Matches

The power went out. Again.

  Sally fumbled around for the matchbox on the counter and clumsily struck a match on the rough side of it. The little flickering light swallowed up most of her tiny dark apartment in a faint orange glow.

  Stupid power grid. What am I even paying taxes for?

  They said they shut the power off because of the snowstorms. Personally, Sally thought that the power company was just incompetent and couldn’t fix the lines fast enough, but saying that wasn’t going to help anything.

   They could’ve at least waited until I finished making my coffee. Gosh. 

  She stood in front of the mirror above the couch, the match in her right hand, while she fixed her frizzy ginger hair with her left. 

  The bags under my eyes are so big they could carry groceries. Gosh. I look like a walking corpse.

  Well, as long as it’s snowing, I’m not going anywhere.

  She was startled by the loud buzzing of her ringtone. She reached down and felt around for the top of her flip-phone sticking out of her back pocket. She flipped it open and answered it.

  “Hey, Sally Watterson here.” Sally sandwiched the phone in between her head and her shoulder and walked over to the kitchen counter, emptying the half-made coffee in the pot with one hand and carrying the match in the other.

  “Weather’s pretty bad out there.” The voice on the other end said, distorted by the buzzy sound quality.

  “Huh, no kidding.” As she reached over to turn off the faucet, the match fell into the sink and fizzled out. “Dang it.”

  “Sally, light another match. I can’t see you.”

  The voice was strangely familiar, but she couldn’t quite place it.

  “Who is this?” She walked over to the counter and set the empty coffee pot down.

  The person on the other end laughed sweetly. “Sally, it’s Kevin, remember?”

  Kevin? Kevin. Oh my gosh.

  Sally dropped the phone and the matches, frozen in panic. 

  “Sally? Sally, are you there?”

  She blinked twice, her breathing sporadic, and knelt to the ground fumbling around for the matchbox. It was much harder now to actually find it because of the pitch blackness in the room and the furious shaking of her hands. 

  Her hand seized the small rectangular box and one of the matches scattered across the floor, and in one swift motion she struck it and illuminated the room again. She could now see the phone on the floor, and reluctantly she reached down and picked it up.

  She swallowed a large breath, thinking maybe that might steady her voice. “This isn’t funny! Look, I don’t know who—”

  “Hey, I can see you now!”

  She spun around again, holding the match a full arms length away from her as if it would ward off whatever devil was on the other end of the phone. Shaking, she rose to her feet. 

  In the mirror above the couch, she could see a shadow on the wall behind her. It wasn’t hers. It was shorter and thinner, and etched out of the wall in a deep black that defied the light of the match.

  Holy crap.

  Sally hung up the phone and flipped it closed. It didn’t do a thing.

  The shadow stepped out from behind her. “Hey, Sally… it’s been a while.”

  Sally turned. The shadow seemed normal in all other respects, it was connected at her feet and stretched all the way up the wall. But when it came to the shadow itself, it seemed to elude the matches’ glow and move as it pleased.

  None of its features were detailed. It didn’t have an expression. But the way that it moved, the tone of its voice was radiantly alive in just the way Sally remembered.

  It was unmistakably Kevin.

  “What on earth are you doing here?”

  “I’ve been here. I’m just never able to talk to you.” Kevin kicked sheepishly at the floor, but there was no sound.

  “What– why?”

  “Well, you never use candles or matches. That’s the only way you can see me,” Kevin said, picking a discarded match up off of the floor and setting it gingerly on the counter. The match seemed to be levitating. “And I never called because I didn’t think you’d answer the phone for your dead childhood friend.”

  Dead childhood friend.

-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-

  Sally and Kevin had been neighbors since Kevin’s family, the Colbys, had moved in when they were both three years old. Their houses faced each other, and between them was a wide, stone-gray street. Their kingdom.

  Sally’s mom had always said to be careful when they played in the street. But they’d done it for years, and nothing bad had ever happened. Mom was crazy. She didn’t know that Sally and Kevin were invincible.

  Sally soon found out this wasn’t the case.

  It was a warm evening in early July. Sally wanted to run one last race before they had to say goodbye for the night, so they hauled their bikes a few houses down and lined up in between the two mailboxes, the designated starting line.

  “Ready? Three… two… one!”

-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-

  “You died, Kevin. You died. I was there.” Sally’s voice was cut out by a sob. She wiped her face on her sleeve unceremoniously and cleared her throat.

  “Gosh. How are you here?”

  Kevin danced back across the wall and stopped right in front of Sally. “I told you, I’ve been here. This whole time.”

  Sally stared at Kevin, or rather, this construction-paper cutout of him on the wall. She could see it. His messy blonde hair and brown eyes. His freckled face and innocent smile, complete with braces and teeth that dipped just below his lip.

  She had ignored and avoided any memory of that face for eleven years. 

  Distressed, Sally blew out the match and threw it on the carpet. She only had a few seconds of silence before her phone vibrated in her back pocket. 

  Reluctantly, she answered.

  “What was that for?” He chirped on the other end, childish offense in his voice.

  “You don’t understand,” Sally’s eyes flickered around the walls. Without the match, she was surrounded by black on all sides. “I already got over it. I already did all the stuff they tell you to do when a person dies.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like, accept the fact that they’re gone and you’re never gonna see them again. Like that.”

  “Well, I’m here right now,” Kevin said. “So whoever told you that stuff is wrong. You should be happy.”

