Chasing Fireflies

by Charles Martin

“Kids are like a spring, or a Stretch Armstrong. No matter how many times they’re passed around, passed off, and passed on . . . they snap back.” He spit through his window. “Hope . . . it’s the fuel that feeds them.” He shook his head and spit something off the end of his tongue. “God forbid the day they stop eating it.”

God wasn’t kidding when he said turn the other cheek, but”—he spat out across the porch and into the grass—“turning the cheek don’t mean be a doormat.”

That’s life. You take the bad with the good. Rise up through it. Live in the midst of it. It’s the bad that lets you know how good the good really is. Don’t let the bad leave you thinking like there ain’t no good. There is, and lots of it, too.”

“Sometimes good judgment comes from experience, and a lotta that comes from bad judgment.”

“Care for the roots, and the flower will bloom all on its own.”

I remember the story of Jesus sitting there surrounded by kids—maybe one or two sitting up on his lap. He said something about woe be to those who steer a child wrong. Something about how it’d be better for them to have a millstone hung around their neck and be thrown into the deep.

“I quit screaming at God a long time ago, ’cause I reckon he knows a thing or two about hurt.

I make a living with words, but sometimes words can’t say what needs saying.

“Every boy is born with a hole in his belly. If his dad don’t fill it, it festers and becomes an aching black hole—one that he’ll spend his waking hours trying to fill. Mostly with things that do him more harm than good.