Bethany switched off the prayer room lamp, then flipped it back on quickly, and turned to see if the candle was extinguished. She had been prostrating before the figure of Mary holding baby Christ in her lap. Her nightly prayer had gone well, but what turned her head naturally was the fear the candle may still have lingering flame that would set the house on fire overnight. It was not for herself that she feared as much as the three children who were asleep on a bunk bed. As a mother, she could simply not believe her eyes. She saw invisible risks in each room and so when she turned on the light, it immediately crossed her mind that an active candle would show itself in the dark. 

 

The future was not as simple as logic to Bethany. She had to go over and snuff the dead candle twice and chant to herself, I have snuffed out the candle. I have snuffed out the candle. I will remember snuffing out the candle. Bethany did not like she was a worrisome woman. The childish demon that made her doubt reality so often had caused her only trouble and ache in her almost four decades of life. She liked herself when she prayed, when she told her children to believe than to complain, and even the way she had loved her husband knowing he would die in less than a year. She knew herself to be of two spirits, one that communicated with the invisible world, and the other that was forever shackled by the pragmatic doings of life. 

 

Yet the two spirits, which had a mind of their own, juggled her heart so carelessly that a certain exhaustion would take over her for a moment and suspend normal logic and boot her brain into oblivion. And so, when she turned on the light to check if there was a candlelight, she could forgive herself because it was, to an extent, not her. The children, Joel, Isiah, and Sarah, slept in one bedroom, where Sarah took the upper bank as the only girl and the oldest, and Joel and Isiah shared the lower one. Isiah, the second oldest, was thirteen and had an early growth spurt that elongated his arms and legs almost to the height of the bed. Joel seemed he would turn out shorter but for now had a wider and bigger stature at eleven, so the bed, floating the crisscrossed and contrasting bodily dimensions of the boys’, appeared to have no square inch unoccupied—except for when Isiah would wrap his long arms and tuck Joel in for a brotherly hug.