Dining by Candlelight

I was eating candlelight, gobbling it whole as it flickered from the ends of burning wicks, five or eight candles each night, in a consumption habit that proved addictive—no amount of twelve step groups curbed my appetite for the light, and such was the rising price of candles that my addiction wrecked havoc on my bank account. Real meals of the steak -and-potatoes variety meant nothing to me. Friends, the few I had, noticed I was losing weight and drastically so, the caloric count of even the most luxurious candles being negligible. They asked how I lost so much weight, my friends did—was it Weight Watchers? or was I working out? I shrugged, afraid to smile for fear that the vast quantities of candlelight that I snarfed nightly would seep up from my intestinal tract, giving away my secret.

On the day before Thanksgiving, the woman the next desk over at my insurance job lit a long-stemmed tapered orange candle, ostensibly to create a more festive atmosphere. Although I was already in a relationship, Michelle and I had been exchanging glances for months and, what, with her actuarial acumen and propensity to wear snug red sweater dresses, I thought she was kinda hot. No sooner did she discard the match used to light the candle, the candle’s pumpkin scent already filling the air, than she peered over at me.

So what do you think, Michelle asked.

How was I to know the candle was not a love offering? I snuck over to her desk and stood over that candle, my mouth open to catch its delicious light.

I bought it at the Yankee Candle shop. You know, down at the mall, she said. Do you like?
Never had I tasted candlelight so smooth. Contrary to rumors, it tasted nothing like chicken, the candlelight, but like the buttered marsala sauces that accompany veal cutlets at the finest restaurants. Care must have went into molding the candle, for the light shone brilliantly—even with the flame cupped within my mouth and me gulping down its delicious light, I saw the glow it reflected on her computer monitor.

Um, what are you doing, Michelle asked.

The phones had stopped ringing in the office hours ago and people were knocking it off early for the holiday, sneaking out the back door or just kicking up their feet on their desks and devoting their afternoon to goofy youtube viewing. I was slurping it up, the candlelight, and already wondering how to go about asking if she had another candle we could light when this one was consumed.

Are you, like, felating a candle?

Huh?

Michelle shrieked. Oh my god, you are, aren’t you? You’re like, sucking a candle! she said, her voice suddenly loud. What few people who remained in the office shuffled over to her desk. Oh my god, this is really gross. Have you no decency? You’re such a pervert, going down on a candle.
I knew how it must have looked: me lowering my mouth over the candle, its flame licking the inside of my mouth and causing me to drool over the melting wax that trickled down the candle’s stem. I should have stopped myself, but a candle like that did not come along often, or such was my sad experience. Michelle was screaming, frantic, in tears—she was witnessing what she thought was a sex act perpetrated at her very own desk, which apparently was too much for her snug-red-sweater-dress constitution to endure.

Two guys from our firm’s vice president’s office grabbed me from either arm, yanking me off the candle. There must have been ten people gathered around me, all of them aghast. Michelle crawled to her desk chair, sobbing and disconsolate, and I just knew there would be no decent way of asking if more candles lay hidden in her desk drawers. How was I to explain myself? They hauled me into our personnel manager’s office, a smallish cubicle abutting a dreary window that looked out over the company parking lot, and the next thing I knew was that I was being told to vamos with all my kinky desires into that parking lot and never return, and when they booted me into that parking lot, gravel scraped my hindquarters, and all I could think of was the three inches that were left of that silky candle and how I would never get my lips around it again.

That evening, I explained what happened to Amy, my frown-fraught girlfriend of three years. We were seated in a booth at a no-frills Korean place, the Hok-i Dok-i, a candle at our table, while we waited for our noodle dish appetizers. The candle did little to bolster my spirits, for after experiencing the joys of a long-stemmed Yankee Candle, this small votive candle on the formica tabletop brought to mind nothing so much as the slick cakes that are tossed into urinals to keep the odors at bay; it was not a candle worth going down on.

As much as I tried to explain myself, Amy did not understand. Screwing her eyes, she flicked back her head, nearly whiplashing me with her long black hair. You did oral sex with some slut in your office?

I did not have oral sex with her. I had it with a candle—and here I became defensive—and anyways, she’s not a slut. She’s a very nice woman.

She is?

Yes, I said, nodding. She is.

Which apparently was not what Amy wanted to hear, for she picked up her handbag and stormed away from the booth, leaving me alone with a candle that even I wouldn’t suck.

I slept on a park bench that night. We had been living together for six months, Amy and I, and I was in no mood to return to our apartment. Nor, suddenly jobless, could I afford checking into a motel. Though it was late November, the temperatures were mild and it was almost possible to think of myself as a something of a naturualist, a camper, a seeker of fresh air and clean fun in our jaded urban environment as I drifted into sleep.

Somewhere around midnight or one, or thereabouts, I woke up beneath the starry cloudless sky to a fluttering sound that I could not instantly place. Light that I had consumed throughout the day was radiating from my mouth, emptying me, yet the night-chilled air flowing over my teeth tingled in a refreshingly good way. The more I opened my mouth, the louder the fluttering sound around me became. I was exhaling candlelight, and great quantities of it, enough that I could see the flapping wings of the moths that I was attracting. They were dining on my candlelight, their little moth tongues slurping it up, and I envied them deeply, for I knew there could be no more candles to satisfy my hunger.