Four Kinds of Burning

The lights went out at six fourteen, and Maya's mother said a word she wasn't supposed to say, then said it again when she couldn't find the flashlight.

"Candles," Maya said. "Under the sink."

"Since when do we have candles under the sink?"

"Since the last power outage. You put them there and said you'd remember."

Her mother laughed in the dark, found the candles, and lit one. The kitchen filled with a single wobbly light. Then her phone buzzed. She read the screen, sighed, and said, "I have to call the office. The backup servers are down too. Will you be okay for a few minutes?"

Maya said she'd be fine. She was looking at the candle.

Her mother's voice trailed down the hallway, already talking about server clusters. Maya pulled a chair closer to the counter, sat down, and leaned in until her face was warm.

She'd drawn candle flames before. Everyone had. A teardrop shape, yellow, maybe orange at the edges. That's what a candle flame looked like when you weren't paying attention.

But she was paying attention now, and the flame didn't look like that at all.

Right at the bottom, wrapped around the wick, there was a space that wasn't glowing. A little pocket of dark tucked inside the bright. Above it and around it, the flame wasn't one color. It was layered, like something geological, like a canyon wall where each stripe meant a different age.

She held her breath so the flame would go still.

The dark zone at the center. Then blue, a thin blue shell curving up from the base. Then the yellow she'd always thought was the whole flame, bright and flickering. And then, at the very edge, so faint she almost couldn't see it, another blue. A second blue, thinner than eyelash, running along the outside of the yellow like a border drawn in disappearing ink.

Four zones. Not one flame. Four.

Maya sat back. She looked at the candle the way she looked at anything that had been lying to her by being too familiar to examine.

The dark part at the center bothered her. How could there be darkness inside a flame? Flame was burning. Burning made light. But the dark zone was right there, close enough to touch the wick, and it wasn't burning. The wax was melting, climbing the wick, turning to vapor, she knew that much. But it hadn't caught yet. It was fuel that hadn't met enough air. A little room of gas, sitting inside a fire, not on fire.

She almost touched it. She stopped. Instead she found a toothpick in the drawer and held it horizontally through the flame, quick, then pulled it out.

Two burn marks. One on each side. The middle of the toothpick, the part that had passed through the dark zone, was barely scorched.

Maya stared at the toothpick. She did it again. Same result. The center of the flame was cooler than the edges. There was a place inside the fire where things didn't burn.

She moved to the blue at the base. That blue was different from a yellow flame the way a whisper is different from a shout. It was precise. Clean. She remembered something from class, Mrs. Alvarez talking about gas stoves, about how blue meant the fuel was burning completely. Every molecule of fuel finding every molecule of oxygen it needed. Nothing left over. Nothing wasted. The blue was the part of the flame that was perfectly efficient, and it barely glowed.

The yellow was the opposite. She could see it now. The yellow was gorgeous and wasteful. Tiny particles of carbon, not yet burned, heated so hot they glowed like miniature stars. The yellow light she read by, the yellow light that made the kitchen feel warm and alive, that was the color of incomplete combustion. The color of things not finished. The beauty was in the inefficiency.

And then the outer blue. The faintest one. Where those last unburned carbon particles finally met the open air and finished the job. A second zone of completion, so thin most people would never see it.

Maya's mother was still on the phone. The kitchen was dark except for this one small fire that contained four different kinds of burning, layered inside each other, each one a different conversation between fuel and air.

She thought about Mrs. Alvarez's class. How they'd drawn candle flames in their notebooks last month and Mrs. Alvarez had said "good" to every single one. Every single yellow teardrop. Nobody had drawn four zones because nobody had looked, and nobody had looked because everyone already knew what a candle flame looked like.

Except nobody did.

Maya thought about what else she already knew. What else she'd drawn as a simple shape because someone had told her the shape and she'd believed them. Water going down a drain. The moon. Her own face in the mirror.

She heard her mother's footsteps coming back down the hall.

"Power company says two hours. Are you surviving in here?"

"Mom. Come look at this."

"It's a candle, sweetheart."

"It's not, though."

Something in Maya's voice made her mother stop. She came to the counter. She leaned in the way Maya had leaned in, close enough for warmth.

"Oh," her mother said, quietly. "There's blue at the bottom."

"There's blue at the top too. The very edge. You have to look."

Her mother looked. The phone call and the servers and the two hours of darkness ahead all seemed to leave the room.

"I never noticed that," she said.

"I know," Maya said.

They sat together in the kitchen, their faces lit by four different kinds of light, and Maya held the toothpick with its two burn marks and its untouched center into the space between them.