Miss Eleanor kept her special matches in an ornate silver case that had belonged to her grandmother. Not the kind for lighting fires—these were matchmaking matches, passed down through generations of women in her family. Each hand-carved stick bore intricate symbols that only she could read, telling the stories of souls destined to find each other.

“Now sugar,” she drawled to young Sarah Beth who sat fidgeting in the parlor’s worn velvet chair, “these ain’t your ordinary matches. They speak truths that most folks ain’t ready to hear.”

The late afternoon sun filtered through heavy lace curtains, casting webbed shadows across the faded wallpaper. The air hung thick with magnolia and something else—something older.

“But Miss Eleanor,” Sarah Beth’s voice quavered, “I don’t understand how a bunch of old matches could know who I’m meant to marry.”

Eleanor’s weathered hands trembled slightly as she opened the case. “Child, there’s more mystery in this world than most care to admit. My mama taught me the old ways, just like her mama before her. When two matches align perfect-like, that’s destiny showing its hand.”

She selected two matches with practiced care and held them up to the dying light. The symbols seemed to shift and dance as she turned them slowly.

“Well I’ll be,” Eleanor whispered. “These marks… they’re different somehow.”

Sarah Beth leaned forward. “Different how?”

“In all my years, I ain’t never seen—” Eleanor’s words caught in her throat as the matches suddenly burst into brilliant blue flame, though neither stick burned.

Sarah Beth gasped. “Miss Eleanor, your hands!”

But Eleanor only smiled, watching as the ethereal fire traced ghostly patterns in the air between them. “Don’t fret none, child. This is just the old magic having its say.”

The flames coalesced into a shimmering vision—not of Sarah Beth’s future husband as expected, but of Eleanor herself as a young woman, refusing the matches her own grandmother tried to read for her.

“Oh,” Eleanor said softly, understanding dawning in her faded blue eyes. “So that’s how it is.”

When Sarah Beth left that evening, Eleanor carefully closed the silver case one final time. The matches had shown her what she needed to see—her own story coming full circle.

They found her the next morning in her favorite chair, the empty case clasped in her lap, a peaceful smile gracing her features. The matches themselves had vanished without a trace, their magic dispersed like morning mist.

Some say on quiet evenings, if you pass by the old house just as dusk is settling in, you might catch a glimpse of ethereal blue flames dancing behind the lace curtains—Eleanor’s matches still at work, weaving together the threads of destiny that bind us all.

Sarah Beth never did get her reading that day. But years later, when she found love in her own time and way, she swore she caught the scent of magnolias and saw a flash of blue flame from the corner of her eye, just for a moment—Miss Eleanor’s final blessing from beyond the veil.