I want it on the record that I did not object to the candle itself. I objected to what it was doing. There is a difference, and I intend to explain it slowly, because I suspect no one in this house has fully appreciated the scope of the problem.
She brought it home in a paper bag and set it on the coffee table like it belonged there, like the coffee table hadn’t already been claimed, cheek by cheek, corner by corner, over what I can only describe as weeks of unglamorous, uncredited labor. I built that smell. Nobody helped me. And then she struck a little flame to a wick and within twenty minutes the whole downstairs smelled like something warm and spiced and completely unauthorized, and I sat in the doorway of the back room with my tail wrapped very tightly around my feet and thought, so this is how it happens.
I approached the jar first, because you have to know your enemy before you can properly assess it. It sits low and round with a paper label I couldn’t read even if reading were a thing I did, and a small orange flame moving inside it in a way I found genuinely unsettling — not frightening exactly, but the kind of thing that makes you keep one ear pointed at it even while you pretend to look elsewhere. It gave off heat when I got close, a soft heat, nothing like the radiator, more like something alive and very small being patient with you. I did not put my face directly over it. I am large and impressive but I am not a fool.
The smell was the real offense. It came off the thing in waves, thick and spiced and sweet in a way that had nothing to do with me, nothing to do with the couch cushion I have personally curated for months, nothing to do with the specific corner of the bookshelf where I have left, cheek by careful cheek, a signature I consider close to a masterpiece. And here was this jar, sitting there, undoing it. Filling the air with an opinion nobody asked it for.
So I did what needed doing. I went to the couch first and pressed the side of my face into the arm of it, dragging slowly, the way you do when you mean it. Then the doorframe into the kitchen, low corner, my height exactly. Then the leg of the coffee table itself, which felt almost insulting to have to do in the candle’s immediate presence, like correcting someone to their face, but I was not going to be precious about it. Then the edge of the rug. Then, because I was fully committed to the project by this point, the leg of the chair she never sits in anymore and a low spot on the curtain that probably didn’t need it but I was not taking chances.
She watched some of this from the kitchen table and laughed in the particular way she laughs when she thinks I’m being silly, which I have learned to simply absorb and continue past, because she does not have the glands for this work and cannot be expected to understand its urgency. “You’re going to rub your whole face off,” she said, which is the kind of thing a person says when they’ve never had to defend a room from an aggressive spice smell using only their own face.
By the middle of the day the candle had burned down enough that the flame sat lower in the jar, and the smell, I noticed, had started to soften into something less like an announcement and more like a fact of the room, which I chose to interpret as a retreat on its part rather than simple physics. I checked my corners. The bookshelf held. The couch arm held, though I redid it twice out of what I’ll call thoroughness and not anxiety. The doorframe was fine. Everything I’d built was still there, underneath, holding its ground, the way good work does.
What I hadn’t accounted for was her. She sat down in the afternoon with a book and pulled me up onto her lap without asking, which is her right, I suppose, and I settled in the way I do, chin on her arm, and that’s when I caught it — she smelled like the candle now, in her sweater, in the hollow of her wrist, small and specific, the spice smell riding right there under the smell that is actually hers, the one I know better than I know anything. I lay very still and worked through what this meant. On one hand: further contamination, the enemy smell reaching me by an unguarded route, straight through the person I trust most. On the other hand: she was still hers underneath it, the candle smell just floating on top like something borrowed, not replacing anything, and when she scratched behind my ear the way she does, some of my own smell went onto her fingers, onto her sleeve, mixing right back in.
I decided, lying there, working it through slowly the way I work through most things, that this was not a full surrender. This was closer to what happened with the thing in the window that catches gnats — a coexistence I had not asked for and would not have chosen, but one that, examined closely enough, mostly benefited me. The candle would burn down eventually. Candles do that, I assume, though I have no prior information to base this on beyond the fact that this one was visibly shorter by evening than it had been at noon, the wax pooled soft and yellow around the wick, the little flame dipped lower into itself like it was tired. My work does not burn down. My work simply is, night after night, cheek after cheek, quietly outlasting whatever gets set down on the coffee table in a paper bag.
Still. I did another round before bed, just the important spots, just to be safe. The bookshelf corner. The couch arm. The low place on the curtain that probably didn’t need it the first time either. She’d blown the candle out by then, and the smell was thinning into something you’d only notice if you were specifically looking for it, which, obviously, I was. I settled against her side under her arm the way I do now, and the last thing I caught before I gave up on staying alert was the two smells together, hers and mine and a thin, retreating edge of the spice, and I found, somewhat to my own surprise, that I didn’t mind it there. Underneath. In its place. Not on the furniture.
I’ll be checking the jar again in the morning to see how much ground it’s lost. I expect good news. I usually get it, eventually, if I just keep at the corners long enough.