By the Candles
Ethel Grunfelt was sitting with her butt just on the edge of the counter, her legs propped up on the edge of the kitchen island across from her. She was spreading and stretching out her little feet so as to clear a tiny spot for them on the cluttered surface– crumbs and kleenex with brown stains were pushed aside and she settled into her little position perched up on the counter so she could watch over her mother. She was wiping her little nose with her sweater and she thought that she should use one of the kleenexes but now they were too far away and she didn’t want to get down, plus the sweater was easy enough to use and maybe she’d wash it later or tomorrow. Mama was across the room, sitting deep in the La-Z-Boy watching a show on the TV where men in red plaid were shooting at little ducklings with big guns, smoking pipes. Mama was surrounded and illuminated totally by candles, and if Ethel squinted then her mom looked kind of like an effigy or a sacrificial lamb. She was smoking a cigarette but Ethel thought she must’ve forgotten about it because the ash– Ethel was watching the ash more so than her mama– it fell into her moms lap and she didn’t notice it. Ethel wondered how she could not smell the cigarette and be reminded of it but brains are weird and her mom wasn’t exactly there, she thought.
‘Mama!’ Ethel called out. Her mom didn’t turn her head in response so Ethel shouted out ‘Jeanine!’ and Jeanine turned around. ‘Your cigarette!’
Jeanine went wide-eyed and noticed the cigarette that was down to the filter and threw it down on the ground and settled back in. Little Ethel instinctively got off from the counter and scurried over to her mama and picked the cigarette up and put it in the ashtray. Then she scampered back to her spot on the counter. The men on the TV fired a shot at the mallard, but he dove underwater just in time and escaped to his nest where there was a camera crew waiting, filming. Soon the plaid men got around the pond and got the mallard in their sights and fired and then he was a duck laying down with a few tiny holes in him. Then an ad-break.
Jeanine grunted and mumbled something from her chair but the commercials on the TV drowned it out.
“What was that, mama?” chirped Ethel.
“Serves them right,” Jeanine said. “Stay there. Serves ‘em right.”
“What do you mean, mama?”
Jeanine turned from the TV and looked at Ethel with her lips parted and a look of wild confusion in her eyes. “What, on Earth, are you saying, Ethel?” She took a cigarette out of the box and lit it. “Are you talking to yourself again?” It seemed that with every word she said the candles flickered out and then burned back, brighter. The room was only lit by candles; Jeanine’s voice was the light and dark.
“No, mom, you said something about ‘serves them right,’ and I was wondering what you mean, is all. I was talking to you”
“Serves who right? Is someone here?”
“I mean on the TV, mama. The ducks.”
Jeanine turned and looked at the TV, where a man was advertising used trucks and motorcycles in worn out colors. “There are no ducks, Ethel. Can’t you see I’m trying to watch?”
Ethel gripped the edge of the counter and stared at her mom’s thinning hair and then jumped off the counter and grabbed a heap of the used tissues and the scraps of paper and tin foil in a big handful and dumped them in the trash can. She filled up the kettle and put it on the burner.
“Mom?” she called.
Jeanine made no response but Ethel continued anyway. “I’m going to my room. I’ll only be gone a second. Please don’t burn the house down, will you?” And after waiting around for a response she turned and scurried down the hallway lined with old newspapers coated in wax, and candles melted down to stubs, and into her room.
Solace. Ethel pulled off her sweater and in the dim, moonlit room she grabbed her matches and lighted the candles and incense on her desk. She stood in the center of the room and took a deep breath, another, and then kicked away the clothes on the floor so that there was a little spot for her to sit. Then, in a blur of stringy curls and over-picked fingernails, she turned and jumped onto her bed and took down the poster which hung above. It was a poster of beetles. She hopped off her bed and set it down in the little clearing on the floor and then kneeled down right before it and put her face so close to the paper that she couldn’t even make out any of the bugs, just colors and lines that seemed to make no sense but to her were beautiful and exactly what she sought. She moved the curls out of her eyes and smiled and laughed to herself and kissed the poster, and then lifted her head up and stared at them intensely, purposefully, as if her stare could make them pop off of the page and come to life.
And then it seemed to her that they really did. The small ones lining the edge of the poster arose from their slumber, wiping their eyes with their little beetle legs, and they moved. Tiny ones that looked like blueberries or marbles glittered metallically, running around over the big ones that were still only ink, although they too would soon rise. They stopped and looked at each other and then at Ethel– they looked right at her– and then they ran up to her and climbed atop her knees and up her legs, resting in the folds of her shirt, chittering happily.
The Japanese beetles woke up, as did the ladybugs. They took off in flight, buzzing around the room like little angels glowing in the soft candlelight. They flew over to the windowsill and gazed at the moon, then they would turn and look at Ethel and, as she watched them, it seemed that they sighed and gazed at her lovingly, then some of them took off in flight and came to her and let the blue beetles on her legs climb on them and they flew their passengers around the room, letting them see the world as they never had before. They landed on Ethel’s hair and shoulders and she had never been so happy. She felt like love incarnate; she could remember none of her sadness or anxiety and she forgot the ducks and the cluttered counter and everything besides the beetles.
She ran her fingers over the paper, over the beetles that had not yet awoken, and her touch brought them to life. First their massive mandibles, and then their legs and then their shiny bodies rose out of the paper like babies brought out of the baptismal water, and they stretched their heads to the sky and all turned to look at Ethel. Beetles of every color, beetles who looked like scraps of damascus steel or petrified wood. A symphony of their tiny footsteps and chirps and buzzes, and Ethel joined in, and then it seemed to her that their chittering took on an English aspect, and soft words were spoken into her ear by the ladybugs and she could not make out any of the words specifically, but she knew the feeling they inspired in her although it had been long since she had felt that feeling before.
And then the big ones, the longhorn beetles all stopped. Ethel thought for a moment that they would sink back into the paper and her dream would be over, but then they moved again with newfound vigor and purpose. They strode to the clothes encircling them, and, using their horns or teeth, they dragged the clothing to the edge of the room and the floor was clear. And then it seemed to Ethel that there were so many more of them than had been on the poster, and her room was swarming with thousands of beetles of hundreds of species, climbing up the walls and flying onto the desk and dresser, and then they all stopped, every single beetle.
Ethel knew that they were to go away. It always happens. They all stopped and then they would run to the poster and sink back into it and she would have to hang it back up and go out to her mother.
But then they started moving again, all of them, and they moved over to her and past the paper and surrounded her, and they formed concentric circles that moved around her, shrinking and expanding and pulsing. So many circles, from the tiny one nearest to her to the circle at the edge of the room that must have been made up of hundreds of beetles, moving in alternating directions, put her in a trance. Her hands started to rise in front of her, involuntarily, and she felt magical. She felt magical; life coursing through her.
Then a lone beetle who had been sitting on the lip of a candle took flight and landed on her palm. It was translucent– she could see its inner organs that looked like a little engine. On its back was a little bit of gold, a flake like a hat that glittered. It moved across her palm and stared into her eyes, its antennae flicking up and down, and then it was still and she knew it was asleep.
And then she heard the whistle of the kettle on the stove, and she snapped out of her trance and she was alone in the room and the beetles were gone. It was just little Ethel, kneeling before a poster, her hands in the air. But the gold-hatted beetle remained. It was still asleep, and she quickly jumped up and ran across her now clean floor and put the beetle on the dresser.
She felt something like a hunger pang in her heart. But there was no time to reflect, as the whistle grew louder and louder, and it was completely possible that her mother was in front of the TV, piling and piling cigarette ash in her lap. She went to check.