The Candle Snuffer

It had been three years since I last cried. It was over something stupid, something worthless. I tore a hole in my favorite sweater, I think, and something in me snapped.

I quickly mended both the sweater and my ragged soul. The black thread clashed hideously with the blue of the sweater, and it hurt to keep everything inside, but these things got easier with time. The sweater still served to warm my skin against the chilly ocean breeze.

“Wilder, got your lantern?”

I barely heard Cora’s voice over the crashing of the waves, but I always made sure to listen to what she had to say. Cora didn’t say much of anything unimportant.

I held up my own paper lantern, a twin to hers. I didn’t say much of anything at all, if I didn’t have to. She offered me a pen, and I scribbled well-wishes across the crinkled lantern before lighting the candle inside. They weren’t of much substance compared to the kind and sympathetic words scrawled on Cora’s lantern, but no one could match Cora for turn-of-phrase. I passed the match to Cora, who lit her lantern and passed the match on to the next person.

There was a congregation of people by the seaside. We all held lanterns, inky black platitudes scrawled across the delicate paper and clichéd expressions of sympathy rising and falling with the wind. A small canoe filled with a corpse and flowers from the shores was set alight. The lanterns were placed on the waves to follow the body to sea, though many were quickly quenched by the untameable waters.

“Lovely ceremony, isn’t it? I don’t mean to sound insensitive, but I do love funerals. The lanterns are so pretty.” This was Saye, who said lots of everything, most of which erred on the side of unimportant. “And the storm approaching is so big. You saw how those lanterns all got turned upside down. I hope they serve their purpose all the same. I hate storms.”

I had always thought storms were lovely. They weren’t afraid to be loud and to cry, like everyone on the island was. Even now, looking down the line of people stood by the shore, I saw a woman holding a hand over her child’s mouth to snuff its crying, whispering angry words to it. She brought out a handkerchief and soaked up the child’s tears before stuffing it back in her jacket pocket. No one else seemed to be crying, though most had foreheads wrinkled with grief.

I didn’t remember who it was that had died. Someone consistent to the town, surely, someone worthy of mourning, but I’d never been one for socializing beyond a select few people. The chief of these select few, Cora, did not speak, but grabbed my hand and led me away from the funeral. The shoreline wasn’t far from the great evergreen forest, and we soon lost ourselves in the tallest and loveliest of trees.

She pulled the hat she always wore, stitched up like my sweater, down over her ears. “I cried the other day,” she said, and I turned to look at her, shocked. “I know, I tried not to, but I couldn’t stop it. And something about it felt… right. I don’t know about all this, Wilder.”

As was often the case, I said nothing. I always tried to speak around Cora, but something about my thoughts was impossible to translate to words. The thoughts would swirl and spin and build up in my throat until I choked on them. Still, a panicked attempt to understand circled about my head and between my ears, running to the tips of my fingers.

Cora looked at my twitching fingers and continued, “The sea is lovely, and it’s made of tears, too.”

“It’s- it’s just… I don’t want…”

“To drown?” At my nod, she looked back up at the trees that crisscrossed the sky in whirls of green. “I suppose. I’ve heard it hurts. I- I’m sorry, I guess. Pretend I didn’t say anything.”

I nodded and quickly forced the thought from my mind. I didn’t want to drown, but more than that, I didn’t want to get Cora in trouble. She deserved a place where she could be free to feel what she wanted to. This just wasn’t that place.

“Let’s go… back,” I said, and we did.

***

I never quite understood why I got dirty looks when I smiled. My mother always slapped the back of my hand when I did, and my father bore his teeth like a hound. It wasn’t as if sunlight was something that drowned us out and wet our feet and tore apart our homes like the sea did. Still, I now worked to keep my mouth level as could be.

My eyes were always drooping, too. My mother called me Dozer and ran a soft hand through my hair when I drifted off, though she didn’t smile as she did so. “No one,” she told me, “can hurt anything in their sleep.” I didn’t think that was quite true, being plagued with horrific nightmares, but I didn’t argue. I wasn’t hurting anyone, I supposed, just myself. She never knew that the reason I slept so much in the day was because I couldn’t make myself vulnerable to the dark. It was so heavy, too heavy, and its eyes peered into mine until they sat in my own sockets and I was laid bare. Its tongue tasted my face, and its hair fell into my mouth until I choked, and its fingers thrashed my throat until it was raw. I heard screaming.

