Candlestick Kingdom

cw: greif, loss, death

I see my face in my mother’s. 

Her head, an oval-shaped mirror on a frail torso, shimmers in the moonlight and reflects my image back at me. 

I can see that I look just as despondent as I feel when I see my reflection in her. My eyes are swollen and my nose wet. I have been in denial for the last several years that my mother is reaching her end.

When she first started showing signs of expiration, my father, the emperor of Candlestick Kingdom, took her to the appraiser, who examined her carefully under the light of a full-circle rainbow and blew the dust off her wooden frame. He looked her back and front and solemnly informed us that her head was made in Venice in the early 1800s. This, as of today, would make her approximately two-hundred and-sixty-three years old and place her toward the end of her lifespan. Candlestick Kingdom's fortune teller, Seraphina the Seer, who had flower stems for hair, told us that today would be the day.

When my mother sees, or rather I see, my face swollen from my heaving sobs behind the closed castle doors, she touches my shoulder. “I’m antique, Lilith,” she reassures me proudly. “Not outdated.” 

But I feel her slipping away. I try to hide my expression, but like my grandmother who also had her heart on her sleeve, mine beats under the glittering sleeve of my gown, my unconventionally placed organ glazed in blood like one of the frosted, raspberry-glazed crumpets our caterpillar-mouthed maid Agatha brings up to mother whenever my mother rings her bell.

Although my mother is now too weak to ring her bell, Agatha comes up unprompted every hour with a freshly baked tray for my mother. When my mother says thank you, Agatha’s mouth transforms into a Monarch butterfly and flies out the window I’ve opened to let out the rotten-apple smell of impending death.

Because Agatha can no longer say that it’s her pleasure or you're welcome, she bows her head to my mother and dismisses herself from the room a few seconds earlier than she normally would. Maybe she’s gone downstairs to catch her mouth in a net before it realizes that the sky is a better place to be than under her nose. Or perhaps it’s because the room smells like death.

I lie on the floating bed of storm clouds next to my mother. When I blink, my father appears at the foot of the bed. He’s holding a birthday cake for my mother with his candlestick fingers. I don't think we have enough time left with her to eat it.

As it has every other year, the cake consists of three teaspoons of vanilla extract, a drop of edible serotonin (a new ingredient my father added to the list after his visit to the appraiser), and twelve lightly beaten eggs from the Cellar Spider that lives in the cobwebs draped over our chandelier.

Agatha knows better than to clean them off, as that spider used to be my sister Constance. My mother’s lover many moons before she married into Candlestick Kingdom, the man who she told me had magic wands for fingers, turned my sister into a spider when he found out she was not his own. She had come out of the womb with pink and white spiraled candles for fingers, trying in vain to wrap them around our mother’s thumb before she was turned into a spider.   

“Don’t put your ovaries all in one basket,” my mother used to tell me. “That’s how you get your heart broken.”

My mother had been courted by a number of men from Candlestick Kingdom. Some had silver trinkets for noses. Others had beet roots for veins you couldn’t see but that formed a complex network of capillaries inside their bodies. She ultimately chose my father—not only because he didn’t have the fleshy fingers to smudge her face with, but because he was the only suitor not burdened by self-hatred. The rest couldn’t stand a lifetime of looking back at the face they hated in the face they loved. My father loved himself so much he enjoyed looking at himself. Every time they’d prepare to descend the palace steps and greet the public, he’d look deep into my mother’s face, blow out his fingertips, and smooth his mustache with his candlestick fingers.

“I think it’s time,” my father says.

"No," I say firmly, as if death were a yes-or-no question. But her hand is cold, and he is right. It's time.

Not much later, Seraphina the Seer's vision comes true. My mother is just a mirror now, like any other mirror—like the mirror in the washroom or the mirrored walls in the boudoir—mirrors that cannot breathe or dream or hold your hand when you are sad. I ugly cry in her face, and I see my lips and nose contort in ways I didn’t know were possible.

All I can do in this moment is wish for this nightmare to be over.

I fixate on the uneaten cake sitting on the dresser. I wonder what was the point.

My father blows out his fingers so that he can help Agatha carry my mother without shattering her face. As they always do, it’ll take until sunrise the next day for his fingertips to relight themselves.

He lifts my mother’s head carefully and Agatha holds her ankles. Without a mouth, all of Agatha’s sadness seems to come out through her eyes, nose, and pores. I hand her a handkerchief, and for the first time without smoothing his mustache in my mother's face, my father descends the palace steps, carrying my mother to the carriage waiting outside.

***

I don’t know how much time has passed between now and the funeral, and I can barely remember what happened in between, but I’m here now. I’m dressed in a black gown, carrying my sister Constance in a glass cup with my father standing on one side and Agatha on the other.

Every person in Candlestick Kingdom has gathered to honor my mother. Even her magic-wand lover is here. I look down at his fingers somberly folded in front of him and stupidly wonder if they can bring my mother back to life.

The appraiser is here, too. He makes a sentimental speech that my mother’s head was valued at a price too special to put a number on. Agatha must have spent all evening polishing my mother’s face, because as she lies in the casket face up, it reflects back the sky above her more clearly than if you were to look up at the sky itself.

As the people of Candlestick Kingdom dab their turnip noses, peppermint eyes, and licorice mouths, my mother is lowered into the ground. I rub my temples and try to escape this nightmare, but I’m too deep in—as deep as my mother is now.

We return to the palace that night, and I lie on the floating bed of storm clouds face down. I can still smell my mother's musty, aged-wood scent embedded in the water droplets. I stay like that for what feels like hours, inhaling her scent, slipping in and out of consciousness like one of the silk nightgowns she used to let me borrow, when I suddenly hear her voice.

“I'm here."

My mother is back, standing at the foot of a bed that is no longer a storm cloud. I do not know what time it is. I am lying on my back with my hands folded over my chest the way hers were in the casket. I am too releived and overcome with gratitude to move.

“Lilith?”

The familiarity of her voice brings me solace. Her face is now a face, but I still see myself in it. I bring myself to sit upright and move toward the foot of the bed, my heart now beating inside my chest. My face feels warm to the touch, then hot. I reach toward my mother to wrap my arms around her but nearly fall off the bed from the heat on my face. I look around the room to find the source of the heat, but the window is shut and the drapes are closed, and I find nothing.

I pick myself up and move toward her again. She reaches out toward me, and I reach out back, but my face has become so unbearably hot that, right before we make contact, my eyes open.

It's sunrise in Candlestick Kingdom, and my father's warm fingers, waving above my sleeping head to wake me up from a dream I didn't want to leave, have relit themselves.