the absurd and unfortunate end of a love story

The man with a candle for a face married a woman with a kerosene lamp for a heart. On their ten-year anniversary the woman accused the man of marrying her only for her kerosene lamp heart. The man replied that this was absurd. Obviously, he joked, he had married her for her legs and her brain (which glowed white in the full moon and on certain days of November). It was the end of the marriage. They’d had this fight before, and they'd had others, and all had dropped into a level of pettiness never to be recovered from. So the woman ran crying to the bedroom, slamming the door behind her. Later, she tip-toed back to crouch at the door for the rest of the night. No footsteps followed her. No hand paused against the doorknob.

The man with a candle for a face had gone to a bar to drink two dollar pints of beer and reflect on the past ten years.

During those ten years he had worked as a janitor and a failed writer. At the time he thought he had been happy. Perhaps not ecstatic, but no one really wants to be ecstatic. Much better to be solidly miserable or decently happy and take from life what you can, he told himself. In the mornings, he made breakfast while his wife made coffee. They read the newspapers together until she left for her secretary job at the law firm. He had suspected for years that she was having an affair with one of the associates, but he had never confronted her. She had, in fact, not been having an affair. She was too insecure.

The man sat in the bar and remembered two years ago when the economy had crashed around them, broken, mangled, and smelling like dead animals. The economy had always seemed like such a stable institution. People had been planning it for years. Millions—billions!—of dollars had been spent on its construction. If the business of the economy was the future, said the politicians, it was going to be a damn good one.

The man and his wife hadn’t felt the effects very much. They started growing potatoes like everyone else and stuck to a tighter budget, but otherwise life went on as it had before. But they had come to depend on it, on the tight belts and the little victories over rising prices. It kept them together in a joint struggle. When the economy improved, ease yawned empty before them.

The man, sitting in the bar, realized his marriage had been over for a long time. He was tempted to cry into his beer, thought better of it and instead killed a beetle that was waltzing at his feet. He hoped the beetle was leaving behind a large and impoverished family. He pulled his coat around him, left a tip for the bartender and walked out the door.

It was late. The man with a candle for a face lit his own way home. The house was dark and quiet. He paused in the doorway, listening for sobs from the bedroom. The only sound he heard was the creaking boards beneath his feet. He hung up his coat and his hat and took of his shoes. He wandered into the kitchen in search of bread. While rummaging through the cupboards, he knocked over a stack of plates. In the ensuing clash of breaking glass, he never heard his wife walk up behind him. He saw, for a second, her eyes red with weeping and the snuffer in her right hand.

But then everything was dark.

Five months later, the woman with a kerosene lamp for a heart married a Jewish man. When Hanukkah rolled around, she used her first husband’s face for the center candle on the menorah.