Candle Flames Everywhere
When Greg and Vera awoke one morning they found their little bedroom lit by seven hundred floating lights. They were like disembodied candle flames floating as if weightless, filling the space equidistant from one another but not with any pattern, and dappling the walls and bed and dresser with golden light. Looking in the mirror that hung from the closet door, Greg could see the room reflected in it, and the room in the reflection was filled with small candleflame-like lights.
Vera his wife grunted, crosseyed on her pillow, regarding the glowing object floating a few inches above her nose. Greg reached up to touch one, and it moved away like a magnet avoiding another magnet at the same pole. He drew back and the glowing thing returned to its place, bobbing a little as if anchored by elastic. He tried it again, unable to touch the thing because it avoided him, wondering if its proximity felt warm or perhaps soft.
“Umm,” Vera spoke first, “I'm dreaming, right?”
“Probably,” Greg said.
Feeling sure they were dreaming, the couple glanced at one another and individually thought about their own ways of waking up.
Then Greg’s phone began to buzz and play a grossly familiar wake up song. Instinctively he reached over to the nightstand to hit snooze and in doing so he swung his arm past ten floating orbs.
Greg and Vera looked at each other inquisitively. Then her phone went off, playing an obnoxious rock song. Normally the light from their phones would have made them squint in the dark, but it was already light in here.
Stretching out his fingers, Greg tried to bump two with the same hand but they were always too far apart. They lay there staring until ten minutes passed and Greg’s alarm began playing again. Glancing at one another with the look of paratroopers about to jump into battle, Greg folded the covers back and sat up. He suddenly thought he knew what it must be like to be a Christmas tree, being so surrounded by glimmering glowing little lights. But they didn’t burn his face as he feared. The lights that had been occupying the space where he now sat had moved and now floated nearby, just an inch from his nightshirt. He tried swaying in his seat, moving his body back and forth, and the floating flames just moved around him and resumed their places once he had passed by. “This is weird,” Greg said.
On many mornings the couple would race to the apartment's one bathroom. This morning it looked like Vera might win; she was now tiptoeing across the room, facing the floating lights that were at head level one at a time and with great suspicion. She opened the bedroom door and peeked out into the hallway. “Ah!” she grunted.
“What?”
“There’s more.” Greg joined her and they both beheld hundreds more floating lights presiding in the space of their hallway. They were identical in appearance to the ones in the bedroom and floated the same distance apart. The same was true in the bathroom, which Greg reached first. Vera explored the linen closet and then the bedroom’s walk-in closet and then ventured to look into the living room and kitchen. She opened the cabinets, the oven, and even the refrigerator. Wherever there should have been a cubic foot of empty air, there was a light suspended among its neighbors, offering neither explanation nor permission nor apology. There were candle flames everywhere.
They shone a gold light in corners that had always been shadowed, dappling the floor and furniture and ceiling and walls with a gentle glow and with brighter circles of light on the closest surfaces. Vera turned on the lamp in the living room, finding that the familiar light fixture still worked but didn’t add much. Every movement was performed carefully because the floating things looked like fire and Greg and Vera both felt sure that in a moment they would start burning something. They stood staring for several long minutes, waiting to wake from this odd dream. Suddenly having a vivid thought, Greg pushed up one slat of a window blind and looked outside. “What is it?” Vera asked.
“There’s none outside.”
“The lights are only in here?” To confirm this, Greg stepped outside the front door and reported no glowing orbs at all, only a normal morning taking place outside. “What does that mean?”
“I don’t know,” Greg said. They stared at one another uneasily and stared at the lights some more and eventually ate a halfhearted breakfast. The candle flames didn’t burn anything but they didn’t go away either.
Suddenly Greg’s phone lit up and his ringtone sang. Glancing at the time, he cursed and jabbed the green answer icon. “Hi, boss.”
The voice was fuzzy over the phone, but it was clearly irritated. “Greg, what’s up? We need you to compile the Moscow reports as soon as you come in.”
“Yeah sorry, I’ve gotten held up at home.”
“You’re still at home?”
“Um. Yeah, but not for long.”
