Strength of a Tealight

This is a short experimental fiction piece I wrote a few years ago that I found buried in my computer files and decided to share.

You think the tealight candles are defective.

Can candles be defective?

These ones must be. Despite the fact they’ve hardly been used, they have the smallest flames. The faintest bulbs of light. As if there is hardly any wax or wick left. But there’s plenty. You find yourself expecting the flame to die and surprised every few seconds when it doesn’t.

You expect yourself to cease to exist, to dissolve in madness, and are surprised every day when you don’t.

The tealight candles are one of the few comforts in the small, cramped apartment, surrounded by the noises of children on the flanking walls like the wails of ghosts trapped between one world and the next. The tealights are companions, glimmers of hope in a dark world. They remind you of the candles on the Advent wreath in front of the altar, except those candles were taller, with steadier flames. You stared at the pink one last week at Mass, trying to imagine yourself as the flame, and the Holy Spirit as the wick, grounding you, keeping you alight.

But really, maybe you’re the flame of one of these tealights. Barely holding on, a tiny bulbous thing struggling for oxygen, hardly able to light up the circumference around you. Trapped in the darkness.

A loud series of clicks and a screech as the ancient door opens behind you. Steps resound in the short hall. You don’t take your eyes off the tealights, off the only source of light here.

“How’s it going?” She—you—sits down next to you. Your constant companion, your familiar friend. You could take it if it were an enemy, but not this. Someone you trusted.

You don’t respond. The tiny round flames continue to sway, barely clinging to the wick.

#

It was two years ago that you sat in a bar together, one of those questionable, tacky places that attracted more students than locals. You ordered a gin-based drink, of course, while she got something colorful. She always had the brighter personality anyway. You sat at the bar, charmed the slimy bartender, watched young people wrapped in tight leather and studded boots file in and out of the warm, sweat-reeking place. You talked, you laughed. You wanted to seem cool to her, to you.

You’re pretty sure this is the night you went the wrong way.

#

It seems like you always met in dark places. Shadowy bars with backlit shelves stacked with bottles. Musty, cavernous restaurants in former wine cellars or stables. Narrow streets late at night, echoing with the laughter of drunken students.

Your conversations were dark too.

Venom spilling over innocent lives.

Poison seeping into your heart.

Hatred and mistrust walking hand-in-hand.

#

You didn’t know this at the time—how could you?—but there is a well deep inside you that became blocked with stones and dirt. The pile was so high it was nearly impossible to reach the space where the well existed. Your constant companion, your familiar friend, continued to pile the stones, one drink at a time, one ranting conversation at a time, one bad decision at a time.

As you stare at those tiny, defective tealights two years later, the faint glimmer of a flame burns away part of the blockage so you can reach the space again. Ah, there is the well. You must uncover it now. It’s going to take a lot of work. It will be tiring, and painful.

It takes months. You dig out one large stone at a time. Most of them you toss to the side, but once you get low enough in the space, you start throwing some at the wall across from you. They break with satisfying cracks. You take a shovel and dig the dirt out. Each conversation. Each person. Each twisted thought, twisted path.

There is only a thin layer over the well now, and you realize it is not so much a well as a fair-sized hole in the ground. You turn the shovel over, hold it upright, and slam the end into the remaining layer of dirt and rock. It shatters, cracks, dissolves inward.

You gasp, the first clean breath of air after drowning.

Down, down, down, the muck falls until it lands in a lake deep below. The lake is tranquil, the waters a glowing electric blue. You expect the dirt and rocks to cause an enormous splash, but they sink into the waters with hardly any disturbance. The lake absorbs them, calmly removes them from your sight.

You breathe deeply, staring down into it. Your chest swells, your heart expands. You feel freedom, peace for the first time in so long.

You sit back in the thin grass surrounding the hole and tip your head up. A canopy of stars hangs suspended above, each one no more than a faint glimmer of a defective tealight. Together, they light up the whole space.

“How’s it going?” She—you—asks again.

You still don’t respond. You don’t need words or strength to prove yourself.

You are enough.

Join the heist

Buy me a coffee