Do Not Go Quietly

by Jason Sizemore

  It’s the last evening of the year, as glittering cold as a guillotine blade, and the snow makes blue hummocks of familiar landmarks up and down the avenues of the great city, all the way to the factory gates. Mara watches the last of the holiday crowds go by, bundled and fur-framed against the cold, warm and on their way to warmer, in brightly-lit parlors and dining rooms, and she wants to throw her basket of matches after them like a curse. Were Father still alive, he would beat her for even thinking of such waste, but Father is long dead in the garden where they plant paupers, burned to a cinder in his bed one night while she was out selling her wares.

  The world is cruel to orphans, cruel as a man reeking of drink with a strap in his hand. His death has made things no easier, although she’s still glad for it, down in her secret heart of hearts. What she makes now, she keeps. She uses it to buy more matches from the factory girls—the match-makers with their swollen gums and gapped smiles, with lives like mayflies—and in this way she keeps alive a little longer, one more sunrise and one more sunset, snatched defiantly like a pork pie from a windowsill. But her cheeks are very thin, now, are Mara’s, and every night this winter is a little colder than the one before it. The rich have long since wired their homes for electric bulbs, mimicking the royal family in their palace on the hill, and the poor hoard their matches like gold or the last bite of stew, buying more only when it’s necessary.

  She reaches out for a passerby’s trouser leg and earns a kick for her troubles that scatters her matches in the snow. Frantically, hissing curses under her breath, she scrambles to scoop them back up, praying to Grandmother and fickle Lady Luck, both, they won’t be ruined by the wetting. Grandmother had vanished not long before Father’s death, during the bright mosquito-bite summer when the nights were longest and the skirmishes outside the palace hottest. Mara’s father had toasted the old revolutionary’s presumed death, but Mara still holds out hope that, someday, she’ll return for her girl. It’s the one bright spot that keeps her hanging on, the goad that moves her to snatch up the matchsticks when she otherwise might simply watch them sink into the dirty slush.

  Her grimy hand does not tremble as she strikes one against the basket handle, resigned to whatever may come to pass. The sputter and hiss as the sulphur tip catches and blazes like a morning star beneath her cupped palm is a relief, but not as much as the sound of a sizzling goose or frying bacon would be right now, when all she’s got in her belly is a crust of soggy bread and half a Christmas orange a passerby handed her in lieu of coins, earlier that evening. Mara always accepts food when they offer it. She rejects their pitying looks, the sad shaking of a hat-swaddled head atop a scarf-wrapped neck, the way they want to make her into something she isn’t—something that doesn’t belong to her, but to them. A symbol, an icon like the ones all gaudy-painted in church, dying in the snow.

  She’d rather them just buy the bloody matches and throw them away, if it came down to it. It makes no different what they do with the things, so long as they pay up.

  The little flame is warm, bright, and for her and her alone. For the briefest of moments, her fingers stop being numb as it burns down to their tips. And then, just like that, it’s gone, smoke sighing away into the lowering sky like the soul from a body. Mara is left alone in darkness, feeling even wetter and colder than before.

  She could go to the orphanage run by the church, but she knows all too well what the nuns and priests get up to in there; there are plenty of other escaped orphans on the streets with stories to turn your hair white. Grandmother had always been dismissive of the entire institution. She would wave her hand at their newspaper-wrapped feet—the holes in the roof of their hovel, the grim factories hemming them in, the grand, distant domes of the royal palace—and bark a laugh, cold as the sparks off an iron wheel.

  “Whose god,” she would ask of no one in particular, “that’s what I’d like to know. Is there a God reserved for them up on the hill, and another assigned to us down below? Does He walk up and down the factory rows with a little badge and notebook in His hands, handing out citations, scribbling down the names of them that works hardest and suffers longest? ’Cause so far as I can tell, there’s no God down here and never been in my lifetime. Maybe He’s something you take for yourself like a loaf of bread or a rich man’s pocket watch.”

  On the rare occasion or two Father had taken her to mass, the priest had gone on at length about the importance of suffering. To suffer hardships without complaint was a virtue, he said, and virtue would surely bring you closer to God. But if that’s true, Mara finds herself thinking, she and the girls who work in the match factory should glow from head to toe like consecrated candles. It feels like a lie told to comfort someone—a lie told to soothe someone into a cold, frozen sleep.

