My uncle was crazy, but that’s beside the point. The real point is that my uncle was broke. He was the kind of broke where even the people who were out for blood stopped hunting him down because they knew there was nothing more to take, he’d been stripped to the bone. The last time he did his taxes (though who knows why he bothered), his residence was Homeless. But that was only until Dad finally got a hold of him—got a hold of his sleeve, I mean, because my uncle didn’t even have a cell phone—and made him agree to come home. Home as in here, to us.
So people talk about crazy uncles, but the first time I saw mine in seven years was this pile of bones scattered across the sofa first thing in the morning where the sun made him look unreal, as pale as a bleached skeleton picked clean. I stared at him like I was seeing things. He was more a memory than a man, wasn’t even there.
Broke broke. Broke as in broken. The kind of broke where your mom doesn’t let you say certain things around your uncle because those things could be triggering. Don’t say money, she told me. And don’t say unhoused, and don’t say ex-wife, or layoff, and for the love of god don’t ask about Sacramento, where Dad found him. So I said none of those things to him. Meaning I said nothing at all.
The family tiptoed around his broken bones and waited, because all things heal, eventually. Not to say my uncle ever did. Instead, he took the broken pieces and made new things out of them, instead of trying to solve the puzzle of putting back together what had been shattered. He started gathering sticks and stones in the yard. Found things, bits of things.
When Mom was heading out one afternoon and asked if he wanted anything special from the store, he said no. But then he said, “Candles.”
“What?” Mom had been thinking more along the lines of cantaloupe or cigarettes.
“Candles. If you wouldn’t mind. You know—those little ones.”
“Votives,” I said on the way to my room. (I’d been avoiding the living room lately, where my uncle was living.) It was just one of those things I knew from somebody at school: that a votive comes from a Latin word meaning prayer. Prayer candles.
*
My uncle took broken things and made them into other things. He twined the sticks with long, careful fingers. Not steady fingers, though, so he often broke apart the very project he’d started. But when it broke down into nothing, he went out for more sticks. In a few weeks he had a little wooden pedestal. He surrounded it with stones. He found a few flat stones, slate or something, stone that easily chips away, and put those on top. Then candles on top of that, two of them.
At night—every night—he’d go to the coffee table in the corner and use those long, relentless fingers to light a match after five, six, seven tries, and he’d light a single votive. Staring at it for a while. Staring so long that I’d go away and come back half an hour later and see him still staring at it.
Then he’d gently put out that votive, and as the smoke straggled up without ever reaching his face, he’d strike out and strike out on the matchbox until he finally got a new flame to light the other votive.
One, two. One, two. Every night.
It made Dad nervous. Not the votives, even though we weren’t really religious. (“Neither was he, last I remember,” Dad told us.) But Dad was in construction. He knew his business. And he knew his horror stories. “That thing’s not gonna hold. Slate’s not so bad, weight-wise; but you put those on that rickety little shelf—”
“Just leave him alone,” Mom whispered back. “He’s coping.”
He’s crazy, I said. But with my uncle in the next room, staring at the votives, each of our whispers got lower and ghostlier. By the time I took my turn and said my piece my voice had gone so ghostly it wasn’t even there.
*
Broken like something you dig up in the yard that’s been chewed away by rust or soil, this foreign thing from another decade left behind by some other homeowner where you sit there wondering, “What’s this thing even for?”
Meaning we didn’t know where he fit as a part of our lives. He didn’t know either. Mom invited him to join her at the town council meetings. Dad tried to take him on little pointless outings like my uncle was a dog going for a car ride: to the bank—to the dry cleaners—to the newest work site. We sat him down at the neighborhood brunch when it was our turn to host, but partway through he smiled in the direction of nobody and quietly got up and left.
“He’s getting his bearings,” Dad told his work buddies.
“He’s healing,” Mom told the wine club ladies and the councilors.
He was a bunch of things that I wasn’t going to say out loud.
It wasn’t because of us that he didn’t fit. It wasn’t even really because of him. When my uncle went out into the yard for sticks, he found the short splintered ones, and left the long thin branches where they lay in the tree line. He would have fit if he had been a part we could recognize. Even Dad talked about his brother in the past tense. “Miguel was always this really out-loud guy.” “—liked to sing the house down.” “—did this thing that always drove me crazy when we were kids … I kind of miss it,” he said, then knew he’d given himself away. Especially that one time, when he talked about his brother just like that and my uncle was only across the room, lighting a candle.
