Fireflies

Rachel noticed the fireflies.

I never would have; I was too busy swatting mosquitoes. Rachel sat in the folding chair next to me, her legs propped up on the porch railing, and the bugs didn’t bother her at all. I poked her in the arm and she turned to look at me with her moss-green eyes and that beautiful, catlike face. “How come every bug out here tries to eat me alive, but they don’t even buzz in your ears?”

She leaned over and kissed my cheek. “Because you taste better. Besides, I have an arrangement with them. They don’t bite me, and I don’t swat them.”

“Why don’t you work out a deal like that with the spiders, instead of making me stomp them?”

“There’s no reasoning with spiders,” she said absently. Her mind was on something else. I sipped my wine. My roommate, Derek, was banging around in the kitchen, cleaning up. Rachel had joined us for dinner. She and Derek got along pretty well, which was good. I’d had roommates and girlfriends in the past who couldn’t stand each other.

Derek and I had moved out of the crackerbox apartment we’d shared the year before to lease a little house overlooking Job street. It was close to campus and pretty expensive, but I’d been saving, and Derek always seemed to find money somewhere. The house was small, but it had a red wooden porch and a green hill in the front. If we’d tried to picnic on the lawn everything would have gone sliding down the incline to scatter on the street, but it was a nicer view than the parking lot we’d had before.

It was one of those sweet spring-going-on-summer evenings, a twilight sky all purple and pink in the west. It was shaping up to be a fine mountain summer. Classes at Dearborne University had just ended and I hadn’t started my job at the bookstore yet, so I had a little languishing time. I looked up at the clouds over the mountains. Looked like a thunderstoem might be moving in.

Rachel tugged at her homemade skirt. She looks good in anything. We met last year when she joined my writing group, and I was drawn to her almost immediately. She writes magical poetry, transforming the everyday world into a realm of fairies and monsters and miracles. Sometimes I think she really sees the world that way. She’d done wonders for my perspective. And my heart. I looked to see what she was watching, and smiled.

“Fireflies,” I said. They were all around the big white-blossomed bush, dozens of them. “I had a cousin who used to make jewelry out of them.” Rachel didn’t answer, just stared at the blinking bugs. “She used to wait for them to light up, and then she’d pinch off the part that glows. It goes on glowing, and she’d stick it on her knuckle and call it a ring. The guts held it on.” I put down my wineglass and stood up, just to lean on the railing, but Rachel thought I wanted to demonstrate the ring-making. She stood up and grabbed my arm.

“Robert, you wouldn’t.”

“No, I wasn’t going to. But now that you mention it, why is it okay to kill spiders and not fireflies? At least spiders eat mosquitoes.”

“Spiders are merely functional. Fireflies are beautiful.” She sounded preoccupied. “Robert, does Derek know Morse Code?”

I shrugged. “Probably. I imagine his Dad demanded it.” Derek’s father was a retired Pentagon type, and quite an outdoorsman. Derek inherited the love for nature, but (despite his pathological tidiness) not the military mind.

“Derek!” she called, still watching the fireflies. When Derek yelled back, she said “Could you come out here please?”

“What’s up” I asked.

“Look,” she said, pointing at the bush, and I did.

The fireflies were blinking, which they were supposed to do, but they weren’t doing it randomly. They were blinking in unison, short glows and long ones. Dots, and dashes.

“Holy shit,” I said reverently, swatting a mosquito.

Derek came out in his cut-off camouflage pants and a faded green t-shirt. Clean-up clothes. His wild black hair was standing nearly straight up, a gift of his mixed blood (a mishmash of Asian and Pacific Islander), and his glasses were askew. “Yeah?”

“Look at the fireflies,” I said.

He slid up to the rail, gracefully. My friend Meredith says he should dance, but sword forms and the martial arts are more his style. He looked for a long moment toward the bush.

“That’s pretty weird,” he said at last.

“Do you know Morse Code?” Rachel said.

“Yeah, learned it when I was a kid. Why?”

“I think they’re using it.”

He cocked his head and looked at her, trying to see if she was putting him on. I probably looked at her that way myself.

“No,” she said, “Really. It’s a pattern. A pretty long one, so I didn’t notice it at first. But they flash a sequence, take a long pause, and then repeat. Could you translate, Derek? I mean, if it is Morse Code?”

He shrugged. “Why not? I’ll go get something to write with.” He came back with a pad and pencil, the screen door banging shut behind him. “Maybe they’ll say ‘Elvis Lives’ or ‘Help me’, like that guy in The Fly.”

“Shh,” Rachel said. “They’re about to start over.”