  Sleep. She knows better than that. Don’t sleep. Light another match and be done with virtuous suffering, if only for the length of a single match’s lifetime. The sharp hiss of the head striking brings her eyes back into focus, warding her eyelids off for another sweep of the clock’s hands. In the glow, she sees a vision, indistinct, as if seen through a gauzy curtain or a frosted windowpane.

  There is an older man in a study, balding but well-dressed. A warm fire roars in the grate behind him, well-fed and stoked without a care for how much fuel it might be burning. On the desk next to his inkwell, something in a mug wisps steam. Tea, maybe; he has to blow on it before taking a sip. A maid comes in to carry away the remains of a half-gnawed roast mutton, doing her best not to disturb him.

  Mara cannot see what he is writing, but somehow, in her vision, she knows all too well what the spidery handwriting must say. It is a fairy story, a parable about the virtue of suffering as she now suffers, cold and mute and alone. Resistance is wicked. Want is wicked; little girls and women who want more, wickedest of all. God only blesses those who slog soundlessly beneath their burdens and die with a smile. To them, the gates of Heaven will eventually open, even if the only gates ever unlocked to them on Earth were the iron-tipped bars of a factory.

  Anger and resentment at the brokenness of the world should be snuffed out at all costs.Anger rises in her own limbs, swift and sudden and warming as a hot mug of cider, gulped all at once. Who does this moral serve? Why try to lull her and those like her to sleep, when that sleep will eventually kill them as surely as slow poison?

  Jaw clenched, cold and hunger temporarily forgotten, she leans in closer.

  A draft of air from somewhere causes the candle on the writer’s desk to gutter. As he looks up from his work at the sudden darkness, his elbow catches the candlestick’s base. It teeters and wobbles and totters, finally falling against his shoulder in a splash of hot tallow and sparks. Flame leaps from the wick to the wool of his frock coat, catching merrily in the time it takes to blink. He leaps to his feet, so fast he upsets his chair, beating frantically at himself. In his panic, he trips over the overturned furniture, totters, and, like the candlestick before him, tumbles to earth, brushing a set of curtains on the way down. They go up with almost as much gusto as the woolen coat. The entire elegant study is now rimmed in fire, the man knocked unconscious in his fall.

  The maid has just burst in and is shrieking in the doorway when the match finally goes out. The crackle of the flames cuts off abruptly. Once more, there is nothing but the soft, muffled sounds of the winter night, the distant rumble of carriages throwing up slush and the creak of street signs in the cold wind.

  Mara realizes she is smiling.

  How awful, she makes herself think. What a vision to have, of such a terrible accident! If I should light another, perhaps it would erase the memory of that poor man’s suffering with its cheerful light.

  The tips of her fingers are blistered and throbbing, now. She relishes the feeling as she strikes a third. Again, a vision plays out before her eyes, the frozen spines of her lashes.

  She herself is in this one. Mara has rarely seen her own reflection, but she knows who the ragged figure is in the way of dreams, a familiarit
y like staring at her own hands folded in her lap. She looks … warm. Her mitten-less fingers are outstretched over a great bed of coals and ashes at her feet. Water drips from her snow-wetted braid. She has a stick in one hand that she’s using to poke and prod at the smoldering mess in front of her, stirring up sparks like clouds of summer midges.

  She is not alone. Jenny, one of the girls who toils in the match factory, crouches beside her, cheeks rosier than they’ve ever been, her own braid thick and yellow. When this Jenny smiles, she has all her teeth, spared by the poison vapors that have stripped them in life. She pokes at the embers with a stick as well, chatting to Mara in a familiar way they’ve never been allowed in the waking world. Another expert jab and she’s drawing a potato out of the coals, sooty and steaming, jacket split to reveal the mealy goodness inside. Looking at it makes Mara-in-the-here’s mouth water. Her shrunken stomach seizes fiercely enough that she almost drops the match.

