Matchless: An Illumination of Hans Christian Andersen's Classic "The Little Match Girl" (3 page)

SHE CROUCHED, half asleep, till a church bell rang. It was a quarter to midnight. So she lit another match, and in the flare she saw a roast goose on a platter, amid silverware and crystal and creamy napery.

“Oh, goose,” she called, and it rose on its roasted legs and walked across the table toward her, the knife and fork in its back wagging in a comical way. She laughed, and put her hand to her mouth, but the match burned out and the goose disappeared, and the pretty table with it.

“COME BACK!” She struck a third match.

This time a Christmas tree rose high above her. She craned her head to see the pine boughs laden with glass ornaments, and with candles shining bright as stars. The highest candle served as the beacon; but then it streaked earthward.

“Mother said when a star falls, it means a soul is going up to God; so someone is dying,” she remembered.

THEN MIDNIGHT CHIMED, and the thought of her mother cheered her so that the little girl struck another match.

IN THE FLINTY LIGHT she
saw
her mother, who lived in heaven, but who now leaned forward with her smile, her bright and matchless eyes.

AS THE VISION FADED, the match girl despaired, and she lit match after match, to hold the vision. Her mother looked so inviting…

…AND THEN her warm arms were around the girl; and her mother took her home to the sky, where the stars shine like matches that can never be extinguished.

PART THREE

FREDERIK GOT HOME in time to stir the fire before the coals went out, which was lucky, for he had no way to start a new fire. When his mother returned, she said, “I’d have stopped to buy matches with the Queen’s bonus, but I saw no vendors at work this late on Christmas Eve. Now off to your attic; I’ll stay by the stove and keep the fire alive till Christmas morn.” But sitting to take off her shoes, she leaned against a pillow and immediately fell asleep.

ALL NIGHT Frederik sat nodding by the stove. Sometimes he imagined climbing into a comfortable shoe and sailing off to find a more hospitable place to live, a place where the poor did not shiver so, and the hungry could find enough to eat, and the children had all the parents they needed. Whenever a coal tumbled, startling him, he tended the fire with a poker, managing to keep the room tolerably warm until dawn.

“CHRISTMAS DAY, my dimpled dumpling!” Oh, la!—precious oranges, and anise cookies, and the fragrant dust of nutmeg to stir into his morning milk.

WHILE DAME PEDERSEN dawdled over her tea, Frederik hurried upstairs to arrange his little folk in their new boat, and help them set sail to find their necessary neighbors and kin.

Putting the slipper down, however, he shook something in it loose.

AN IRON KEY with a paper tag attached.

Now Frederik guessed that the shoe had been lost by accident. Since he couldn’t understand his letters, he plunged downstairs to ask his mother to read the tag. It was an address.

“An invitation?” wondered Frederik. “A nuisance,” said his mother, but he pestered her until she was overcome. She knew he couldn’t find an address on his own, so they made their way hand in hand across the causeway and through quiet streets to locate the address attached to the key.

WHEN YOU’VE NEVER heard its like before, it is hard to recognize the sound of human grief. At first Frederik thought it was seagulls, but his mother insisted: “We have come at an unfortunate moment.”

Frederik darted ahead anyway. He pressed through a crowd of neighbors, and he climbed a steep staircase to a room over a warehouse. There he found a frozen girl lying on a table, and her father fitfully rocking nearby, his eyes shut.