My uncle lit one votive, the one on the left, at seven-thirty each night. If this was a ritual, that was part of it. He did it even with company around. “It’s from when he was married,” my mom mouthed to her wine clubbers. “She was Jewish.” Another time, to another set of people, “I think it’s from that summer he spent in India.” Another time, just to me, “It doesn’t matter what it is.”
One night my parents went out, and I was stranded. I had nowhere to go. Nobody was answering my texts or DMs. And at exactly seven-thirty my uncle rose from the recliner in the living room and took the few long, unsteady steps required to the coffee table, the shrine, and the little box of matches.
I stood behind him and watched him run the match along the strike-on box. Striking out, again and again. I didn’t wait until the votive was lit to ask loudly, “So what are you praying for?”
“Brilliant Boy.” He said it right away, before I’d really finished the question.
“Okay.”
“And Savior Girl.” Pointing with the match, still unlit, at the votive on the right.
I got a little closer to him, because he wouldn’t turn around to look at me. “So I guess I have to ask: Who is Brilliant Boy? And Savior Girl?”
In lighting the match, he almost threw it away. Like the sticks in the yard, he’d chosen the smallest box of matches, the pocket-sized ones. He relentlessly hovered his hand over the votive for Brilliant Boy until the wick caught fire. “I don’t rightly know.” He was concentrating so hard to connect with the wick that he was biting the inside of his cheek.
“Then I don’t get the point.” We stood side-by-side staring at the half-melted candle, white wax slumped and twisted from when it burned the night before.
I saw him start to smile. It had a thin or faraway look to it, as if it was the copy of a copy of somebody else’s smile. “A lot of people don’t get the point. They don’t get to have a point. Is all.”
“Is what, exactly?”
“Dickens,” he said.
I couldn’t even come up with anything in response to this.
“Or Jackie Robinson,” he added suddenly. “Nat King Cole. Marquez. These men are famous because they’re brilliant. Fine. But they had something else.”
“Well, they were men.” I couldn’t help poking him on that point, because he was in that club, and of course I wasn’t.
“They had good timing. They had luck. Sure, fine, they had ambition, they had talent, they had stick-to-it-iveness. But there’s another Dickens and Robinson, there’s millions of them, but they just didn’t get there. Close, maybe. But then—Oh. Choked to death as a boy. Run over by a car, hell, a horse and buggy. Never had the money. Somebody never phoned or wrote them back. The big executive was walking out the door when they were walking in. Ships passing in the night.”
“Okay.”
“And Marie Curie. Maya Angelou. Willa Cather, Frida Kahlo, their names we know. But everyone else who would have been, but couldn’t be. Died in childbirth, probably. Too many of them. And what else? Who scarred them or broke their necks, locked them inside the house, laughed them out of the room? Millions didn’t get a chance. Millions had a chance and didn’t know it, or as they were reaching, somebody yanked it away. Nobody knows them, but they were here. Even if they didn’t do what they could have done. They were.”
I started nodding, one slow bob at a time. “The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.”
He reached out two dark fingers to pinch the flame dead on the wick. I hadn’t known he was doing this before now. I’d only seen the smoke, never the snuff. “I don’t rightly know their names,” he murmured. “But I still try to remember.”
I stood beside him as he struck out half a dozen times before he had enough fire to light the votive for Savior Girl.
*
The questions I had, meaning my other questions, I didn’t ask them. There wasn’t enough ice broken. I didn’t know what he prayed, for instance. If he prayed anything particular at all.
But I came up behind him another night just after seven-thirty, when Brilliant Boy was already burning. “You’re missing one,” I told him.
He turned and saw I was holding a brand new votive. It was one from my room, that fancy, fragrant New England brand.
“Not everybody’s a Brilliant Boy or Savior Girl,” I said. “For every Chavela Vargas and Michael Dillon and RuPaul there’s a million more people who were told they had to pick this candle or that candle and weren’t allowed any other choice.”
The classmate I’m in love with, they chose. But they had to keep choosing, every day. Picking a fight, even, when there were usually just two circles to choose from, and you were asked to shade in one or the other. Baby-blanket colors, pink and blue. “I’m neither/nor,” they told me once. Meaning in their world I would be a never, or not a chance.
