About Grief in Beeswax
Warning: Contains mention and description of child’s death after accident. Contains notions of suicide from characters.
Lighting a memory candle allows you to relive any day of your life, but the wax is made from days you have not yet lived. A mother uses it to see her dead child, each inch burned during the viewing shortening her future by a year. She has three inches of candle left and a lifetime to decide.
Six inches of candle, one inch a year of life per flame.
Light it: your past unwraps like newsreel nitrate—every scent, every syllable mirrored in the hazy flicker of a flame.
Blow it: a year you haven’t lived peels off the end of your story.
Mara’s son is dead at five years old from a pointless accident. She’s watched him laugh, run, breathe again… and again… and again.
Now the wax is a child’s finger, the wick a heartbeat. Thirty memories, maybe twenty, maybe ten.
Outside, the world turns on without her. Inside, she balances the candle like a loaded gun, counting birthdays she’ll never see against the dimple of a boy who will never grow.
Yet as she keeps burning she must choose: try and move past the dark years ahead hoping to heal an ache as old and known to mothers as time, or strike the match and meet her child one last time—knowing the final flare will swallow every tomorrow she has left.
Love is measured in melted wax.
And the night is almost gone.
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Author Bio:
Rafaela Drougouti lives in Athens with her family and a whole lot of stray cats. When she is not trying no turn some insane idea into a story or even an activity book, she loves reading, watching movies, anime and cartoons or raiding the internet in search of new interesting skills.