Horoscope at the End of the World

Hilary Fair

A small beeswax candle sits on the table in the sun porch. The glass jar that holds it is clotted with drippings. This squat, two-inch, $3 pillar will burn for a couple of hours end-to-end: we are only half-way through, this candle and me. My husband urges me to move like a feather in a breeze, not like a bird in a hurricane. I wear a dead woman’s brown suede shoes and try to remember to walk lightly, as though tracing watermarks along a philodendron’s leaf. Even so, the sun porch is dripping into the ground and when I dream, it is of a mare with leaves braided through her mane; it is of a man throwing hot coals for a dog to fetch. I kick the man. I scream. Each year, with the first whisperings of spring, we open the door to this porch and begin pushing the table around, searching for a spot that won’t put our bodies, or our dinner plates, on an eighteen-degree angle tilting south. My little candle’s flame has navigated these same harsh angles, these bad dreams, and in protest, in solidarity, it has burned a hole in one side. An astronaut’s helmet. A tiny retro T.V. that allows me to observe the wick: the spinal cord along which the candle will both burn and burn itself out. Before I worried about displaced koalas, or the Amazon’s ash, or the way whole mountain ranges can disappear behind heavy drapes of smoke, my father used his thick-lensed glasses to graft the sunshine against small pieces of driftwood my sister and I collected on the beach. With a patient hand, the lenses eventually magnifying the heat, he would write our names, delighting us with this improvised wood-burning tool. I remember us picking snake grass, tugging apart and then reconnecting its segments — a time, maybe, before the dunes were endangered. I remember clear water and dad, skipping stones. Now, the globe is on fire and the old bones of my confederation-era home melt a bit more with each heat wave. Candle wax pools in glass jars. The walls are cracking. There are squirrels in the roof. Sometimes, it rains inside. The horoscope for Libra told me Saturn would spend these last six months in Capricorn, that this is the time to put the floorboards of your life in place. It spoke of shadow and shame; reckoning with, and healing, that which has been forsaken. And I heard in this an incantation: Melt. Be a feather. Try again.

Hilary Fair (she/her) is a writer, psychotherapist, and potter-on-hiatus from Ontario. Her creative non-fiction has been published in The New Quarterly and The Amy Award Anthology; her essays have been shortlisted for the 2022 Edna Staebler Award (Honourable Mention) and the 2021 CNFC/Humber Literary Review Nonfiction Contest. In 2021 she co-won the inaugural Amy Award.