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EMBERNACHT

Glory sat nestled deeply into the antique high back chair, heavy head lolling against the threadbare velvet of the wing. Half a glass of beer sat on the flimsy wooden table beside her, soaking its coaster and slowly getting warmer. She was lost amid the undulations of the fire across the room, like dozens of others around her. Red and orange light beat against her pink bangs and glinted off the piercings in her nose and ears. Hanging from the tavern’s wooden beams, garlands of giant maple leaves had browned and withered. This was Embernacht, the last fire.

No one spoke, no one ordered another round. No one had come with friends or family. They only heard the crackling of steam escaping the wood, glasses knocked against each other behind the bar. The near silence was broken when someone by the corner, hidden behind the back of a couch, started humming a strain from “Harvest in Geardegum,” nearly under their breath at first. With each verse the round began anew at a nearby table, spreading through the whole room but staying soft and low like a funeral dirge. Half the words were grunted more than sung, made of English so old that most people didn’t even know what it meant. But it was a lullaby of a sort, that loosed their grip on time, and seemed to settle the fire to sleep. A dry log shifted and fell, the orange light sputtered and went out, and only the pulsing red embers remained.

In the darkness that followed, some black mass rose from its seat near the hearth. And like a flock of starlings leaving a power line in unison, so all the lonely patrons of the bar slowly lifted their tired bodies from the sumptuous chairs and couches, and drifted outside. Glory loitered for a while against the brick wall in the alley, smoking the last cigarette she’d saved, as another patron joined her- some face she dimly recalled from Barlow’s. Still entranced, they stood silent in the autumn night, listening to shouts from a bar down the street. Tonight must not have been Embernacht for them; maybe tomorrow, maybe next week.

Glory stubbed out her cigarette on the brick and flicked the butt in the general direction of the dumpster. “See you in spring, yeah?”

The other patron began walking away, replying, “Goo’nter.”

“Goo’nter.”

Her last awful work of the year, Glory trudged all her winter weight up the hill seven blocks to her microstudio. At home, she changed into a nightshirt and shorts, scrubbed the hell out of her teeth, unplugged all her appliances and turned off the heat. She set a heavy bar across the door, and buried herself under piles of blankets, below a strand of yellow lights and a wide garden window.