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A Promise Kept By Candle Flame Short Story Analysis

Decent Essays

All stories begin with a problem; these three flash fictions share the problem of these characters being unable to move on. The flash fiction story, “Promise Kept by Candle Flame,” tells the tale of a desperate woman who loves another woman and has the problem of moving on from her death. The flash fiction piece “Like Father, Like Daughter” conveys the bitterness that the father had endured until that day, causing him to be unable to move on and realize there are others who love and need him to move on. “<3 Quest,” another Flash fiction, creates an embarrassingly shy kid who is unable able to move on. This universal theme is seen in It by Stephen King, where Stuttering Bill, many years later, has not moved on from his dead brother, Georgie.
“A Promise Kept by Candle Flame” by Kelly M Sandoval shows us the problem many will have moving on, that is, with the dead. In this work the unnamed female narrator had had the one she could call a soul mate, Gemma, die. She had recalled her days with the living Gemma, the one who had blamed the creaking of the house on ghosts (Sandoval 1). Now that she had died, the narrator believes that she is a ghost. Believing this, the narrator attempted to discover some sort of message, through morse code. Before she had tried listening for Gemma she tried to record her through candles, she set up twenty six candles, each for one letter of the alphabet, recorded the order in which they had blown out, and tried to decipher nature. After this first method failed, she would not move on, she attempted candles once again, but this time, the candles had spelt out a specific message, “I L O V E Y O U”. Even so, the message had only ended up sounding how it was intended to sound, after these methods had not worked she went on to Morse Code. However, that didn’t work, considering she had only taken the letters that she had needed for specific messages. In the end, she was forced to move on, but only after the destruction of her home.
In “Like Father, Like Daughter” by Holly Geely, the protagonist, Robert, is a single dad who has had the problem of moving on; he had been bitter for three years. His wife had left him three years ago, telling him that there had never been any magic. Hearing

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