The Lantern Keeper’s List
A light left burning for no one still burns.
There was a lantern keeper who tended twelve lanterns along a mountain path.
Every evening he lit them.
Every morning he walked the path and extinguished them one by one.
But one morning, he forgot one.
It was the seventh lantern, in the middle of the path, behind a bend where travelers rarely stopped.
He noticed it when he returned home.
I’ll go back for it tomorrow, he told himself.
Tomorrow came.
He lit the other eleven.
He did not go back for the seventh.
It was still burning from the night before — pale in the daylight, almost invisible, but burning.
It will go out on its own, he thought.
It didn’t.
The lantern burned through the day.
Burned through the next night, while all the others were lit properly around it.
Burned into a third day, quieter now, the oil running low.
The keeper passed it each evening when he lit the others.
Each evening he thought: I’ll deal with it tomorrow.
Each evening it was still there.
Still burning.
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Still his.
On the fourth day, a traveler stopped at the seventh lantern.
“This one looks different from the others,” she said.
“It’s been burning for four days,” the keeper said, embarrassed.
“Why haven’t you put it out?”
He thought about it.
“It was such a small thing,” he said finally.
“To leave burning, or to extinguish?”
He looked at the lantern.
Such a small flame.
Such a small decision.
He cupped his hand around it and blew it out.
The relief was immediate and slightly absurd — disproportionate, he thought, to such a small act.
But the path felt different now.
All twelve lanterns the same.
Nothing burning that shouldn’t be.
Nothing left unfinished in the dark.
The small flame does not ask much.
Only that you decide.
To let it burn, or to let it go.
Either way, the deciding is the thing.
