She cuts the lights in the basement and strikes a match. Shadows on her hands and thorn scratches across her knuckles. She touches the flame to the wick of a vesper candle. A cigarette between her lips. She counts her husband’s steps on the floor above her. When it’s quiet, she imagines him at the kitchen sink, the water beginning to warm. She can hear it in the pipes. She reaches into the dark and touches a damp wall. She knows her husband is waiting to fill a cup. A spoon of salt beside the sink. She moves the tip of the flame close to her fingernail. She hears him walk back the way he came. The porch door slaps shut. The baby isn’t crying. The baby is asleep. She inhales and hopes the smoke doesn’t seep up through the floorboards. A chair scrapes across the porch. Her husband must be sipping the salt water, she thinks. Holding it beneath his tongue, Two-Mississippi, before spitting it into the grass. He’ll do this until the cup is empty. He told her once that salt water is a cure for most things, and she believed him. She holds her finger to the fire until she can’t hold it there any longer. 

When she was a child her brother unscrewed a burnt-out lightbulb from its socket and touched it to the skin of her shoulder. In the dim light of the basement, she moves her hand to the welt where the bulb burned her years ago. She blows out the candle and drops the cigarette. The smell of smoke in the dark. She tries to remember the prayer of St. Nicholas. Instead she thinks of the wooden kneelers pressing hard into the skin of her knees, a Sunday school boy crawling on the floor during the confession of sins and tugging the hem of her dress. She finds her way to the basement stairs with her arms outstretched in front of her. A thin slit of light beneath the basement door. She leaves the candle and the pack of cigarettes on the last step. 

Her husband is on the porch with the empty cup resting on the arm of a rocking chair. He is standing beside it looking out at the sky. 

“I thought you were sleeping,” he says.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she says.

She takes the cup from the chair and touches the cool glass to her cheek. 

“I used to wake up late in the night to the sound of my father sweeping the floor outside my room,” her husband says. “I remember it scared me. Each time, it scared me”

She raises the cup and looks at the light of the stars through the bent glass.

“Once, he painted the straw of the broom white and slapped the wet paint against the front door,” he says. “My mother spent the next day scratching flecks of paint off with her fingers.”

“I think I would have loved your father,” she says.

He turns to her and touches her wrist. She steps on his toes and rests her head against his chest. 

“My mother kept that broom in the kitchen closet for years after that,” he says. “The dry paint in the bristles. I never heard him use it again.” 

She reaches down into his pocket and finds a quartered buckeye shell. She takes it out and puts it in her mouth. He kisses her. She spits the shell into the cup. She shakes it and they listen to it rattle against the glass. 

“I put the baby in his crib and he just lay there blinking up at me,” he says. “I sang to him and he reached up like he was trying to touch my voice.”

He takes the cup from her and tosses the buckeye out into the dark grass.

“I think he’s going to be okay,” he says.

“He is okay,” she says.

“We shouldn’t worry so much,” he says.

“We don’t have to worry,” she says.

“We don’t have to,” he says. “But I think his room is too cold.”

“Let’s go to bed,” she says.

“Let’s crack his door first and look in at him,” he says.

She follows him inside and they stand outside the baby’s room. Neither of them touch the doorknob. She kneels and unlaces her husband’s boots. The floor is dirty. She licks her finger and touches the floorboards. He helps her up. The baby is quiet behind the closed door. She shows her husband the dust on her fingertip. He begins to laugh and she covers his mouth. He can feel a drop of dried candle wax on her skin. The palm of her hand smells like smoke.

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Andrew Siegrist is a graduate of the Creative Writing Workshop at the University of New Orleans. His debut collection of stories, We Imagined It Was Rain, was awarded the C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize and published by Hub City Press in 2021. His work has appeared in Wigleaf, trampset, Mississippi Review, Baltimore Review, Arts & Letters, Greensboro Review, Pembroke Magazine and elsewhere. He lives with his wife and two daughters in Nashville, Tennessee.