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

Matchless

—A Christmas Story—

An Illumination of Hans Christian Andersen’s Classic “The Little Match Girl”
Written and Illustrated by Gregory Maguire

TO GERALDINE FEGAN
and to the thousands of school and public librarians who work
to keep the library lamps burning during dark times

PART ONE

ON AN ISLAND so far north that it snowed from September to April, a boy named Frederik kept himself warm by keeping a secret.

SOME MORNINGS the top of the water in the kitchen jug had frozen into a disc of ice.

Frederik had to smash it with a wooden spoon.

He piled the pieces of ice in a saucer, reminded of the way that harbor ice broke up in a thaw. Small ice made musical clinking sounds; large ice groaned like his mother.

“Not dawn, not yet!” she protested through her morning congestion. “The troubles of another day come to haunt me. Where are you, my sweet ginger biscuit?”

“I’m making your tea to warm you up,” replied Frederik.

HE HURRIED to light the kitchen fire. Money was scarce, and this was the last match until his mother could afford to buy more, so he struck it carefully. The warmth on his fingers made him want—quick—to use them to make something clever before they became stiff with cold again. His fingers were the only clever part of him.

“My useful child,” said the widow Pedersen. “Tea on a cold morning: a reason to live.

But this”—she grimaced—“pfaah! It’s thin as rainwater. Have you made one scoop of leaves do for a whole pot?”

“The canister is nearly empty.”

“It’s Christmas Eve: I’m paid today. I’ll buy some more.”

“We need matches, too.”

AS DAME PEDERSEN and Frederik folded the bedding, their breath wisped in the chilly room. “Look, it’s a pair of ghosts.”

“That’s all that’ll be left of us, a pair of ghosts, unless you succeed today,” said Dame Pedersen. “Make those seagulls pay for waking me with their jeering.”

“We work as a team, the gulls and I,” Frederik reminded her. His stomach muttering with hunger, Frederik kissed his mother and left.

The Pedersens lived in a couple of rooms tacked onto a herring smokehouse on an island in the harbor. From their threshold Frederik looked across the water to the prosperous city on the mainland. The town was bedecked with necklaces of evergreen. Setting out across the low stone causeway that joined island to mainland, Frederik caught a whiff of a goose roasting for a holiday luncheon.

USUALLY HE STAYED near the docks, meeting the boats. As fishermen emptied their nets of herring or skrat or mackerel, gulls or storks filched from the day’s catch.

If Frederik could startle a scavenger into dropping a fish, why, there was the beginning of supper. The fishermen didn’t begrudge Frederik stealing from seagulls.

WHEN FISH WERE FEW, Frederik searched for bits of beautiful trash. Anything he might use for his secret.

HIS MOTHER didn’t suspect a thing. Every night when she came home from the palace—she was a seamstress for the Queen—Dame Pedersen fried the fish and then plunged under the warm coverlet to do her mending there. The Queen had a heavy foot and always stepped on her own hems, so every evening Frederik’s mother reached for her basket of threads, all wrapped tightly on wooden spools.