  The two girls halve the potato. It burns their fingers and they laugh, tossing the pieces in the air, blowing on them to try and make the red-hot chunks cool faster. The vision recedes, as if Mara is hiding in the back of a wagon, slowly pulling away. She can see, now, that there is a great mountain of burnt timbers and smoking rubble, metal bars half-melted and tilting to prod the gray sky. Mara and her companion—doll-sized, now, against the ruin—are cooking their meal in the remains of some great burning. Occasionally something shifts and crashes. Snowflakes sizzle and hiss in tiny, agonized whispers as they fall from Heaven.

  The gates of the factory are flung off their hinges, whether from the fire or from some other force. All that’s left of the match manufacturer’s industry is a pile of glowing coals, a warm place where two girls can munch on potatoes and enjoy each other’s company. Mara wants it to be real so badly, she can almost smell the hot, wet ash, can almost feel the heat of the potato as she sinks her front teeth into the gritty mess. Tears are freezing on her face as the final match burns her fingertips black.

  Not yet, says a voice behind her closing eyelids. It sounds an awful lot like Grandmother, or maybe Jenny, or maybe both of them together at once. You’re close, you’re so awfully close, you’ve got your name took back and your purpose tucked in and you’re glowing inside, all rosy-red, but you’ve just a little further to go. Can you see it? Can you see where you need to go from here?

  Θ

  They find her frozen against the factory gates the next morning, a bundle of spent matches clutched in one blue hand. What a pity, the constables say. Was this the girl they called Mara? She never was one to ask for help, poor beast. Suffered quiet as anything, never complained after her father passed. Like a little saint.

  The matchstick girls know better. That was Mara, they say to each other. She never asked for anything from this lot, and why should she have to? Why should any of us have to? Don’t we deserve to live better than this, scraping and starving and dying of the phossy jaw to pad the pockets of them in the palace over yonder?

  It’s the last evening of the year, as glittering cold as a bayonet’s tip, and the snow makes blue hummocks of familiar landmarks up and down the avenues of the great city, all the way to the royal barracks. Mara watches the soldiers clomp-stomp by in clusters of twos and threes, collars turned up and hat flaps tugged down, already enough applejack working in their systems to turn the teeth of the bitterest wind, and she doesn’t even try to sell them what’s in her basket, in case they recognize her from the week before. She’s just a thin-faced girl shivering in the snow, a basket of matches at her half-frozen feet. As long as that’s all she is, she’s safe.

  Since the night of the factory fire, her family and friends have been scattered like handbills in a high wind, some in hiding and some captured and a few others most certainly frozen breathless beneath the ground. The broadsheets wrapped around her hands and feet had blamed it all on an arsonist riot, a violent rabble making unreasonable demands of their bewildered employers. They made no mention at all of the girls dead, or disfigured from phosphorus fumes, the bread shortages squeezing the city like a broken accordion, or the private army the factory owners had hired to break up the strike that really wasn’t private in the slightest. They may not notice Mara as they pass, on their way to parties and saloons, but she recognizes many of their faces beneath royal livery.

  The second, third, and fourth pages of the newspaper had been devoted to an account of the youngest princess’s confirmation. Ten thousand blessed candles had burned, as the priest delivered the rites (the demand for matches had outstripped the factory’s ability to manufacture them; this was not touched upon). There was a detailed description of the many gifts the princess had received, the important guests who had attended, and the banquet table, where they had all nibbled and grazed afterwards. No shortage of food behind the palace walls, that was for certain.

  What about Jenny, and Olga, and all the rest of the girls out of a job, now that the factory is a smoking pile of rubble? What of the organizers, their blood spilled on the snow beneath the clubs of soldiers with faces as hard and red as bricks? Mara would pray for their safety, but prayers must go through the church, and the church is a compromised channel. She settles on lighting a match for them, instead, a tiny spark that turns the flesh of her cupped hand to rosy stained glass. Let Princess Annalise have her ten thousand flames. This one belongs to the girls of the factory.