We were silent. There was a long pause in the blinking, and then it started again. Derek frowned and muttered as he wrote, never taking his eyes off the lights. I couldn’t see the bugs themselves, just the flashes. I wondered idly if they were really fairies, and it was just too dim for us to see their little Tinkerbell-bodies. It was a joking thought. Rachel just waited.

“Well?” she said, when the pattern ended. The fireflies stayed dark.

Derek started to speak, then stopped, looking down at what he’d written. “See for yourselves.”

We both leaned in, and it took me a second to find the words in the unbroken string of letters. Rachel read it aloud. “The rains come. Let us in.”

“That’s a joke, right, Derek?” I said.

He shook his head, slowly, still looking into the yard. “If it is, I’m not the one playing it.”

Rachel opened the screen door wide and made a shooing-in gesture with her arm.

“Maybe we have to signal back,” I said, only half-kidding.

A greenish-yellow constellation appeared in the yard as all the fireflies lit at once, and flew past us, shining, through the open door.

Rachel went in, and I followed, more than a little stunned. Derek, grinning cockeyed and a little vacantly, came in after me.

Outside, thunder crackled.

The fireflies were everywhere. It had looked like dozens in the yard, but it could easily be hundreds now. They were lighting up and settling on everything, the milk-crate and plexiglass coffee table, the brown couch, even the comic book and music posters on the walls. I looked closely at a bug clinging to an outdated Allison Wonderland flier. Not a fairy, just a bug, with six legs and two wings..

Derek and Rachel were on the couch, looking around with wonder, and I sat between them. The fireflies seemed perfectly normal now, with no sign of unity or intelligence. “When I was little,” Derek said, “I thought they could shock you. You know, ‘lightning bugs.’ I thought they were like electric eels, so I never touched them.”

I refrained from retelling my firefly-ring story, maybe because I didn’t want to offend our company. “I thought they might be fairies. Not that I really believe in fairies, but I thought, maybe… but they’re just bugs.”

“Maybe they are fairies,” Rachel said. “Traveling incognito as fireflies.” The rain came hard then, flashes of lighting and thunder and the rattle of raindrops on the windows. “They were right about the rain, though.”

“Hey!” Derek said loudly, startling me before I realized he was talking to the fireflies. “Hey!” The bugs just fluttered and took no notice. He sighed. “Why’d they want in out of the rain, anyway? It wouldn’t have killed them.”

“Still,” Rachel said, “An inconvenience. You’d want in out of the rain.”

He grunted.

It was a summer thunderstorm, and quickly passed. When the last drops had drizzled, the fireflies clustered in a thick swarm around the door. Rachel stood up. “They’re ready to go. I’d better, too.” She hugged us both, and kissed me goodbye. She opened the screen door and held it. “After you,” she said, and the shifting lightstorm drifted out, dispersing into the dark. Rachel followed.

Derek got up and made two cups of Russian tea. He handed me mine and we stood leaning on the counter, staring out the front window by the door.

“Well,” he said at last. “That was sufficiently strange.”

Time passed, and we forgot about it. I started my job, Derek kept hiking and rock climbing, and life went on. Sure, we watched the fireflies pretty avidly for a while, but they never did anything unusual, and eventually we stopped.

Later in the summer Derek went camping and kayaking, solo, in Mason’s gorge. Helping him load his car with gear that Friday morning I said “What happens if you get hurt out there?” Mason’s gorge is no tame national park; it’s a real wilderness, and every year I hear stories of inexperienced campers and hikers getting lost. Some of them never get found. And some of them aren’t that inexperienced.

He shrugged. “If I die, keep my stereo, but send the swords to Dad.”

“No, really, what if something happens?”

“If I’m not back by Monday night, get in touch with the cops. But really, don’t worry about it. I’ve done this before.” Derek was all cool confidence. There was nothing he couldn’t handle, as far as he was concerned, and he didn’t like anyone to suggest otherwise. He knew I was a worrier, though, so he didn’t get too grouchy.

He gave a final wave and drove off, kayak strapped to the top of his car. I’d tried to persuade Rachel to take advantage of the empty apartment, but it was a no-go. She was going to summer school and she had a folklore paper to finish. “Sunday,” she said. “I promise.” I could handle the wait. Derek was going to be gone all weekend, after all.

I didn’t have to work that weekend, so I spend Saturday morning reading. Later on I gave my friend Meredith a call. I had a real crush on her before I met Rachel, and she’s still one of my favorite people. We went to the Bean Tree for some coffee (it was the summer of caffeine; the coffee shop was less than a block from my house). Meredith was energetic as always, and we listened to the jazz and talked about writing group. I left, mentally drained after a long conversation about obsessions and dreams. She always wanted to talk about Great Things with me, which was fine, except that she was the only one of us qualified to do so.

