Flash Fictions from Web Del Sol


DEVOTION

Robert Hill Long

      A woman stamps the mud off her boots and asks the candlemaker to build a candle the exact height and weight of her son. It seems the saint has answered her prayer: the boy broke off a worrisome affair with a woman eight years older than he.

      "It has to be five feet nine inches, 169 pounds and white," she says. The candlemaker demurs, he can make one that tall but not that heavy. Not unless he constructs a special cypress mold--very expensive. She doesn't want to know the cost; she's promised the saint, she can't cheat him. The candlemaker takes out his pencil anyway and begins making estimates--lumber, paraffin, and does she want a special fragrance added?

      Outside, the downspouts are full of a drumming rain. Korea is wet like this, and colder. Her boy hasn't written since boot camp and now he's there, sleeping, she hopes, in a dry bunker behind the lines. She wishes the saint had separated them in some other way. But she won't light a candle that smells of gardenia or sweet bay.

      "Pine," she says, remembering the sap that oozed from the wormy planks drying in her father's shed, the resinous pause of his hands on the Bible: "Make it pine."


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