Dale Krupinski

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The candles gutter and lean, all twelve flames pointing at him like a compass finding north, and for a second his face is lit up from underneath, the way a face looks telling a scary story at a campfire. His thumb throbs where he pricked it with the boning needle he keeps in his kit. He said the word he wasn't supposed to say out loud, the one the book told him to only shape with his mouth, and he thought, even as he did it, *this isn't going to work, nothing ever works,* and that thought is the last one that is only his.

Then the flames straighten. So does he.

You come up through him like heat through a hand, and the first thing you learn is the weight of it — how a body like this sits differently in the world, how the knees know something about carrying that yours never did. The floorboards under him are old, a little cold. There's a lamp across the room throwing yellow onto a corkboard pinned with photographs and a phone that's face-down and buzzing, has been buzzing on and off for an hour.

You look, with his eyes, at the mess of chalk and wax around his own knees. Twelve tea lights, most of them still lit despite what just happened to them. A circle drawn in his own hand, a five-pointed thing inside it. A boy — because that's what he is, whatever his shoulders say, twenty-two and built like a man who moves sides of beef for a living — who wanted something badly enough to open his own skin for it.

You didn't ask what he wanted. You never do. But his wanting is still in the body like a smell in a coat, and you can't help but breathe it in: *her.* Not the one down the hall right now, running water in the kitchen, humming something off the radio, waiting for him to come out and say what he was doing in there with the door locked. The other one. The one from three winters back, who left before he made rent on his own place, who he has not stopped almost-texting since.

He thought the circle might reach her. Might make her call, might make her think of him at the exact hour he was thinking of her. That's the whole shabby hope of it — not demons, not power, just a boy who found a book online and a girl he couldn't get out of his chest, and a Tuesday night with nothing else to do about it.

You stand him up. His knees crack. Heavy man's knees, comfortable with complaint.

"Dale?" A voice from the kitchen, easy, unbothered. "You talking to yourself in there?"

You look down at the mess you'll have to clean up — wax on the floorboards, chalk that won't fully scrub out, a thumb that's still weeping a thin line he'll want a Band-Aid for. Behind you, on the corkboard, there's a photo half-hidden by a work schedule: a woman laughing at something outside frame, an old photo, the kind you keep for reasons you don't examine.

"Yeah," you say, in his voice, testing the shape of it in his mouth like a new cut of meat, checking the grain of it. "Just finishing up something."

You blow out the candles one by one. Little grey threads of smoke go up before they bend and disappear, like something leaving, like something finally, permanently arrived.