Candle On The Water

The flame flickered and I had to act.

I could spy the candle from over my clenched knuckles that grasped my down comforter with the grip of a lion tamer among several large, agitated cats. Ma had propped the full mirror that stood stoically across the room to show me the view of the lighthouse out and beyond my room’s window. The pale white light that repetitiously lit my room up like an inner city movie premiere, did not trouble me. The beams that splashed through the pane and dwarfed the luminescence of the candle sitting on the ledge was not out right noteworthy in the least. It was the way the flame pointed away from my bed at a right angle.

The tip of the dollop of fire was either repelled by me or being sucked into the corner of the room. Despite the candle and lighthouse invading our home from the nearby rocks, the corner remained negative.

It was her again.

Somehow and somewhere she was calling out to the ocean with a broken heart.

I mean, it must be broken.

No one lingers with anything that long unless it hurts.

“The tongue returns to the jagged tooth,” Ma was known to say.

This jagged toothed room, I came to believe, was composed of the crescent moonlight and the tide all the way in. The serenity of violent waves and splashing white water, under this particular kind of incomplete heavenly body, influenced the burning flame to jut out away from my bed. But it was the flickering that broke my rigid grip on the covers.

Her wailing and sobbing echoed up from the crashing water as though she stood beside my bed belting them out today.

But I knew better.

She was not beside my bed.

She was in the corner, drawing from that simple candle.

If I ease to the far corner of my bed I can make out her figure in the corner when the light element of the lighthouse passes over our house. It seems fitting that the mirror display her in that pale, moving light, as most of the ethereal is so subtle most folks just refer to it as invisible.

There is a threshold adults come to when they can bare no more and just burst.

The flicker of the candle is her limit.

So, like I said, I had to act.

The wherever and however she is here, is close.

Should she revive or recreate the bursting I would not consider myself immune to the fallout.

Risking attention to my position, I slip between the side of my mattress and the wall like a cowboy wounded and unable to free himself from his horse. My grip betrays me and my head and shoulder fall below the tall bed revealing a slanted view of the floor of my room. In a snap the candle light extinguishes either from fear or total ingestion, but creating total darkness that is in unison with the small New England cove. The echoes of her despair fill and enter the room with the wrath of a lawn mower trapped in a closet. I can feel the arteries in my neck pound in desperation, but for my own survival I stay still and don’t struggle.

Lighthouses were the proverbial candles on the water to sailors who had lost their way.

The light that splashes into my room is a beacon of grief.

Her hair descends from the other side of the bed frame like a slowly closing garage door.

I didn’t act quick enough.