  Such a little thing, a match. So unimportant, in this new era of electricity. But a match was a free agent; it needed no bulb or wire down which to run to be dangerous. Mara watches it push back the night in wonderment. It gives her the same feeling in the pit of her chest she gets when Grandmother talks to a crowd like they’re a bundle of matches themselves, and all they need to burst into a mighty, roaring torch is the deft strike of some unseen hand. The factory bosses had felt it and had feared and hated the old woman above all other foes. Now the rulers of the kingdom know what she’s capable of, as well, and soldiers pace the streets and alleys night and day, looking for an excuse to stick a bayonet between someone’s shoulder blades. It’s not safe for Grandmother to show her face in public, not even to collect her only grandchild. Mara misses her so badly, it ties her empty stomach in knots, but she at least understands. They had gone over the risk of this happening long ago.

  “If we should get pinned apart and you can’t go home, the best thing you can do is stick tight in one place and wait it out,” Grandmother had said in her smoky rasp. “You got friends, and one of our people will happen along and find you before too long. Keep warm and keep your head down, and I’ll be back soon’s I can. I’m a hard one to snuff, else they wouldn’t always try so hard to do it.”

  It had been a good plan, and sound advice at the time, and because Mara loved and trusted Grandmother like she trusted the sun’s rising, she had followed it to the letter, finding a doorway in a side alley and making camp there. But days had passed, and then weeks, and none of their people had ever happened along. Mara tries not to worry too much about them. She focuses on surviving, scraping and stealing and selling her matches when someone’s actually willing to stop and buy.

  The match goes out. The alley is almost totally silent, save for the distant crunching of some passerby’s boots in the snow. Mara has never felt so cold before. Her ears ache with it. Her cheeks have gone numb with it. Her fingers are clumsy, dead things that refuse to work properly as she fumbles and gropes in her basket for another two sticks, desperate to ward that inky darkness off for just a moment longer. Maybe someone who isn’t a soldier will happen by and see her and take pity. Maybe the heat will wake her up just a little. Maybe—

  A vision in the spark and hiss and sudden flare, seen as if through thin muslin curtains.

  The grand cathedral of ten thousand candles glowing with a holy white light, pews filled with the rich and the powerful and the gilded. Princess Annalise, so good and pure, kneels at the feet of the archbishop and he blesses her, prays for her, secures her place in Heaven Above. All thos
e who witness the benediction smile and simper and feel that this is right, is good, is owed. They don’t really notice the candles, let alone consider who made the matches that lit each one. They are deaf to the voices of the girls screaming for justice inside the flames, although the howl is so loud, Mara can’t imagine how that could be. All they can hear is the power jangling inside their own pockets, buying them an audience with God.

  There’s a sudden gust of wind down the nave that sets plumes on fancy hats shaking and fur-lined collars to trembling like dandelion fluff. Shadows flicker and test their wings. The voices of the girls in the candles are a righteous chorus, now, rebellious angels harmonizing at the moment before the fall. All of the little fires seem to blow and join together until both sides of the cathedral are sheets of living, singing flame. They reach up and up, setting the walls alight—licking at the rafters—and then—

  Again, the matches sputter and die. The vision fades, although Mara’s ears still ring with the sound of ten thousand ghostly voices raised in song. She sits in the quiet for a moment, trying to commit the sound of the tune to memory.

  She grabs three, this time, striking them all at once against the brick wall at her back.

  “Get up,” says Jenny, grabbing her roughly by the shoulder. There is no veil between her and this vision. She’s pulled to her feet by it, linked arm-in-arm with it, half-carried down the blue alleyway by a friend who cannot possibly be there. Jenny hasn’t been this spry in months. The phossy jaw has eaten her strength so she can barely stand upright at her place on the factory floor, and yet here she is, as solid and real as the cold and the hunger and the darkness, pulling Mara along to who knows where. Her grip is iron. “You’ve got places to be. Don’t argue—just-come-on!”

  They round a corner and come face-to-face with a drunken huddle of soldiers, who blessedly pay them no mind. Mara tries finding her voice to ask where they’re going, but she seems to have left it behind in the alleyway along with her basket of matches. Up a dog-legged side street so narrow their shoulders touch the walls—down snow-clogged closes and thoroughfares choked with cheerful crowds of midnight revelers—shambling across busy avenues just beneath the hooves and noses of overworked carriage horses—on and on and on Jenny drags her, steadily puppeteering them both uphill to where the palace sags beneath its domes and spires and clustered growths of incandescent bulbs. It glows like a false moon, just over the next rise, desperate to be noticed even out of eyeshot.