I’m really excited to share I had a short story called “The Fire” included in the Candlelit Chronicles’ third issue. You can read it here.

After seeing what Issue III would be focused on, “An Ode to Quill and Ink,” I started thinking about what kind of story I’d want to read focused on that, and in my mind, I saw a man struggling to find words to a speech while sitting beneath a tree in his yard. I started wondering about his life, and more importantly, who was in it that he couldn’t properly see.

Thus came Ms. Sanger, his servant whom he drastically underestimates. I think to the main character, she’s of such little importance that even when he waking up countless times after speechwriting to find his words transformed, he credits himself with the changes rather than wondering if she had any hand in it.

Long after I submitted the story for consideration, I came across a quote by Margaret Atwood that I think perfectly sums up what happens: “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”

I’m not sure if anyone will particularly notice or care, but I purposefully didn’t name the main character while only naming Ms. Sanger. With the story forced through his perspective, I felt like he would have never bothered to really remember her first name, which is why it’s missing, but his name doesn’t even exist as far as this story is concerned. I get a small level of satisfaction from that — I think there’s nothing a villian hates more than being dismissed and forgotten.

Like many villains, he comes to regret killing her for the wrong reason: he no longer has her help fixing his words. As the months following her murder wear on, too, I think he might even begin to think of them as a duo writing speeches together, but of course he thinks this only after she’s died and so has no say in how he frames their relationship in his mind.

He is, to me, a dangerous villian much like Gaston is in the Disney film Beauty and the Beast in that they are everyday people you might find in any place on earth, quietly infecting the world with their poisonous thoughts of superiority and ignorance.

I wrote this story while listening to a remixed song from the video game Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Even if you’re not a Zelda fan, or a video game fan, I hope you might give it a listen while reading the story, if you want, since I personally think it really sets the mood nicely for the story.