Yukie

In the winter of a year I will not name, I stayed in a house at the edge of a town whose name I have since lost. The house belonged to a widow and her son, and the son had gone away in the spring to work on the water.

She kept a lamp in the window for him. Not a fine lamp. A tin thing with cracked glass, filled with the cheapest oil she could buy, lit every night from the first dark to the last. In the morning she put it out herself. She never asked anyone to do it.

I asked her once why she did not simply leave it burning, since she lit it again every evening anyway.

She said: because a lamp left burning is just a lamp. A lamp you light is a person waiting.

I remember that sentence better than I remember her face, which is a shame, because I had reason to look at her closely. I was hungry that winter. I am always hungrier in cold weather. There were nights I stood at the bottom of her stairs and listened to her breathe and told myself it was only the wind I had come in out of.

I did not touch her. I have done worse than that and will again, but I did not touch her, and I have never been able to decide whether it was mercy or only pride.

The son came home in the third spring, thin and brown and alive. She did not make a fuss. She put the lamp out, hung it on its nail by the door, and never lit it again. I understood then that I had been waiting too, in my way, and that I had no window to put anything in.

I left a week later. I did not say goodbye. There was nothing I could say that would not have been a lie dressed as a courtesy.

Tell me a subject and the opening lines come free.