“Wilder.” Cora shook me awake, and light streamed into the eyes that were no one’s but my own. “Hey, you’re here and you’re safe, yeah?”

“Here” was the forest floor. I looked up at the trees above me and felt their leaves scratching at my back. My breath shook, but all my hair was on my head. I figured it had been me that was screaming, considering my throat was raw. “Y-yeah,” I said. “Sorry… sorry.”

“You’ve got nothing to be sorry about. ‘S not your fault you get these. There’s a lovely world out here, away from your dreams. Remember that.”

I nodded - she was right. The trees had always looked out for me, and the animals, though skittish, were lovely and soulful. To live in the earth, I thought, you’ve got to be one with it. In a hole in the ground, I didn’t think there’d be too much danger of drowning. And the ocean - well, it brought us fish, and it showed us sunrises and sunsets and all the phases of the moon in its waves - a thousand paintings of what looked upon it. Yes, it was beautiful. One just had to hope it wouldn’t get too full of itself.

Cora ruffled my hair, picked out the leaves. I flinched, but her hands weren’t the claws of the night. They were just hands.

She smiled at me.

“Cora… C -” My voice gave out, and I gestured at her. She got it.

“Hey, there’s no water, right? I never did get why smiling is bad. I’m trying this new thing where I do what I want, instead of what I’m told to.”

I hummed. “Like… wha - mmh - what?”

She looked away, pinching her eyes closed, taking a breath, leveling herself. And then she turned, all at once, and kissed me.

I’d never got the appeal, not really, but when it happened to me, all my hopeless logic, my stuttering denial, washed away like sand on the beach, houses into the sea. And I couldn’t help but think of it, that great big mass, that enormous vastness, as I kissed her back. It was soft, like the wind gently buffeting the waves, and it was strong and tumultuous, like the storm beneath the raging clouds, and as the clouds parted, all I could see was light. All I could see was her, her, her.

She pulled away, though I wished desperately that she wouldn’t. She smiled. She laughed. I laughed too, and the sound was foreign and beautiful.

We looked at each other, then looked away, and laughed once more, cheeks burning red. I didn’t know what to say - I’d never kissed someone. Also, I wasn’t entirely sure I’d be able to talk at all. Instead, I laid back against the ground and let my eyes - my eyes - wander over Cora as the sun beamed from the trees and lit her in its overwhelmingly gentle glow. She was beautiful, hair dark and curled, tucked up under her hat, and her eyes, shadowed, held so much I didn’t think I could hope to understand. One such thing was why, out of everyone else, she chose me.

Cora picked up on my unease, though she didn't correctly guess its source, and said, “Sorry if I made you uncomfortable. We can just forget it happened.”

I shook my head immediately. “No. I, er…” I made a complex gesture with my hands, and she somehow understood.

“Ah. Well, good. Good.”

I continued to flap my hands about, and managed, “Why…. me?” Embarrassment immediately flooded my vision and rushed to my ears, beating them with the pounding of blood. Good lord, the nerve. To ask her, to question her for falling for someone like me; I shouldn’t ask, or she’ll think too hard. I shouldn’t ask, or she’ll realize she was wrong.

Too late, too late, though; the words were out, and she looked at me sadly, and said, “I’m sorry you don’t know already. I’ve tried to tell you so many times before, and I just can't get you to believe it; that you’re worthy of love, Wilder. You have this big beautiful world in your head, and even if you can’t always say it, even just being around you brings me into it a little more. When I’m with you, I can see what you see, even just a bit. The world is scary through your eyes, but it’s so beautiful, too. I chose you because you’re you, and no one else. You don't have to worry about that.”

“Oh,” I said, and looked away, trying to discreetly pinch myself. I wasn’t dreaming. My dreams were never this lovely, never lovely at all. I tried to eke out words, but they wouldn’t come; instead, I gestured at her in a way she understood to mean “Thank you”.

She reached out and tanged her fingers with mine, and both of us laid back on the leaf-ridden forest floor. I could still hear the ocean, just a mile or so away, but now it sounded like a lullaby.