“Are you all right?” Only a sliver of concern entered the boss’s voice.
“Fine. I’ll be in soon.” Greg hung up and peered between five floating candle flames at Vera with a look of desperation. “I’m already ten minutes late and it’s a half-hour commute. I don’t know what to do about this,” he swatted a glowing orb, “But I have to go.”
Glancing at the time, she shrugged. “Me too. I’ll be late if I don’t leave in five.”
“We’ll have to deal with this later.” He glanced over at the broom where it leaned against the refrigerator, then down the hall where the vacuum was stored in the linen closet. He shook his head in exasperation, then frowned. “Will the place burn down while we’re gone?”
Vera cradled a light in her hands as if she were catching a firefly. “I don’t think so. These things don’t feel hot. They feel weird.” With that, they set about pulling on shoes and buttoning dress shirts in a sudden race to get out the door.
“How’s my hair?” she asked.
“Poky. I’m sure that’s in style somewhere.”
She scowled, hunching over to see her reflection in the microwave door. After a few seconds of pulling and bundling hair, she rushed out the door with Greg in tow, rushed back in to retrieve a forgotten wallet, then rushed out again and set the deadbolt. The apartment fell quiet after footsteps died away down the stairs.
While the couple was away, the floating lights remained suspended in the air where they had been since that morning. They didn’t move except when the air conditioner turned on every couple hours, and then the lights adjacent to the air vents in each room would sway out a few inches, pushed by the breeze, and sometimes bounce back and forth a little with the eddies of air currents. A stray fruit fly explored the space above the kitchen sink, confused by so many lights and sometimes bumping into them. The little fly was too small to move them, so it bounced from one to another until it settled exhausted on a shred of apple skin on the counter which the dishcloth had missed after dinner last night. When the air conditioner turned off, the lights near air vents bobbed back to their places, like floating leaves riding ripples until the surface of the lake is calm again. The lights were unmoved by the sound of a dog barking in the apartment next door, nor the tiny scampering of a roach inside the wall. A curious eye would have seen blinds drawn over the apartment’s windows and would have supposed the tenets forgot to turn off their light switches before they left. In fact, every electric light in the place was switched off, but the place was lit by the floating lights.
It was approaching 7:00 PM when footsteps approached the door and Vera unlocked it, shuffled in, tossed a paper bag on the kitchen table, and flopped on the couch. She had nearly but not quite forgotten about the floating lights over the course of her day. Rehearsing her tasks and the unfairness of getting scolded over taking time for lunch while Abigail did it all the time, she absently counted candle flames in the space above her face, dreaming about Chinese takeout but for the moment lacking the energy to get up. The air reeked of burned toast. The apartment was drafty, so in the warm months cool air from upstairs would drift down and bring the smell of all their neighbor’s culinary debacles. “It’s worse in the winter,” she mused. Then they would smell the downstairs’ neighbor’s warm air instead.
Since she was lying there, Vera looked a little closer. Each light looked very like a steady candle flame, yet slightly more substantial as if it were made of something other than merely hot gas. There was a small golden aura around each, like the hazy glow of streetlights in the fog. “I wonder how much rice it would be if each of these were a grain,” Vera mused. She figured the lot would make a good meal for two, maybe more. At last Vera levered herself off the couch and went to eat her food.
A minute later Greg peered around the door cautiously, eyeing the lights. “They’re still here,” he observed.
“Yep.”
“I was hoping they wouldn’t be. Like maybe I imagined it.”
“Nope. Me too.”
Greg set his briefcase by the door, dodging a light that was near his eye, then faced a dozen more and gave up avoiding them. “That looks good.”
“Mmmph. Fried rice,” she commented around a mouthful.
“Can I have some?”
“I only got one.”
“Huh.”
“I thought you’d get something too.” Instead, Greg foraged in the cabinets and refrigerator for dinner. “Ugh. Abigail is such a princess,” Vera said. Greg rolled his eyes as she recounted the day, which to him sounded like many others. He made a peanut butter sandwich, microwaved a frozen packaged burrito, and ate some leftover spaghetti that smelled just slightly fermented.
