The Last Match

Hope is not always something you feel. Sometimes it is something you protect with both hands until feeling becomes possible again.

It had rained for nineteen days when the building forgot how to be warm. The heat did not leave all at once. It withdrew room by room, beginning with the corners, then the floors, then the metal bedframes. By the twelfth day, breath had become visible in the halls. By the fifteenth, everyone slept in coats. On the nineteenth, the pipes in the north stairwell began to split. Mara heard them cracking inside the walls while she sat at her kitchen table with the matchbox between her hands. The box had once been red. Water, years, and the oils of her fingers had turned it the brown-gray color of old brick. A strip of blue cloth tape held one side together. Her father had wrapped it there after the original cardboard tore, pinching the fold between his thumbnails with the concentration of a surgeon.