy on his back. A short while later, he had built himself a neat little house on the window sill, for the heat from the house warmed it nicely. It also came with a view.

Shielded behind a thick pane of glass, the house’s inner workings seemed less hellish than before. With the whole family snuggled up on the couch, it even seemed nice. Something, Mr. Cricket supposed, that some poor souls only dreamed of. Not he himself, however. He was perfectly fine as he was. With shelter and warmth, he would survive this harsh winter. He was still hungry. But he would survive.

And yet, as he watched the small family, so cozy and warm and safe with one another, he began to feel the strangest ache, unlike any he had ever known: it did not growl like his stomach, nor did it bite like the cold. It carried with it no threats or demands, and yet it stirred in him a yearning. What for, he could not place. But he thought of Mr. Beetle, then, and all the silly insects who would gather in hopes of sharing his house. How foolish they were, to believe that he would share anything with them. He did not know them, after all. They had no importance whatsoever to him. And so, how strange it was, that when he pictured them out in the cold, he shivered. That when he thought of them desperate, his own heart churned.

“To heck with it,” he said, rather unheroically.

Mr. Cricket dreaded the thought of leaving the warmth, but he did so anyway. And how he regretted it. The cold felt so much worse than before!

The snow ran deeper, the wind blew stronger, and as he drew nearer to where he found those spent matchsticks, he knew for certain he was going to die. Perhaps he would have felt resentful at the ordeal, if he had not gone utterly numb. He collapsed in the snow without ceremony. He saw no dreams nor visions. He merely curled up and succumbed to the darkness. It happened that dying was not much different than drifting off in hibernation, except in one way. When Mr. Cricket awoke this time, he was not alone, but surrounded by faces.

He thought heaven would be more glorious than a simple matchstick house. Perhaps he was hopping a little too high, to assume that he had ended up there and not elsewhere. But the insects all cheered to see him awake, and they helped him to his feet, and they fed him mince pie that some kind soul had left on the sill. He wondered aloud how they had managed to survive, and they explained how his footsteps had showed them the way, and how grateful they were that he was sharing his home. This surprised Mr. Cricket, for it had not occurred to him to call this little match house a home. Among these good souls, however, the word did not seem so terribly amiss as they entered the new year’s first morning together.