The Last One

Being a match is not that fun.

Born from a wooden stick, you just sit all day in a thin box, forced to spend the rest of your time with about fifty of your own kin. Your head is painted usually pale and all you know is that one day you’ll be lit on fire.

The absurdly humorous thing about being a match destined to burn in flames is that you know exactly how you’re going to die. It will be swift, short, sort of spectacular and a tinge over the top as you’ll be ignited, but kind of sweet. You know that you’ll bring comfort to people, that your sole purpose is to create a big enough flame that sometimes is enough to light up an entire room.

A candle, an oil lamp, a lantern, and even a chimney!

Anything is possible.

The other absurdly humorous thing about being a match destined to burn in flames is that, although you know your death, the thing you need to be most aware of is your life. How long or short you think it will be does not matter; you know nothing. Sometimes, while you’re compressed together with all your brothers and sisters in the tiny box, you hear all these astonishing tales about others of your kind. Stories and stories that someone heard from someone else who had heard them from somebody else who had heard them from someone who had actually lived them.

A bunch of bollocks, if you ask my opinion. But also, how would you have heard them if we’ve been all sharing the same ridiculous space since the beginning of our time?

That, I do not know.

Yet those adventures resurfaced from time to time, while more and more of my family exclaimed once in a while how they knew someone who had belonged to a witch, someone who had belonged to a pirate, someone who had belonged to the queen, and so on.

They all seemed so thrilled to be finally used one day that, being one of the most hidden matches in that claustrophobic house, I began wondering what they were so excited about. Being pushed and crushed by all my siblings was agonizing as it was, and merely thinking about how long I had to wait until my end was boring in the extreme.

Therefore, while we travelled from factory to shop, only two questions kept my mind at bay, while the rest of me was plagued with being unmoving and squashed until someone eventually picked me up.

When will it come?

Will I finally be free?

Yet even if anyone actually bought the box, it would have been long before my time arrived. I kind of envied my brothers up above the rest of our family. They had been lucky. Born lucky.

Death would have cloaked them days, weeks, if not months or years before it even knocked for me.

Being a match was not that fun.

No matter the squeals, the legends, and all the imaginary scenarios my ménage whispered between each moon; being a match was not that fun.

I was in the middle of repeating myself when I felt a tremor run in all of us and our household suddenly grabbed from its usual dusty spot. My thoughts had instantly dissipated, and a rushing fervour had taken hold of each of my siblings. The end was near.

My mind had quieted while on the outside world, exchanges were made. The stick closest to me had cried out in joy, like the rest of them, but not me. I felt strange, weird, and sort of somebody else.

The box fell in two small, tiny, kind of rough to the touch, but so gentle hands, and so it began.

Oh, how pleading were her words and thoughts, so much that I felt them along the freezing wind of the human world. That was enough to set me astray, what could I have ever known of the cold out there?

At first, I was simply annoyed. She exhausted me, and I was just a match. Solely feeling this person, this little girl, walk up and down the road, almost drowning in the alabaster snow, was ticking me off.

Be more assertive! Attract their attention! Let me be free!

Now that we had been chosen, it was a matter of time before someone else bought us and we all would have finally been set aflame.

And yet…the child failed.

I trembled in that tiny body of mine and a grim thought engulfed me completely. That couldn’t be it. Some of my kin groaned after a few hours, wondering if we hadn’t been unfortunate after all. Doomed to never be.

But as we all heard whispers in the streets of a merry holiday and felicitations for something new, even I, a little matchstick, felt my same gloom cover the small child who was holding all of us. I fell silent once again and so did the girl.

Contrary to my presupposition, although weak, she did not give up. For the first time since I had been first placed in that box, it flew open. Hope ignited anew in me and stupor overwhelmed every member of my family as we all stared in shock at the child. Snow was falling from the sky and almost everything was covered in white, but, although I was the last one of them all, I could perfectly see her. Her rosy cheeks, her watery eyes, and her chapped lips. So small. So frail.

One of her frost-bitten fingers reached towards us and that’s where it started.

I saw the first of my siblings go up in flames, bright almost like the sun and leaving me utterly astonished. Tediously and yet fast, one after the other, they all began burning while our number went down. The girl whispered, cried, and laughed but I didn’t care.

Me! Please choose me!

I wished to shout and yell at her, but I knew I needed to be patient. Perhaps we had not been unlucky in the end. No. We had been granted the most fortunate destiny. All at once, all together.

The night grew darker, and the wind grew colder, but the small child kept her quiet promise. She would have used us all.

When it came to two, her skin brushed on me, yet she chose my neighbour, and I was content. My time was here and near, waiting a minute more wouldn’t have changed anything. But as she finally picked me up and set me aflame, her body stiffened, and the little girl fell on her side.

Something in me started screaming or crying, I couldn’t tell the difference. Her fingers parted and as I also fell with her, no matter how big or small my flame was, my half-torn body hit the snow, and I was left once again unmoving.

Now I knew. How funny.

Burned just enough not to kill me. No one would have grasped me ever again.

How humorous.

Not even at the end, I could find the sweet relief of death.