The Candle-Maker

Shen Jiu had spent his whole life making candles. His little shop at the mouth of the lane hung a worn cloth curtain, and inside there was always the soft smell of beeswax, mixed with old wood and lamp oil. He used no machines. His wax pot was copper, his molds were bamboo, and each candle was poured slowly by the warmth of his hands. The wicks were cotton thread, twisted three times, so the flame would neither sputter nor go out.

After autumn came the early dark. The first girl who came for a white candle arrived on the third night of the ninth month. She wore a grey cloth gown, stepped in without a word, lined copper coins along the counter, then pointed to the row of plain white tapers at the back. Shen Jiu asked whom they were for. She only said, "My mother fears the dark. I keep some by." Then she left, her steps so light it seemed she feared waking something.

From then on, on the third of every month, she came without fail, bought two of the same white candles, paid the same coins. Shen Jiu came to know her — not her face, but the way she always set the coins in a neat row, as if someone had taught her a rule.

Once he spoke out of turn, saying the white tapers were the longest-burning in his shop, one able to last till dawn. The girl paused, said nothing, and slipped away as quietly as before.

Late in the tenth month it rained, and she did not come. Shen Jiu kept the empty pot, heard rain on the tiles, and felt a strange hollow open in him. The next evening a man in black stepped through the door and asked, "The girl who buys white candles — do you know her?"

Shen Jiu looked up and stirred the wax in the copper pot. "Many come for candles. I do not recall."

The man slapped a creased paper on the counter. On it was drawn a courtyard gate and a dead tree beside it. "She is my sister. Our old house caught fire three years back; our mother died in it. Since then she has... has gone out each month, saying she means to light a lamp for Mother. But the house is sealed, and there she is, a young woman, crouching in that waste ground at midnight. I worry for her."

Shen Jiu lowered his head and scraped the wax, and gave no answer.

When the man left, he shut the shop, took up the horn lantern he had made himself, and felt his way toward the place the man had named. West of the city lay ruined ground, sour with the smell of rain on earth. Far off he saw a point of white light, wavering at the foot of a broken wall. He softened his steps and drew near — it was the girl, kneeling beyond the charred threshold, setting a white candle into the mud. The flame was flattened by the wind and showed tears on her face, and a kind of smile.

"Mother, I brought the osmanthus cakes you loved," she said to the empty, blackened soil, as if someone truly sat within.

Shen Jiu stood in the dark and did not step forward. He thought of his own wife, dead on the birthing bed, and of the two people this shop had once held. He turned and walked back, the horn lantern flickering in the rain.

On the third, the girl came again, lined her coins, pointed to the white candles. Shen Jiu wrapped them, and tucked in a small packet of beeswax scraps. "The wind is fierce," he said. "Add this, and they will burn longer."

The girl lifted her eyes — the first time she had met his — and gave a small nod.

The man in black came to ask twice more after that, and each time Shen Jiu said he could not recall. He was no busybody; he only felt that a person who would keep a lamp for the dead through the midnight hours ought not to be stopped.

The smell of wax in the shop stayed soft as ever. Yet now, each time Shen Jiu poured a candle, he set two plain white tapers aside at the back of the counter, to wait for the third night, and for that light step in the dark.