Dark Candles

The candles were the good kind, thick beeswax pillars that smelled faintly of summer. I lit three on the kitchen table and said, “I know, overkill. But the room’s cold and you always said fire makes a house feel like it remembers.”

The clock over the stove ticked like a metronome for sadness.

“Don’t start,” I told it. “You don’t get to heal anything just by noise.”

Tessa let herself in without knocking. “You talking to the appliances again?”

“And to Jonas,” I said.

She walked over, kissed my forehead, and eyed the candles. “It’s noon. Are we summoning or celebrating?”

“Both.”

She held up a paper bag. “I brought carrots, walnuts, and enough cream cheese to solve geopolitical conflict.”

“You remembered the cake.” My throat wobbled. “I promised him last year I’d learn to make it the way he liked.”

“You did,” she said, dumping the groceries on the counter. “You learned, and you cussed, and you threw one at the sink. Which is what he would have wanted.”

I tied my hair up and reached for the grater. “He’s the gift I always keep,” I said, surprising myself by saying it out loud. “Even if… you know.”

“Out of reach isn’t gone,” Tessa said. She bumped my hip. “Let’s get to it, baker.”

By the time the first batch went in, every surface had orange confetti. Tessa cracked eggs and sang under her breath. I joined in until the words snagged like a sweater. “Happy birthday, my true ... ” The rest folded into the mixing bowl with the sugar.

“Breathe,” Tessa said softly. “Then sing like he dared you to.”

“He always did dare me,” I said. “Who proposes during karaoke? Who chooses a Smiths song?”

“Someone who wanted you to laugh before you cried,” she said. “He was smart that way.”

The door buzzer went off, an abrupt flatline in the sweetness. I wiped my hands and pressed the intercom. “Yes?”

“It’s Lou,” came the building superintendent’s gravel. “Package for you, Mia.”

“It’s Mira,” I corrected reflexively. “Come up, Lou.”

He shuffled in with a long box he held like a surfboard. “Neighbor kid Maya stuck this on it.” He squinted at me. “Says, ‘for the stars.’”

My name wrong, Maya’s right. I took the box, and inside was the cheap plastic planetarium Jonas and I had looked at last winter and refused to buy because we were saving for a trip. I sat on the couch. “He would hate how much I love this,” I said.

“You want me to set it up?” Lou asked. His eyes flicked to the candles. “You doing a… vigil thing?”

“A birthday,” I said, hearing the reply land between us like an unbroken egg.

Lou nodded. “My Angie’s been gone twelve years,” he said, matter-of-fact. “I still buy the cake she liked. Guess we keep the treaty even when the other side can’t sign.”

“Thanks, Lou,” I said, and he took the screwdriver from his belt like a knight unholstering a sword.

While he wrestled with the planetarium, Tessa frosted. “Taste this,” she ordered.

I did. Sweet, cream-cheese tang, a whisper of vanilla. I closed my eyes.

“It’s not as good as his laugh,” I said.

Tessa set the spatula down. “There isn’t frosting for that.”

When the planetarium clicked on, the room filled with soft blue night. Stars showed up on the ceiling, lazy and sure of themselves. I leaned back on the couch and put my head in Tessa’s lap like old times.

“You’re in the stars,” I told the ceiling. “You always wanted dramatic entrances.”

A breeze shouldered through the cracked window and shimmed the candle flames. Tessa’s hand stilled in my hair. “Did you feel that?” she asked.

“I told you,” I said. “He keeps teasing the thermostat.”

The phone rang, and Tessa grabbed it. “It’s your mother.”

I took it. “Hi, Mom.”

“Hi, sweetheart,” she said. “I was thinking about how he used to eat the frosting first like a barbarian.”

“Please tell me you did not put his name on the cake,” I said.

“I did not, because that would be strange,” she said, and then added, “but I got blue candles for the Mets.”

“He hated the Mets,” I said.

“My point exactly,” she said, and I could hear her smile, upholstered in grief and mischief. “Come by tonight?”

“After,” I said. “We’re doing the thing here.”

“Sing loud,” she said. “If you choke, let the cat cover the high notes.”

After I hung up, Tessa lit the last candle. “Okay,” she said gently. “You ready?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I keep thinking the words are going to break something.”

“Maybe they’ll fix something,” she said.

We stood in the planetarium sky with cake between us, candles throwing lacework shadows against the walls. I took a breath.

“Happy birthday, my true ... ” The words fell apart again.

Then, soft, like my grandmother’s hands, the whisper: It’s okay.

I didn’t look at Tessa. My eyes were full of the ceiling. “Did you ... ”

“I heard the heater,” she lied kindly. “Keep going.”

“Happy birthday, my true, true love,” I said, and this time it came out like a promise. “I wish you were here for the cake and the mess and the way the cat pretends not to care.”

The breeze lifted the edge of the napkin and set it down again.

We cut crooked slices and ate standing up. Lou refused a piece, then accepted two. “You know the Mets actually have a decent bullpen this year,” he said between bites, and I groaned on Jonas’s behalf.

After Lou left, the apartment calmed to its regularly scheduled galaxy. Tessa washed dishes and sang the wrong words on purpose. I dried. “Do you ever think,” I asked her, “that time is rubber? Like, it stretches where you don’t want it to.”

“All the time,” she said. “But it snaps back, too. Not to what was. To something that can hold you in a different way.”

I looked at the candle stubs. “People say it heals. It doesn’t. It just… teaches you the shape of the limp.”

Tessa handed me a plate. “It also teaches you the choreography.”

After she left, I took the last of the cake to the fire escape. January rubbed its cold hands together and decided not to snow. I could hear the neighbors bickering about a documentary, a siren rotating somewhere far off like a tired lighthouse. The planetarium’s slow spin sent constellations and the shadow of my plant across the floor.

“Okay,” I told the open air. “Here’s the deal. I’m going to keep lighting candles for your impossible heart. I’m going to hate time for being both relentless and useless. I’m going to make that trip we saved for, and I’m going to bring your favorite bad jokes to the ocean.”

A moth flirted with the kitchen light and settled on the sill. “I’m going to be a person you’d like to come home to,” I said, and that was the part that hurt, the way muscles ache when they’re starting to remember.

The cat, who had no time for ghosts, jumped into my lap and butted my chin. “He says you’re dramatic,” I translated for her.

Her tail thumped. The candles guttered, gathered themselves, and steadied.

“I’m keeping you,” I said to the night. “Not hoarding. Holding. Like a song that plays in the other room and you can hum along without needing it to be louder.”

The planetarium clicked off. The stars on the ceiling went away, but they left a map in my bones. I blew out the candles one by one, sealed the room back into itself, and listened to the quiet settle like a blanket fresh from the line.

“Happy birthday,” I said to the place where his laugh should be.

The window nudged me with a quick, warm breath.

Baby, it’s okay.

- Julia O’Hara 2025

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