I sat on the floor of a room, lined with concrete, surrounded by a few hundred black candles. I felt slightly sick. I was facing a young man, maybe 16, who had his back to me, sitting crosslegged on the ground, a trail of smoke rising from his fingertips as he snuffed out yet another candle of the hundreds.

The room was bare. Just the concrete floor, ceiling, and four walls was what could be seen from the floor of it. A perfect negative cube. Simple, bare, inescapable. I felt my arms shiver, though the temperature was perfectly in balance with my body.

I smelled the candle smoke.

"Who are you?" I asked simply.

"God." The young man snuffed out another candle, hunched over the cluster of candles about his knees.

"Oh," was all I said.

About a half hour passed.

I heard the sound of light metal scraping against heavy rock yet again, and the faint sound of a dying flame, killed between three fingers.

"Is heaven a beautiful place?" I asked the boy sitting before me. The answer might comfort me, I realized halfway through speech; perhaps fear was not a necessary emotion after all.

"Heaven is empty," he said simply. His fingers never stopped.

I didn't reply. Was this true?

"Surely someone was good enough to go to heaven!“

"You are."

We sat in silence, the trailing smoke from the candles rising.

As I waited, another candle lost its life.

"What are the candles, what do they mean?"

"They are souls."

"Why-" I breathed, as he snuffed another. "Why do you kill them?"

"Because they burn red." He snuffed another. "They do not burn clean."

"Surely some of them burn clean…"

"You did," he told me.

Tireless, endless, he shifted his slight weight time and again to reach new candles with his sooty fingers. His head was bowed in concentration; his eyes hidden from me, his back turned. I watched this wretch snuff out his kingdom one by one in concentrated silence. I shivered in fear of this boy. The slow rhythm of extinguished flame beat upon my ears like blows that did not sting.

"Why don't you let them live?" I said, pitifully.

"I have, for many years. But now, they burn too much. I cannot breathe."