“Why don’t you tell Carl what’s really going on?” Greg asked again.
“He won’t fire her, and then she’ll hate me even more. Believe me, I’ve thought of that.” The debate continued as Greg sat down and it occurred to him that under the circumstances, their meal was something like a candlelight dinner, more moody than the most romantic restaurant, but he didn’t say so. By the time he sat down, Vera was finishing her meal and rising to fill the dishwasher.
By this time the couple was growing confident that the flame things weren’t going to burn anything and was getting used to the idea that they would get out of the way like water flows around you in a pool. Sometimes a light would be in the line of sight of what Greg or Vera wanted to look at, so they must move slightly, out of its way. Greg said he felt like a rooster cocking its head at something it didn’t understand. Vera had left the fortune cookie from her meal and Greg munched on it and read the fortune paper absently. It said, You will have a visitor in your home. He chuckled.
After dinner it was time to try to get rid of the unwelcome guests. The first attempt was to open the door and try sweeping the lights out like one would guide a wasp that has flown inside, but of course that did not work. The lights just flowed around their hands like leaves on the water and returned to their places. Greg tried to grab one and throw it out the door, but it was hard to hold, almost slippery, and anyway as soon as he let go it jumped back to its place. So they shut the door, growing embarrassed because it was getting dark outside and the neighbors would see. Since the lights looked like fire, Vera got a cup of water and tried to extinguish one, but it wouldn’t go far enough into the cup. So she got a spray bottle and sprayed a whole swath of them with water. The spray of water droplets only scattered when they neared a light as if bouncing off something solid, and the couple concluded this was because the droplets were not massive enough to displace the lights. It seemed to take about an ounce of force to move one of them six inches, and it increased from there. If Greg and Vera had been present to watch the fruit fly earlier, they would have expected this.
Greg tried the vacuum next, though neither of them really expected that to work. It was fascinating to watch the handheld tube suck a glowing gem down into it, revealing how grungy the inside of that tube was after sucking a few years of household dirt, but the vacuum’s motor wasn’t strong enough to pull the gem all the way into its bag and as soon as Greg switched it off, the gem shot back out the tube to its place.
“Should we call someone about this?” Vera asked.
“Who?”
“I don’t know. An exterminator, maybe?”
“An exterminator? Like somebody’s going to come clear this stuff away with rat poison? Huh.”
“I don’t know, I’m just thinking. A scientist? An exorcist? The police?”
“An exorcist?” Greg wrinkled his nose. Neither of them considered themselves spiritual people. “Don’t be stupid. I don’t want somebody coming in with a bunch of mumbo jumbo about ghosts and scary stuff.”
“Well this is pretty weird already, don’t you think?”
“So let’s not make it weirder.”
Vera shrugged expressively and went to brush her teeth. It was after 10:00 PM now. They got ready for bed in silence and crawled under the covers. Greg reached over to turn off the lamp, realized it was already off, and cursed. “Don’t suppose these dratted things have an off button,” he grumbled, crawling out of bed again to get a t-shirt to wrap around his eyes. “One for me too,” Vera asked. He tossed her one and they fell asleep, hoping individually that it would all be a dream when they woke up.
It wasn’t. In fact they both had something of a hard time sleeping. They would fall asleep after a few minutes, shift around on their pillows enough for the clothes to fall away from their eyes, and wake up soon after. Greg sleepily resolved to buy a real blindfold as soon as possible and then had to admit to himself that, whatever they were, the lights might remain here long enough for that to be a worthwhile investment. He ended up sleeping with his pillow on top of his head instead of under it, and he stayed asleep this way though he woke with a neckache.
Next morning, Vera reported that the shower’s spray of water succeeded in pushing the lights that were floating in the shower stall a little, though it didn’t seem as though they were capable of getting wet. Like droplets falling off a duck’s back, the water just bounced against the candle flames and kept going. Though she hadn’t slept well because of them, Vera enjoyed the extra light in the shower stall. The thick shower curtain blocked most of the room’s regular electric light.