  “I’m not happy! You know why?”

  “No. Really, I don’t.”

  -x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-

  Kevin bolted ahead of her, but Sally wasn’t far behind. She had lost quite a few of the races that day, something Kevin loved to tease her about, and she was determined not to lose this one.

  They had just passed the Fitzgeralds’ house, Kevin’s neighbors. Kevin’s house was the one right before the turn. The finish line.

  Headlights. 

  A bright red car flew around the turn, heading straight for Kevin and Sally. Startled, Sally swerved, hit the curb and fell off of her bike, landing on the Colby’s front lawn. 

  -x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-

  “I— I don’t know either, Kevin.”

  “Well, there’s your problem.” Kevin teased. “Now can you light that match, please?”

   Sally flipped the phone closed and scraped the match on the rough side of the box, igniting it. There he was, plastered on the wall.

  “What do you want from me, anyhow?” Sally flopped down on the couch across the room from the shadow, raising the match up to illuminate the room.

  “I just want to talk to you,” Though Kevin’s smile couldn’t be seen, it could be heard in the upward movement of the tone of his voice. “I haven’t seen you in a long time.”

  He says that as if he hasn’t been dead for eleven years.

  “Anything in particular?”

  “I do have a few burning questions.” Kevin sat down on the floor.

  “Lay ‘em on me.”

  “Well, back home you always said you’d love to move to a small town. Like the one you’d go to over spring break to visit your Grandpa.” Sally stared at Kevin. She knew where this was going.

  “So, why’d you move to Chicago, of all places?”

  I had to get out of Pennsylvania.

  “Oh, you know how it is…”

  That neighborhood. That street. 

  “You graduate, you’re in your twenties…”

  I couldn’t stand the emptiness.

  “Some things just change.”

  -x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-

   “Sally. Sally, honey, wake up.”

  Mom. 

  Sally was lying on the couch in Kevin’s living room, the lights off. The only light was the glow of the dying sun, bleeding over the horizon.

  Mrs. Colby was standing in the doorway, her hazel eyes glittering with sudden misery as she stared out the window at something in the street. The telephone cord was wrapped around her arm, the phone pressed against her face as black mascara tears ran down her cheeks.

  “Please, come as quickly as you can—”

  Sally sat up and stared out the window, realization slowly dawning on her. A glimpse of a twisted red bicycle and Mr. Colby kneeling on the pavement was all she caught before her mother sat in front of her and blocked her view of the tragedy unfolding in the street.

  “Sally, it’s going to be fine.”

  It was obvious it wasn’t. Mom had that same look of regret on her face as Mrs. Colby. Her eyes shining with diamond tears, her pupils dilated in terror.

  In her heart she knew, but by four o’clock the next morning it was confirmed.

  Kevin Colby was dead.

  And to Sally Watterson, now 23, it was still an open wound.

 “Things like what? You haven’t changed all that much.” Kevin said, his head cocked slightly. “You’re just… older.”

  “And you’re not.” Sally paused. “You should be. You should be here. You should be alive, Kevin.”

  “Look, Sally, it doesn’t really matter—”

  “I feel like I stole this from you.” Sally rose to her feet, gesturing around at the walls of the apartment. Kevin mirrored her on the wall. “High school graduation. My first job, my first kiss. This life in this city. Everything I’ve done and everything I’ve had feels like I stole it from you.”

  “Sally, thinking about it over and over again is gonna get you nowhere. Believe me.”

  “You don’t understand, Kevin! I can’t! I can’t live like this!”

  The smell of smoke. Sally looked to realize the match wasn’t in her hand anymore.

  I dropped the match.

  The russet-red carpet caught the embers, its burnt-out color suddenly turning a dangerous orange.

  Sally ran for the sink, snatching the coffee pot off of the counter and stuffing under the running faucet until the water rose to the top.

 This isn’t going to work, is it?

  Sally stood there in the living room, the coffee pot filled with water.

  Gosh.

  Shattered glass on the floor. The coffee pot in pieces.

  Oh my gosh.

  The temperature and flames rose. Sally’s back against the wall, the tremendous light casting a dim shadow behind her.

  “Sally, I’m here.”

  The air became hazy with smoke and the brilliant orange fire engulfed and illuminated her powerless apartment. The flames clawed at the carpet, growing ever closer to Sally, enlightening her mind with one last thought.

  Kevin was there. He had been all along.

  Then, as if on a cue, Sally’s vision went black.

-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-

  “Excuse me, ma’am?”

  Sally’s eyes flew open and in one sudden instant, she tried to recount everything that had happened. She looked around, bewildered.

  “Ma’am! Ma’am, calm down, it’s okay.” Her eyes caught on a man in a blue uniform right in front of her. She was surrounded by people.

  My neighbors.

  The smell of smoke lingered in the air.

  My apartment.

  “Ma’am, you’re okay,” the officer continued, as Sally slowly came to the realization that she was sitting on the sidewalk.

  “No. No I’m not.” She felt the matchbox in her back pocket. “Not yet.”

  Sally flew to her feet and dashed into the alley, snatching the matchbox out of her pocket. She struck the match on the side of the box a few times before it finally lit. 

  And there he was.

  In the darkness of the powerless city, the match seemed to illuminate the universe. Both stared at each other in sublime silence for a few moments before Sally finally dared to speak.

  “Thank you, Kevin.”