Rooms Have Their Ways
by K.C. Mead-Brewer
The candle is a stout pillar the same secretive brown as the inside of an acorn cap; Maggie’s just old enough to be allowed to keep it in her room. It’s supposed to smell like cinnamon chocolate, but the way she’s nervously handled it over the past hour, its smooth cylinder now a more voluptuous shape, Maggie’s certain it smells of her instead. It’s true, Maggie worries about the candle falling and catching her bed on fire and then the whole house on fire and everyone’s dead and it’s her fault, but she knows she’ll light it anyway. She believes in curses and worries what a candle might do to someone who got in the way of its fire.
A lot worries Maggie. Maggie worries a lot.
The candle is the latest in a series of gifts from her stepmother. Velma is her name, but she lets Maggie call her Velvet. Velvet has long dyed-red hair, glittery sneakers, an appendicitis scar, and a vampire bat tattooed on her arm. This is her house, a big chunk of Baltimore formstone right in the middle of the row, and Maggie hasn’t decided yet if she likes it. It’s nothing like her old house when her dad still lived with them, surrounded by trees and close to the lake with a very keeps-to-herself mermaid inside it. (That’s what her dad always said, anyway.) But he hasn’t come to visit in a long time, and Velvet’s been giving her all these presents lately; everything feels so confusing. Books, games, a trip to the aquarium, and now this candle that might burn her alive.
Two Velvets watched Maggie unwrap the candle—the real Velvet and the Velvet in the big hallway mirror, the oval one that looks like a pond magicked onto the wall—and they both said, “You should light it around your new room, let the room know you’re here.”
But Maggie knew better. She knew to wait until nightfall. Maggie is the sort of child who understands that magical objects are not to be treated lightly.
Maggie cups her small white palm around the virgin wick, but she needs two hands to light the match. “Sorry,” she says, because manners are important. She knows from fairytales: manners help keep a person safe. “So sorry,” she says again, and abandons the wick to face this first hissing blush alone.
The tiny gasp of a match-strike. A bite of smoke. Maggie stares at the wick, and backs away. Cupping the flame, she steps carefully into the bathroom and runs water over it until there’s hardly any matchhead left. Her hands are shaking and she’s an idiot to be scared of candles, she knows, she can’t help it, it’s so dumb it makes her want to die. She snaps her fingers. She squeezes her eyes shut tight.
Back in her room, Maggie lies in bed and folds her arms across her chest like a corpse. She thinks of Snow White, of kisses and eternal love. Maggie knows love isn’t eternal, though, no matter what fairytales say. It can die like everything else, at any time, for basically no reason. She’s seen it.
She saw her mom pack up the death of her dad-love (shockingly small, Maggie thought) in a shoebox and stick it on a high shelf in the hall closet. It was in the shape of letters and photos, some jewelry, but Maggie understood immediately: a body, a coffin. At first it seemed strange to Maggie that her mom didn’t bury the box (Maggie’s been to funerals; she thought death was supposed to go in the ground)—but then she learned about cremation and taxidermy and grandma getting pounded into a diamond that now glints on Mom’s ring finger. Maggie knows, death can go pretty much anywhere.
Of course, this was at their old place that she saw the box in the closet. Who knows where Mom’s keeping it now. This house is so big! It could be anywhere. Maggie hopes the house doesn’t mind. She can’t stop thinking about what Velvet said earlier, “Be nice to the house and it’ll be nice to you back.”
“Be nice to it?” Maggie asked.
“Keep it clean, keep it tidy, and no running,” Velvet said, smiling when Mom came over and pinched her arm. Oh, Maggie thought. Of course. She’s teasing.
“How could a room be mean?” Maggie asked, and regretted the question immediately. She’d meant to joke back, but lots of options jumped right to the front of her brain. The room could lock her in. The room could go extra horrible cold. It could shake and crumble brick dust into her eyes. Leak poison gas. Burst pipes and drown her in her sleep.
“Rooms have their ways,” Velvet replied, but she was still smiling, which meant she was still teasing, which is pretty much the same thing as lying.
Except now Maggie can’t stop thinking about all the ways a room really could punish a person if it wanted. Maggie wants to be polite and do all the right things, but she forgets sometimes. (Who can remember all the time?) As distinctly as she can, she snaps her fingers, she clicks her teeth. She doesn’t want to think about this anymore. She doesn’t want to think about how her room could also be called a box. She doesn’t want to think about what if her mom stops loving her one day, too. And then they close her up in here and leave her.
She snaps her fingers. She counts to ten. She strikes a match.
She lights her candle.
“Hello,” Maggie whispers to the room, breathing heavily of her own chocolate-covered scent. “I’m here. I’m sorry. I hope you don’t mind.”
And it surprises her to realize: Velvet wasn’t teasing. The room does feel different now that she’s announced herself this way.
Hers is the smallest room. A simple rectangle inside a rectangular house, but there are things special about it, too. It has one wall that’s naked to the brick, and here in the dark and the candlelight, yes, it could be the rough cavern lid of a tomb.
K.C. Mead-Brewer lives in Baltimore, MD. She is a graduate of Tin House's 2018 Winter Workshop for Short Fiction and of the 2018 Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers' Workshop. For more information, visit kcmeadbrewer.com and follow her @meadwriter.
