The Ubiquity of Candles
“…[A] dimly burning wick he will not quench…”
-Isaiah 42:3 NRSV
For a long night of years, she’d thought candles
had given light a bad name. They were always
trembling and flickering and being snuffed out,
their wicks smoldering. Everyone had so many
because they didn’t last long even if
they stayed lit. The deep-down truth
was that most days she felt like a candle—
fragile. Candles, the very ubiquity of them,
reminded her that her light was too frail to merit
mentioning. Her night of years was full
of such thoughts until the hurricane forced
her to pull all-but-forgotten candles out
of bottom drawers. The storm had snapped
the strong-not-fragile light poles, yet here
the candles gleamed when the dark had otherwise
gone untouched. Their dim flames kindled
questions in her mind: What if blown-out candles
didn’t truly go dark? What if their light lingered
at wavelengths beyond her perception? What if
the still-burning light from every candleflame
that had ever quivered would one day re-emerge
into the visible spectrum, but stronger and brighter,
like starlight drawn near? The flames danced
and glimmered until they became tongues of fire
fallen on her and she the wick blazing blue.
A moment later she was herself again, but stronger
and brighter, somehow. Some days
she would seem to smolder, to forget the long
night of years had ended. But the candles,
the very ubiquity of them, would remind her.
Holly Wells‘s fiction and poetry have appeared in The Magazine of History and Fiction, Sehnsucht: The C.S. Lewis Journal, The Windhover, and Sojourners, among others. She lives in Mississippi and has taught English at both the high school and community college levels.
Amethyst Review 