They departed at a more respectable time today, sipping coffee and pulling on shoes as they went. As before, the lights remained suspended in the apartment air when the couple had left, consistently and perhaps resolutely or even determinedly remaining where they were, like ten thousand mysterious little guards keeping to their post. The fruit fly had gotten trapped in the refrigerator and grew very sleepy in the cold air. When the air conditioner turned on, a handful of floating lights swayed in the breeze.
That evening, Greg and Vera stood in their living room with a bedsheet held tightly between them, each with one hand high and one hand low so as to hold the sheet vertically like a sail. With a focused nod to one another, they walked the seven feet between front door to sofa, hoping to snare the lights in their improvised net. At first it seemed to work. As expected, the sheet pushed the lights and it became harder and harder to hold it as the lights pushed back. They brought the corners together and tried to pull the sheet down to the floor, which at this point resembled a hot air balloon all aflame inside. But the balance was upset and the lights exploded out one side, resuming their places as the sheet fell to the floor with a swish of moving fabric. They attempted their dragnet strategy twice more with no success.
It took several days, perhaps a week, before Greg and Vera realized something else about the lights. They felt electric. When they walked through the rooms of the apartment, especially if they walked quickly, they could feel the lights washing past them and imparting a certain invigorating effect. “It’s like being rained on by cotton balls,” Vera said.
“No, it’s not dry like cotton. It’s electric.”
“But it’s not wet either.” And when they returned home from a day elsewhere, they told one another the air smelled different. “I didn’t buy any air fresheners. Did you?” It smelled a little sharper and fresher like ozone, as if the air in the apartment were younger somehow.
Eventually Greg found that he didn’t need to drink coffee anymore. Just getting out of bed and walking to his toothbrush in the bathroom was enough to bombard him with a few hundred lights and each touch shocked with a sober, livening jolt. He grew to dislike the frantic feeling that caffeine gave him. He didn’t see as much of his coworker Sam who was always loitering at the coffee machine at the office. “Too bad,” Greg thought, “I like Sam.” He sometimes made an effort to go into the break room anyway, but overall it was a lame effort.
On a Saturday evening when TV had overtaken and eaten all their weekend plans, Greg and Vera turned it off at last, exhausted even by their bingeing. It was Daylight Savings weekend when the time falls back and they had one manual clock to adjust. Vera’s old alarm clock radio from middle school had stiff buttons that would often trigger the wrong action. She pressed the “set time” button and the radio came on. After she managed to set the time the radio wouldn’t turn off. She could unplug it but this would have reset the whole process.
“Just leave it on for now, I guess,” Greg said. So Vera sat back down and they listened to classical music come scratchingly over the radio, occasionally intermingled with a fuzzy word from the talk show on a neighboring station. They each thought their own thoughts and listened to the melancholy violin, gradually coming under the spell of the moving composition played by some unknown violinist who had trained and practiced and performed the piece so strangers could hear and think their thoughts within it. When the rest of the orchestra joined the violin and introduced something of a tempo, Greg stood up and offered his hand. “Will you dance with me?”
The couple never danced. They possessed generally stoic postmodern sentiments and what might be judged as four left feet. But after a moment Vera took his hand and they stood among the lights, holding each other and walking in circles like they do in old movies. It was a good thing they weren’t wearing shoes because their toes would have suffered. They moved among the flames like lovers dancing in a spectral frozen rain, eventually making a game of swinging each other through the sea of light. Then something about the radio frequencies changed and the noise solidified into a brash monologue about political parties. The classical station was lost and when Vera pressed the “off” button, the cacophony stopped.
Eventually the couple all but forgot about the floating lights. They woke, left, returned, ate, and slept among them until they’d memorized the positions of many of the lights and even gave names to one or two. Eventually they stopped using blindfolds at night. They still talked about ways to expel the intruders but more or less grew used to their presence, at least as much as one can grow used to a soft electric fiery rain. Greg took to boxing them for exercise and Vera got decorations that complimented the color of the light.
Abigail the scheming coworker eventually got a promotion and left Vera’s work team. Greg gradually achieved his boss’s good favor after road construction on the way to the office was finished and Greg began arriving early. The fruit fly finished its short life, was swept up without being noticed, and trucked away to the landfill to feed the microbes. The people who owned the barking dog moved away. The weather turned cold but it was always warm and fresh inside the apartment.