My uncle started smiling. It was almost a new smile—one he hadn’t inherited, but began himself. “Okay.”
“It’s not like there’s a ton of room on there,” I insisted, “but there’s some.”
“There’s enough.” He nudged Savior Girl just a bit, shoulder-to-shoulder with the first votive. I added mine. “A holy trinity,” my uncle said.
“In the name of the Brilliant Boy, and the Savior Girl—and the Holy It,” I laughed.
And after he’d lit Savior Girl and pinched out the flame, he handed the box of matches to me. It only took one strike for me to light it. I blackened the fresh wick with the flame, and we stood shoulder-to-shoulder, silent.
My uncle’s votives were unscented, but mine was different. This company didn’t make my scent anymore—cucumber melon, sweet and green. I had been saving it for a few years, just savoring it unlit. Not wanting to let go of something I was never going to have again.
I stared at the candle as it burned, not thinking a thing, but feeling too much. When the time seemed right, I pinched out the flame. I didn’t feel the pain until afterward, its ash ground deep into my fingertips.
*
The classmate I’m in love with had always known they were neither/nor, and would tell anyone as much, to that someone’s face, with a smile. But they had never let me say to them what I was, or what I wanted us to be. Together we were neither-here-nor-there long before they moved to another time zone. But the day they left, the day they left me behind, I couldn’t speak without my voice breaking.
Broke broke. Broke like the piggybank made of plaster that has no hole to get the coins out, so the only way to get the cash is to smash it. Only my brain was so bankrupt that even if I opened my mouth there wasn’t anything to say, nothing to pick up from the plaster powder in my voice.
I slipped away from my parents the rest of the day like shadows on the walls. But I kept my eye on the time, because I never know how late it is. At seven-twenty-nine, I was waiting at the shrine for my uncle. He joined me there.
“Does Brilliant Boy always go first?” I demanded. I don’t know why I was so fierce, except that it was a better reason for the broken sound of my voice than the real one.
My uncle looked at me as if I’d said whatever I would have said if I’d had the words. He handed me the matches. I lit the green votive. That night, we moved right to left.
*
Like I said, the real point is that my uncle was broke. And he tried not to be, but he tried by piecing together things that were already broken. He told my mom he’d start paying us rent. He told my dad he’d pitch in for groceries. They told him that wasn’t necessary.
“You’ll get back on your feet,” Dad promised.
“You’re family,” Mom soothed, rubbing his shoulder. “We give each other a hand, no questions asked.”
But his hands weren’t steady, even when he insisted on working with them to make something new.
He didn’t ask anything of us. He didn’t ask anyone for a ride downtown. He didn’t even tell us where he was going, so we’ve had to guess. Whether he was applying for a job, or maybe meeting somebody to borrow more money so he could pretend to be less broke. All we know is that he was stabbed—mugged, they think. A broken-down guy mugged for something he didn’t have. He never had a phone, so he had nobody to call. And he would have, given the chance. Because they told us that the way he died, it wouldn’t have been instant. He’d have known what was happening, three minutes, ten. But the way he left us, like he’d never been here, we had no idea where to look, until the cops found us.
The night before the funeral, I stopped in front of the shrine where there were three hunched dusty votives that nobody had touched in a week, one somehow shorter than the rest, as if it had gotten a head start. I had no idea what time it was—I never know the time. The sunlight had already peeled away in layers, only a thin gauze left. But I would take the time anyway, and now was what I had.
I struck out maybe seven times before I could light a match, blinking relentlessly through the tears. I dabbed the wick of Brilliant Boy. I lit the wick of Savior Girl and burned my fingers trying to get three on a match with the Holy It. I needed another match, another misfire.
I watched three candles silently burning away, their lights shuddering and dodging every breeze I saw in the fire but couldn’t feel on my skin. Whatever I said, my voice was so ghostly that the words weren’t even there to hear. But still, they were here.
I took my turn in the darkness, and I said my peace.
Tara Dugan lives in Massachusetts. Her fiction has appeared in Pangyrus and Litbreak Magazine, her nonfiction in The Millions and Five Minutes, and her self has appeared here and there across the Pioneer Valley, wandering trails and trains of thought.