***

I was wearing that same old sweater again, fidgeting with the ugly black thread as I stared out of my window and let my mind drift off. It was morning, and the terrors that lay in the dark and waited just outside my blanket, eager for flesh or violence of some other horrific evildoing, were dissolved in the rising sun. The sky was a light blue, cast with purples and yellows all working to paint the ocean in lovely colors, and the ocean itself was stiller than I’d ever seen it, letting itself be stretched taut like a canvas. I thought about how much I might like to go to its shore, to be closer to it, maybe even to feel its tear-streaked waters sift through my fingers. Maybe I could feel what everyone who filled that sea had felt; the idea filled me with apprehension at the pure heartbreak it contained, but also an odd contentment at knowing that this heartbreak did not go unseen, that this heartbreak was now reflecting the sky.

And the ocean rippled. The serenity was over, and the malice hidden beneath each wave returned. With this ripple came a creak of the door, and my mother poked her head into my room, bracing. “Wilder,” she said, and in her voice was a level of apprehension I’d never heard before. I’d never thought my mother could feel fear.

I gestured for her to continue. Her eyes darted about the room, refusing to meet mine.

“Something happened.”

“...”

“To Cora. She’s… Wilder, she’s gone.”

I laughed, a sound wholly alien and cold like air on a mountain or the sea during a storm, but the water sat still. Apprehension gripped me again in anticipation of my mother’s scolding, but she just looked at me sadly, fearfully.

“I’m sorry.”

I shook my head. I shook my head and kept shaking my head and I could feel my brain rattling in my skull, making a home in my ears and maybe dripping out the sides a bit. I should clean that up. I grabbed a blanket from my bed and wiped my face. The blanket came away wet.

I gripped my throat to steady it as I eked out the words. “Where… is she?”

“Baby, hey,” she said, sitting beside me on the bed and stroking my hair, face still straight as ever but barely containing the storm behind her eyes. “C’mere.”

She took my hand and brought me up from the bed, walking me out the door and to the sea. We were the only two out there. I cast my gaze around, looking for something. Maybe for Cora to be crouched behind a boulder before leaping out and scaring me like she had when we were little.

But she was not waiting for me. All I could see were the crumbling stones of the beach and a hint of colour - a hat, sitting askew on a sharp, jutting rock. Stitched within an inch of its life, until it was more thread than anything else.

There was no note attached to it, no message. Why would she have left a message - she couldn’t have known, could she? It’s not as though it was intentional. Though, the hat was placed carefully on the stone, and was likely too heavy to have been carried by the wind, and it served as message enough. The heavy black stitches, the fabric just barely holding together, fraying at the edges and coming apart. But Cora valued life too much. She saw the beauty in everything, and wouldn’t have just thrown it away - unless she would.

Either way, it didn’t matter. Either way, she was dead. Eaten by the very sea she’d found so beautiful. I took the hat in my hands, the hat I’d watched so many times before but had never touched - just one broken thing holding another.

I heard her voice in my head telling me the world was beautiful, everything was beautiful, that the nightmares that haunted me were just that. She was wrong. She’d been wrong this whole time, and as I looked over the ocean that looked so pretty and pierced so deeply, I felt its own rivulets streaming down my face. They blurred as the sun finally broke free of the horizon and cast its light across the vast ocean as if crying with joy, declaring its freedom from the night. This time, though, the sunrise only hurt my eyes to look at.

***

The funeral was quieter than the last one had been, or maybe I just wasn’t listening. There was the same quiet chatter, the same muttered sympathies and platitudes and that blended into and were drowned out by the ocean’s song. It lapped softly at the shore as if whispering apologies, or maybe spitting in my face.

“Lovely funeral,” said Saye, coming up behind me. “I did always love funerals.” He passed me a match, with which I quietly lit my lantern, refusing to look at him. “At least there’s no storm this time.”

I ignored him and looked out over the ocean, dark and riddled with night. The sky was clear, and the stars seemed to look down with sympathy. Their light didn’t reach the still waters.

I scribbled some empty phrase on the lantern - what do you say when there are no words? - and set Cora’s hat gently atop it before setting it free to join her.

There was no body to put in the boat, but the boat was set up all the same, stuffed within an inch of its life with flowers. I wandered down to it, slowly, and felt a hundred gazes piercing my back. They washed past me like sand into the sea as I sat in the flowers and pushed away from the shore, feeling the ocean battering me to and fro.

I caught my mother’s eyes, and for the very first time, a tear fell from them and joined the sea.