The wine was room temperature, which meant I'd poured it at six-thirty without thinking, the way I used to reach for my keys at a certain point in a party whether or not I was ready to leave. The phone screen had gone dark twice and I'd tapped it awake both times just to look at the lock screen, a photo of mountains I visited once and barely remember. The remote sat between me and the throw pillow, close enough to grab, far enough that grabbing it would be a decision. Outside, somebody's car alarm cycled through all five of its personalities and quit. I set the glass down on the coffee table, where it printed a pale ring, and I left the ring there and looked at it.
The group chat still showed three dots from someone who had typed something hours ago and never sent it. Everyone I knew was at Dana's fortieth. I opened the keyboard and got as far as anyone before her photo loaded: a rooftop, forty people, a pink drink shaped like a flamingo, someone's arm making a parenthesis around someone else's shoulders. I looked at it long enough for the phone to dim again. Then I deleted the word one letter at a time, which was slower than selecting it, and took exactly as long as I needed it to.
The power went out at eight-twelve. I know because the microwave clock blinked off mid-number and left a small black square where the time had been. The refrigerator sighed and stopped. The whole building went the kind of dark that makes you hear your own apartment.
The candle was on the second shelf of the cabinet above the stove, still in its brown paper bag with the hand-lettered price tag. Seven dollars, beeswax, and something the woman at the market had called meadow. I'd been saving it the way I save anything too nice to use, which is to say pointlessly. I set it on the kitchen table and lit it with the long lighter I keep for a grill I've used once, and the flame went sideways first and then found itself.
The library book on the counter had a sticker in the 590s on the spine, which means animals, which I hadn't known when I grabbed it in a hurry two weeks earlier because I needed something to carry to the checkout desk to justify the trip. I sat down at the kitchen table in the small ring of light because there was nothing else to do, and I mean that as the plain fact it was. No screen, no scroll, no refrigerator hum. One borrowed book about animals and a seven-dollar flame.
The first paragraph that actually arrived was about a moth that can smell a single molecule of the thing it needs from three miles away. I know it arrived because I had already read it four times while it didn't, and on the fifth pass the candle sputtered, and I looked up, and looked back down, and the moth was suddenly a real moth, three miles of dark air between it and something it couldn't name and moved toward anyway. I bent the corner of the page with my thumb, a small white triangle that is still there. The wax smell kept coming, honey with something drier underneath.
The lights snapped back on all at once, the kitchen too bright, the microwave blinking 12:00 in red. Across the room the phone shook itself awake against the coffee table, once, twice, then settled into a steady flicker of arrivals, blue-white, names I knew, small rectangles stacking up like cards being dealt to someone else's hand. The candle kept going, a thin column of smoke leaning east when the vents came back. I turned the page.
In the morning the book lay face down where I'd left it, spine cracked a little at the moth page, and under the candle was a wax ring the size of a quarter and the color of old tape. I made coffee and moved around the ring twice. The third time, I reached for the dish towel and then put it back on the oven handle, smoothing it flat the way my grandmother used to, a gesture I had never once made before and apparently owned anyway. I left the ring where it was and ate standing up at the counter, with the mug and the window and the particular Saturday light coming through the glass.
The next weekend the power went out again, our grid being what it is, and I wanted more candles, and the florist that sold beeswax was closed, and that is the only reason I finally stopped at the garden center I'd driven past for three years. I didn't buy a candle. I bought a paperwhite bulb in a little net bag, with a plastic tag promising bloom in six to eight weeks, which felt like a promise someone was making on behalf of a thing that didn't yet know what it was supposed to become. I carried it to the car in both hands, the way I used to carry drinks through a crowd, and at home I looked up the right planting depth and set the bulb in a glass bowl I've had since an apartment I can barely picture, and put the bowl on the kitchen table next to the wax ring, which was still there.
My mother called on a Sunday and asked what I'd been up to, and I said not much, and she said that sounds nice in the voice that means she doesn't believe it. While she talked I watched the one green spike the bulb had put up, crooked and pale. I had moved the bowl three times chasing the light across the sill before I understood it didn't need me hovering. Don't be a hermit, my mother said, and I said I won't, and neither of us meant anything sharp by it. After we hung up I stood at the window tilting the bowl toward the gray afternoon, and the roots had gone long and white in the dark of the water, feeling their way toward something I couldn't see from where I stood.
The paperwhite opened on a Wednesday while I was in the other room, and by the time I noticed, it had clearly been open for a while, white and slightly medicinal, the smell arriving ahead of the fact of it. There had been another invitation the weekend before, a bar, somebody's birthday spelled out in gold balloon numbers in a photo that landed on my phone while I was reading. I said maybe and then stayed home, and the staying felt like setting down something I had been carrying at a bad angle for a long time. The dish towel was straight on the oven handle again; I couldn't remember doing it. I cut one stem with the kitchen scissors, stood it in a juice glass with an inch of water, carried it to the desk, and turned on the lamp even though it wasn't dark yet.