One day Vera came home with a plastic bag in her hand. “Look,” she said, taking out its contents. It was a bed sheet folded up.
“It's a sheet,” Greg said.
“I just got it back from my seamstress. Not just any sheet.” It was two sheets sewn together into a giant sack, and there was a long drawstring around the mouth. “Do you think this will work?” she asked.
It took him a moment to understand. “Oh, it might!” So positioning themselves in the living room, the couple held the mouth of the sack wide open and got ready to capture a load of floating lights. The flames floated there innocently, seemingly unaware that their hosts had hatched a new eviction plan. The first attempt didn't work because though the mouth of the sack was open, the rest of it was drooping toward the floor, so instead of an open sack the lights met a wall of cloth. They tried swooping the sack through the air so it would fill with air, and it started to work before they ran out of space in the living room.
“Okay, let's start by the table.” Standing between the dining table and the kitchen, Greg and Vera set their feet like sprinters ready to race, each holding one hand high and one low to hold open the sack's mouth. “Go!” They ran around the corner into the living room again, feeling the sack fill with air, then felt resistance as a large swath of floating lights bounced inside. “Now,” she yelled, and Greg yanked the drawstring. They pulled the ballooned sack down and sat on the opening. The lights resisted, pushing back toward their original place, pushing against the bed sheet and one another, causing a rippling, bubbling, almost buzzing effect inside the white cotton sack, which now glowed like a lantern with fifty candles inside. Greg and Vera sat on the opening with the glowing sack pulling upward between them. The remaining lights in the room cast deeper shadows at the absence of their fellows. “We did it,” Vera chuckled.
“Yes.”
“We could gather them all up this way,” she mused, “Maybe in little bags.”
“We’d have to weigh them down,” Greg said, leaning all his weight on the sack.
“I was thinking about the utility closet. We don’t use it much. We could stuff them all in there.”
“Yes.”
“Yes,” she and he looked down again at the glowing vibrating sack full of mysterious lights. It was strange to sit in a space without the candle flames hovering in one’s face, distracting with their light and always shocking one with little icy-warm jolts.
“We’ll have to turn the lamps on again, I guess,” Greg said. They hadn’t needed to use any electric lights since this started. Vera chuckled at the thought.
“We’ll be able to see the clock without moving,” she added.
Greg looked up from the mouth of the sack on which they were sitting and met his wife’s eyes. He realized he couldn’t see their color as well now, and despite the annoyance of bumping into candle flames all the time he would miss the way they played with the highlights in her hair. He would probably want to start taking coffee in the morning again. “I’ll see more of Sam Tule,” he thought. Sam always drank lots of coffee. The drawstring's spring-loaded stopper was there, ready to cinch the sack's mouth shut and seal away the intruders. “Yes,” he agreed to her comment, reaching over. But instead of the drawstring he found he was holding the sack's mouth. The man and woman looked at each other again with a burning mutual question, and they nodded yes.
Together they ripped it open, releasing a geyser of boiling yellow light. It knocked them both backward, zapping them with visions of blooming kaleidoscopes and sweet-scented meadows, and decompressing with a whoosh it left each candle flame back in its place, bobbing as the turbulence settled down in the room. The bedsheet sack lay lifeless on the carpet. The couple helped each other stand, plunging their heads back up into golden space.
Later, elsewhere, blue-white fluorescent light shone in harsh rectangles over a sea of cubicles. The hum of the office’s air system met that of a hundred keystrokes per second and murmured conversations in the big room. A hurrying man paused and stopped him at the corner of the cubicles. “Greg,” the man said, squinting at him as if trying to read a foreign language, “What’s up with you? You’ve been acting strange lately.”
“Oh? How so?” Greg adjusted his tie.
“I don’t know, it’s like, I don’t know.” The man set his mug on a table and leaned on it.
“What?”
“It’s like you’re glowing,” the man shrugged bashfully.
Greg thought about the question for a moment, then nodded. “Sam, would you like to come to my place for dinner tonight?”