Night of the Fireflies
Fireflies—not dozens, not hundreds, but thousands!—spun and danced in those oddly inevitable patterns. They glimmered and flickered and traced bright paths against the night. Gazing at them, Hollis remembered slipping swiftly through warm summer nights, hands outstretched to trap the bright insects in a mason jar, beacons for the haunted boyhood dark. Lightning bugs he had called them then, and the notion still appealed to him—tiny insects, translucent bellies aflame with summer fury. Bottled lightning. Magic.
“Go on,” he said as he peeled back the plastic lid. One by one the fireflies hurled themselves into that stiff quadrille. A single insect lingered on the lip of the jug, delicate antennae reading the air. Hollis nudged it with his index finger. The firefly winked furiously, rocketing before his face to disappear amid the thousand flaring sparks.
Hollis sighed, thinking of Blake.
They had met at a party years ago. While the rest of the party—the rest of the world—gathered entranced before the walls—the stunning new four-way liquid crystal walls with their illusion of depth, of reality—Hollis and Blake had retreated to the fastness of the porch and there, like fellow spies long sought for in a hostile land, exchanged their tokens of recognition.
“I’ve often seen a cat without a grin—” Blake had said.
”—but a grin without a cat!” Hollis had responded.
And then, together: “It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in all my life!”
The two men paused for a moment, breathless, afraid to believe.
“No,” Hollis had whispered.
“Yes,” Blake said. “Yes, yes, yes!” He capered and danced, crying, “During the whole of a dull, dark, and—”
”—soundless day in the autumn of the year!”
“It is the flag of my disposition—”
”—of hopeful green stuff woven!”
Blake said, “It was the worst of times,” and Hollis had shouted aloud, “Oh, no it was the best of times,” and swept the other man into a delighted embrace. For it was, it was the best of times. After a lifetime of looking for a fellow book lover in a world that had no use for books—in a world that watched and listened and surfed the endless cybernetic wave—Hollis at last had found a friend who read.
Remembering, he felt a small frisson of that old joy.
Just then a shiny mechanical beetle slid noiselessly down the street and stopped before Hollis’s house. Blake. Hollis trembled, full to bursting with a life’s enthusiasm, anxious to share it at last. He wanted to shout aloud, to sound his barbaric yawp across the rooftops of the world and wake his neighbors up!
Then the beetle’s moonlit carapace slid aside, and his heart went cold within him.
Two men came to him across the grass: Blake, squat as a fireplug, and another man, tall and cadaverously thin, with praying mantis grace. Moonlight collected on the stranger’s wide shoulders and flashed from his grinning ivory teeth. His eyes burned in the shadow of his fedora.
Hollis gasped as if gut-punched. The plastic jug slid from his nerveless fingers.
“Blake?” he said.
Through the spinning motes of the fireflies, Blake came to him, followed by the thin man.
