On Starting a Fire

Everywhere I go, I see candles lit for you. Sometimes it’s an entire nation, a public holiday with fizzing firecracker wheels and tufts of soft candy melted to look like wings. The speeches are tear-inducing (if one is capable of tears); the chants as the moon rises are bold, a touch abrasive. No one can take their hero away, they say: no one would dare. When the night really begins to draw in, you can hear the sea behind them, almost a moan — the candle wax crackles, the society sings, and I shiver.  

But I’ve been other places too; I’ve walked this whole world up and down, just to be certain. There are church crypts with repurposed coffins and biers and midnight devotionals; there are whispers between neighbors at the marketplace, your name repeated under the guise of a question about tomatoes, everyone aware of authoritarian eyes on their backs. In the most desperate lands, there is a single enclave, nestled between thickets in a dark, dark wood. They are wary; they do not trust easily. Many are missing limbs; many more children are missing every year. But when they let me in, I saw them, too, huddle together to watch a spark burn brighter. Your candle, glowing green in the reflected needlework and pines. You brought them solace; you gave them peace. 

No one, in contrast, lights a candle in my memory.  

But this is what happens when one grows close to a martyr, a revolutionary — an eclipse. You, taking all that passion, that posing and posturing, and putting it to use. You knew how to win their hearts, you knew how to take that fire and wrap it around you like a cloak, keening and combusting into blue flame as you burned. You were something of a supernova, I used to say, very quietly — tremendous in the effect of your power and your devastation. A whole universe went out when you went, and from the crumbles of that stardust so much more was born. Your legacy never even flickered. It thrives.  

It would please you, old friend, to know that.

And it would also please you to realize this: no one will ever know that I was the one to do it. To do what? To scrape that flint against your hard edges, to pour combustion fluid over dry leaves, to hold a glass to your upturned face and watch for the first signs of smoke. Once a fire is alight, and bright, no one thinks to remember the firestarter. No one knew who wrote your speeches, who planted those hints of concepts in your brain and left you to muddle through them in your own fashion. Pulling the strings is a dead cliche, and I don’t want to do insult to your memory by calling you a puppet — you were more than that, you were my friend, my pride and joy — but master still fits nicely with what I did to you. You burned because of me. 

Sometimes I wonder if you knew that. Your last bout of fever, before the epic explosion that was your end — you began to look at me a little strangely. Even as I draped cool cloths across your head and managed a makeshift army, all under your name — you may have doubted me. Perhaps your glassy eyes were busy trying to count the strands of gray in my hair; perhaps you were starting to think that I didn’t look as old as I ought, having been a friend of your father’s before you. Were you thinking, right then, that after all we’d been through, I ought to be dead? Were you tracing your history, intersecting with mine, and beginning to realize just how little of your grandeur could be traced to you alone? Did you doubt? 

For your sake, I hope not. Your mind and your soul were many things — steadfast and solemn in your endless sort of do-goodery — but doubt had never even tried to trickle in. I’d built that dam well, of course. I kept it out. Even in illness, that wasn’t something you needed to feel. 

But — though I admit this only to myself — I am not all-powerful. So perhaps you wondered; perhaps you were afraid. It would certainly be an irony if, after it all, the one thing that I could not keep safe, and secure, and intact, was your own mind. I hope that I was mistaken; I hope that all I saw in your face was the twisting of a fever dream. In this case, I would be happy to be wrong. 

But then, I suppose, it hardly matters now. Your candles multiply; they catch, reflect, refract the glory and the hope that you were. You spread. Dead and gone for fifty years, and you can still manage to keep them alight. And the one space that you never illuminated? The shadow behind you — right where, as intended, I have always stood. Where I will always be. 

Rest well, dear hero, dear saint. My most ambitious project, my cherished boy, my hope: be at peace. The world need never know. 

I will go still and silent. Fear not, old friend, I will give you leave: I will let you burn.

About the Author

Julianna Reidell is a sophomore English and French major at Arcadia University. Her work won Gold and Silver medals in the national Scholastic Art and Writing Awards competition during high school; her humor piece “Love with Romeo and Juliet: A Parody” was featured in the Scholastic publication Best Teen Writing of 2019. Her work can be found on the teen humor website The Milking Cat, as well as in Kindergarten Mag and in former issues of Quiddity.