Flame

By Andrew Birden

A candle was in an open window, burning on a warm summer evening. An elderly woman slept in the bed beside the window.

Her son had struck the match to light the first candle on the day he turned 18, the day he signed up. The candle was the promise to herself that one day her oldest child would come home from the war. The sleeping woman, over the years, kept the flame alive, a mission she set for herself to maintain this flame.

A few weeks after he deployed to the Pacific, the call came from the military, the call she could never quite remember, the call with news she had feared to hear. Afterwards, she came back to her room where she kept the candle, and she saw the flame was still burning, a defiant light that would stand against the shadow of change that hung over the family. She kept her promise alive, maintaining the flame each day across time. 

Over the years, as the flame would consume a candle, she would light the next candle from the old one, passing the original flame her son had set from wick to wick. It was something her priest would have called a practice.

And then one day the flame awoke. 

It was love that did it, for the flame loved watching the neighborhood from its upstairs window in the grandmother's room. It loved spending time with the woman and being the thing that formed her shadow on the walls that supported mounted photographs and secured religious symbols. Because it was a flame, it loved shining its light and burning bright. The molecules of carbon and oxygen, emerging from the twisted cloth string and wax, burned and combined and became complex thoughts in the traces of smoke, deep meaning in the bright colors surrounding the heat, and memory running like melted wax. The flame enjoyed being alive, and it watched the family, it loved the family and it loved the aging mother. 

And somehow she sensed that love. The fire was weightless, like her son’s love when he was a child, and something of the joyful energy in the flame on September mornings reminded her of him playing in the yard, and the quiet flickers seemed to cast shadows of him reading books on the sofa and turning pages so quick for a young reader.

And sometimes the flame simply sat, still as an eastern statue of the Buddha and as quiet as only a candle flame can be quiet. That is how it burned that final night, meditating on the window sill.

On that warm summer night, a breeze became a wind, and then it started gusting in different directions. It came through the window, and the flame jerked and flickered. The woman continued to sleep, dreaming of her garden and the things she’d done that day.

When the wind grew in strength, the candle flame hid behind the wick In response, and the thin protection allowed it to burn uninterrupted.

Then it started to mist, and the moistness was so light it could drift into the window, refreshing at first, a shivery experience for the candle. The grandmother continued sleeping, merely clutching the blanket, a gift from her daughter-in-law crafted from scraps of old clothes - her mother’s shawl, parts of her daughter’s dresses, cuffs and swatches of a pant leg from her grandson, and pieces of her dead husband’s jacket that he’d worn in the fall and which still smelled like him on occasion. 

But then it started to rain, and the wind grew stronger. The curtains were tugging at the cord that kept the fabric secure. The flame danced around the wick, now fearful of the wind and the large drops of water, sometimes ducking beneath the crater’s edge of melted wax to avoid a sharp jet of air or a flung mass of water. 

The curtain came loose from its binding and began swinging closer to the flame. Why wouldn't the old woman awake? A Maine blow will pass like a child’s tantrum, quick and strong, but if the curtain caught fire, the flame knew it could destroy the home, the old woman, and her daughter and the grandchildren living there.

Rather than allow itself to be the agent of the old woman's destruction, the flame dove into the pool of melted wax surrounding the wick, and snuffed itself out. 

The woman woke, and knew from the way the shadows fell that the flame had gone out.

And when the old woman saw the unlit candle, she knew a part of her life had also left. Something about the cold empty wick curled and dipped into the scorched wax told her that the death of the flame meant her family was safe. Something about the morning caused her to look at the framed picture of her son in his pilot’s suit, standing large in front of his plane that looked so small behind him. 

Then she took out a second match, and lit the candle once more. She knotted the rope to secure the curtain, and she prayed that people could be like flames, the same fire burning on different candles that merely lit the way for those who are still asleep.