Derek’s car was in the driveway when I got home. My first thought, I admit, was irritation that I wouldn’t get to be alone with Rachel. My next thought, though, was to wonder if he was all right. I rushed up the hill.

Derek was in his favorite chair, which he’d stolen from the student union. He was drinking wine and wearing a bathrobe. His hair was moderately tamed, wet and sticking to his head. He always took baths, to relax, when things got stressful.

“Hey,” I said. “You all right?”.

“More or less.”

I pulled off my shoes. Derek is half-Chinese and half the household, so we take off our shoes when we come in. He looked exhausted. “You won’t believe what happened to me,” he said.

I got some tea and sat down. “Do tell.”

“You’re the only one I can tell, the only one who won’t laugh. But here goes.” He took a deep breath and said “You jinxed me, with all that accident talk. I was in the kayak, in swift water. It was getting toward dark, and I was headed back to camp. I must have looked the wrong way at the wrong time because I ran up on a rock. It cracked the kayak and pitched me. The boat’s gone.”

“God, Derek, at least you lived!”

“I’m getting to that,” he said, a sour look on his face. “I don’t remember much. I must have hit my head, scrambled my brains. I got out of the river somehow. But then, I guess because I had scrambled my brains, I wandered off. Like a fool who’s never been in the woods before.

“The first thing I really remember is sitting on a rock, in the dark. I didn’t know if I was east or west of the river, or how far away it was. No light, no means to make a fire, nothing. All that was back at camp. I couldn’t just head downhill and hope to find the river, not in a place as hilly as Mason’s gorge. I decided to sit until first light, because I didn’t think much of my chances of finding camp in the dark. I was just settling down on a comfy bed of tree roots and rocks when I saw the lights.”

“Lights?”

He scowled. “Listen, I had the whole situation under control. You know that, right? I’ve been in worse fixes than that in the woods. I didn’t ask for any help.” I frowned. He was losing me, and I wondered if his brains were still a little scrambled from the night before. “Yeah, I understand.”

He nodded. “They were fireflies. A swarm of them, right in front of me. They’d drift forward, then dart back. Back and forth. Like Lassie, when she wanted somebody to follow her. If Lassie was a swarm of radioactive bugs instead of a collie.”

“Bioluminescent,” I murmured, marveling. “Not radioactive.”

“Whatever. All I could think of were will o’ the wisps, leading lost travelers to their deaths. But these were fireflies, not St. Elmo’s Fire or swamp gas. I remembered that night, you remember, with the fireflies. So I followed them. As you can probably guess, they did the Lassie routine all the way back to camp. Not on clear paths, either. I got plenty scratched up. Still, they led me, and as soon as I saw my camp, they flew away. I wasn’t so hot on camping anymore, so today I hiked out and came home.”

“That’s incredible, Derek. They saved your life.”

His scowl deepened, and I realized why he was so irritated. Magical intervention was an insult to his survival skills. “Hardly. I knew you’d say that. It wasn’t a life-or-death situation. Getting lost like that, it was just—“

“An inconvenience,” I said, and he nodded, both of us remembering what Rachel had said about the fireflies and the rain.

He went to take another bath, and we didn’t talk about it any more that night.

I went to Rachel’s the next evening. Her roommate, Tori, was at a concert, so we had the place to ourselves. I told her about Derek’s adventure. “Wow,” she said, not at all surprised. “They returned the favor.”

“They couldn’t have been the same fireflies,” I said. “How long do they live, like two days? Even if there was a bunch of them with some kind of collective intelligence, they’d be dead by now.”

She shook her head. “You don’t believe that.”

I slumped. “Not really. It’s just so weird.”

She put her arm around me. “What’s wrong with weird? It wasn’t bad, was it? Maybe they really were fairies in disguise. Or, if you prefer, all fireflies can communicate via Morse Code, and just don’t usually choose to. Better?”

“I guess. It’ll have to do.” I pulled her close to me, kissing her. We sat quietly for a moment, cuddling, and I said “They still owe us both a favor, right? They paid Derek back, but they owe us.”

She hit me with a pillow, laughing. “I can’t believe you. But yes, they probably do feel that they owe us. Don’t expect miracles. They don’t save lives or anything, evidently. Just improve inconveniences.”

“Every little bit helps,” I said, and kissed her again. And if I saw a scatter of tiny twinkling lights outside her window, I just closed my eyes and pretended not to notice.

I pretty much said what I had to say about this story in this entry of tropism.