Night of the Fireflies
“I do. It’s what I do, I’m a writer.”
“A content provider, Mr. Hollis.”
Hollis thought of his long days indexing the countless snippets of music and speech and text that flowed to him through the walls. All those billion fragments sewn together in an endless web, every fragment a bridge to everywhere and nowhere, journeys without destination, guided by no shaping artist’s hand. The men and women and children, the fathers and mothers, the sons and daughters who day and night gazed transfixed into the liquid crystal walls—let them choose. Let them navigate their own journeys, a million unknown ways, guided by a million idiosyncratic interests. No place anymore for a story to be told, the First Principle decreed.
“Yes,” he whispered, “but a writer, too.”
“What gives you the right? Why should you choose what direction the story should take?”
“Alone, in private, I have sought no reader.”
The thin man threw back his head. An thin cry erupted from his throat, and now through the open door the fireflies came pouring—more fireflies than Hollis had ever seen or imagined, whirling and spinning, abdomens glitteringly alight in their endless cotillion. They swarmed about the thin man, alighting by the thousands upon his outflung arms and hands, his face and neck, the brim of his fedora—everywhere—until the black oval of his mouth alone remained, an inky vacuum in the pulsing glare, vent to that eerie and accusing cry. Once again, Hollis had that sense of angular hieroglyphs, bright with a significance that still defied him, carved into the darkling air.
Hollis staggered back as the liquid crystal walls boiled to life, drowning the moon-splashed room with double, treble, endlessly replicating images of his own worried face. Through the distorting plastic lens of the firefly jar he had placed on his desk, Hollis watched himself set aside the antique ballpoint pen; through the intervening mesh of window screen studied his own pensive gaze into the light-starved study; in a spinning vertiginous flash saw himself standing before his door, his face looming down, magnified and distorted as the harvest moon by the firefly camera circling by—a spinning kaleidoscope of images. From a dozen firefly angles, he witnessed the damning moment, his crime. Again and again, from each of the surrounding walls, he saw himself lean forward and speak the words into the phone’s flickering column of light—
Would you like to see it?
Would you like to see it?
Would you like to see it?
Blake, he thought. I trusted you—
A single firefly barreled past him, mesmerized by the thin man’s pulsing form. Hollis’s hand shot out and closed around the winking insect, crushing it. Then, in the glare of that strange pulsing light, he leaned forward to study the remains scattered piecemeal across his tremulous palm. His breath caught in his throat as all at once the significance of those glowing hieroglyphs, that queerly automated dance, came clear: shiny cogs and gears spilled from the creature’s shattered thorax; the extruding lens of a single camera eye stared up at him, bound to the wreckage by a shining filament of wire.
The thin man’s piercing cry fell to silence. The lurid walls flickered into gray. The cloud of fireflies funnelled away as they had come—out the open door and into the moonlit sky.
