Fire In My Heart

The Cart

Rosaline’s smile was impossibly bright, he thought. He felt as though he unleashed the sun within his space when he asked. It made him feel happy and light, the way Isabelle would have wanted him to be, and so as he listened to Rosaline give him a rounded number of how many they used to offer, she was quick to tell him that any amount would be more than lovely to start. 

“I know it’s really out of the blue and I’m sure you have a lot going on…” Daniel waited for a but, except it wasn’t received. “I’m… I’m sorry. I just…” she fumbled with her phone as it screamed in her pocket. 

Daniel frowned at the way she seemed to change from the encouraging woman taking a trip down memory lane with him to the frazzled mess she was now. 

“I’m on lunch and it’s a full floor which means we’re not really supposed to be out in case of emergency,” Rosaline informed him but it seemed more like she was reminding herself. 

He watched her scrunch her nose and grit her teeth before answering with a weak, “hello?”

Another woman’s voice filtered through their space, it was soft but also concerned.

“No, no...no, just breathe. The files for him are in the, but… Listen, Oli, just get someone else to cover that room. You shouldn’t have been put on it. He can wait…” she soothed her staffmate. “I’ll be back in twenty and we’ll sort it out, alright?”

The woman’s voice on the other line agreed and thanked her, prompting Rosaline to close her phone and sigh. 

“I’m in the right place. I picked the right career… that chronic tool is…”

“Tool?” Daniel stopped her mantra mid-declaration, finding a blank face at the interruption. 

Rosaline shook her head, then added. “If you become a constant supplier for the hospital and you can put me on a lifelong subscription of receiving candles weekly because when I’m retired, I’m taking back my calm, one flickering flame at a time. You have no idea how much people need these..” 

The moment he agreed, she shook his hand and reluctantly left the calm space around her. 

Daniel frowned wondering just what it was that connected people to that calm state that Rosaline was going on about. Sure, dimmed lights were nice and the aroma of the scented candles were too at times, but what was it about the preservation of the flame itself that helped people feel better? That was a tough one for him to answer on his own being that he could understand the destruction it could ultimately claim.

He thought about Rosaline’s retirement dream and if he should experiment with such a task. Maybe he could with a box of tea lights. At least then it wasn’t an overall waste of materials, just to understand a feeling. 

As the chime above the door quieted, his memories reflooded him with thoughts of the hospital and Isabelle’s allowance of his own creativity so that they could offer his own designs. She allowed him to go darker with his dips and decide on what worked and what didn’t but ultimately made him keep and show each and every one, claiming that each work was one made by the heart and that it would connect with its rightful owner. 

When they finally finished the order he couldn’t help but stress over the pieces he added to her angelic ones. Hers stayed light and bright, bursting with yellows and whites. Lavender was a new concoction and she used it heavily with pinks and deeper purples as well, but nothing quite like his. He allowed himself to explore the rich colors and stark changes between them, landing him with a very distinct pallet, all his own. One in particular explored heat. He layered yellow with orange, then red, and finally black which had him reimaging the arson that landed him there. All the while he thought Isabelle would intervene, but she didn’t. She allowed it to play out as she said she would.

While at the hospital they received name tags and clearance bands to bring their candles both opened and boxed around to each of the patient loaded floors. Some harbored the very ill, which Isabelle would allow visiting family members to pick out a candle on their behalf, or if they hadn’t been visited, their nurse would often lend a hand at deciding which would be suitable for their personality when the patient was awake. In some cases they weren’t, rather, hooked up to machinery or genuinely unable which is where he met a girl that day. 

Her name was Olivia, Daniel told himself he would never forget. It was the only time he had ever heard a name quite like that and he was sure it would stick. Olivia was a teenager, like him at the time, who had been moved up to the extended stay floor from the burn ward. His heart seized the moment he had seen her, assuring Isabelle that this was not the person to ask if she wanted a candle. 

“Fire did this to her,” he warned. “Fire.”

But Isabelle would not be swayed. She saw her craft as beautiful. It was something special that didn’t need a flame to be inspiration for healing.

Daniel gripped the back of his own neck trying to relieve the pressure building there. He expected to be called out for even entering and then furthermore for being insensitive. 

Not once did he feel as though he would be well received and so he shuffled awkwardly in with her, hoping to be done. He hoped she was sleeping, or that she wished not to be disturbed. Neither of those things happened though, making it so much harder to breathe. 

Olivia’s voice, while raspy sounded delicate when she offered a soft welcome to them. 

It made his skin crawl and his stomach flip. 

The room, while situated with an IV stand and valves behind her that had her hooked up to oxygen, was bare. Not even a coat had been laid over the back of the chair that sat beside her bed. There weren’t flowers or cards or stuffed animals holding balloons that wished she would get well. Aside from the two of them and the cart they created their gifts for, it truly seemed like this girl was completely alone, forgotten...and then it made more sense. 

Isabelle’s offerings were mostly for people like Olivia.

They were for the people who had nothing or no one… and all at once, Daniel felt seen. 

It was scary to feel this way. For so long he was nothing, like Olivia, and now he wasn’t, again, like Olivia. 

While Daniel wondered just what happened to her, his guilt started to set in. What if it was him? What if it was his failure to stop the jerks he was with that caused this?

His nerves screamed, finally getting the best of him when he urged himself to stare at the floor. He didn’t deserve to see her, he told himself. He didn’t deserve to witness what he had done… and so he cast his gaze away, panning them all the way back down to the floor, this time unable to see the angry mob in the linoleum below, but she could certainly feel her ruined state and worst of all, he couldn’t take this from her. He couldn’t stop it now… It already happened he argued with himself, unable to forgive that being for what the court knew he did to another.