By Logan Anthony
The beeswax candle flickered self-consciously on the splintered sill among the others, some beeswax, others not. The only living flame. The others grumbled their complaints within earshot.
On the other side of the window, the night was a soft dark. Still young. The moon was new and surrounded by a faint smattering of weak-willed stars. This was the kind of night the candles lingered for, climbing the walls of their jars in increments of cooled wax instead of melting down t o burn up in their depths.
Outside the shut door, the doe of the house bustled about. The tapping of her hooves reminded the candles of the eating sounds the humans had once filled the place with, the metal of silverware scraping against patterned ceramic plates.
Of the family in residence, the doe was the candles’ favorite: she kept to herself and often left the candle room to its own dust and devices. The candle room remained from the previous owners. Humans with their rooms dedicated to curiosities.
The family of deer in residence hardly had a use for the candles. Most of them were not sure what they were. But the doe knew. The single beeswax candle did not know it was being used as a beacon; neither did the other candles. But the doe knew. Had the other candles known, they might have acted differently that night, and the crooked little beeswax candle in the windowsill might never have gone out.
The night sprawled cool and damp. Had the flame flickered on a few more hours, the passing fox in her crimson robes wouldn’t have stopped to squint through the reeds in search of that pulse of light. The flame would’ve drawn her in, a wingless moth. The doe would’ve sensed the loping of the body as it came closer, trodding over clovers and daffodils huddled beneath the windowsills.
Instead, the fox slowed to a stop and flattened her body beneath the underbrush. In a pile of shed pine needles, clusters of orange-fingered fungus wormed up from the soil. The fox coiled her breath tight in her chest and ignored the aching. She had come a long way. The forest soundtrack pulled her ears in all directions. She scanned each window of the cabin.
The fox dug her claws into the soft earth and huffed, ever so slightly. The meat of her body yearned to run, to feed. Time was not something to waste. Saliva clotted in her throat at the far-off scent of spilled blood across the stream. Yet the fox remained unyielding. In her anticipation, she must have missed it: it couldn’t be that it wasn’t there. She rose, sniffing for honey in the air, that tell-tale sign of burning beeswax. She continued her search for the beacon.
Awake long after the others, the doe laid and waited for the candle to convey her message. She sealed the door to the candle room those hours ago, after lighting the wick of the beeswax candle, and had not allowed herself to reopen the room. She had thrown herself into the night’s routine for the simple benefit of distraction.
If the doe had allowed herself to think of the candle, to gaze upon it aglow without the face gleaming in the window behind it, she knew the longing would be too great. She would melt like beeswax with no glass walls to climb. She would pool at her hooves, unable to listen for the cry that would come from the underbrush. That call to leave the cabin and disappear amongst the red of the leaves and robes out there, claws dug into the earth in wait.
For her.
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Logan Anthony is an American queer writer and transgender artist from Indiana. Anthony holds a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing & English and works as a freelance writer. Find Logan’s work in Thin Air Magazine, Hare’s Paw Literary Journal, The Madison Review, Stoneboat Literary Journal, The Write Launch, and more. You can read their work at www.thewritinglog.com and follow them on social media @the_writing_log