Three Candles

Three candles burned dimly in a dark room awash with the scent of rose water. Three dirty yellow points of light lit a face, wet and round. The heavily textured walls swam and shifted whenever the door opened or closed but they had been still for some time now. Still and sallow and dull behind the red unblinking face. Rose water and sage and putrid juniper fumes filled the small room with their thick sickly presence. Dense, dark, unflattered by wind or sky.

One whole day and night had passed since the little room had been animated. The three candles held their unnatural flames at their wicks ends, the tallow stalks hadn't melted a drop. The round face too, would have seemed an inanimate, lifeless carving, had anyone seen it. Perfect in feature and form, but dead and breathless. The visage like a moon and her satellite stars flinched suddenly. The gleaming brow furrowed and the shaved scalp blushed. A new color washed the smooth cheeks and red turned violet. The first sound in a days length jarred through the room like an avalanche in a desert. A moan, a grinding of teeth, and finally an exhalation, then black. The candles died in an instant, the face vanished.

There was the slight rustling of rough cloth on smooth, wet skin, the steady pace of new breath and bare feet. The door opened, light spilled in. Three candles stood in a tidy row on a cobbled floor, a dun mat lay behind, and beside sat a brazen bowl brimming with scented herbs and rose water. The place was so simple now, exposed and emptied of it's darkness and ritual.

The figure shuffled slowly out into the dusk. It was a stiff form, robed in simple brown with bald head and naked hands and naked feet exposed. Androgynous and round featured, swimming in the folds of it's robe. Kind with a mother's eyes and firm with a father's mouth, the figure walked from the shade of solitude into the shades of coming night, so tired and so alone.

There is a place, on this evening, that was for so long the home of an anchorite. An old place, filled with stories of nations and kingdoms and the ghosts of the masons who carved it from the still older mountains. It is empty this evening, a tomb for memories cut in the clean angles of stone and softened by time. The anchorite has left this place, a hollow to be filled again, but not tonight. Tonight that figure walks into the red ribbon of the western sky to be swaddled by the night.