The Light of the Fireflies

by Paul Pen

On the night I asked my father the question, my family had been five years in the basement.

Sometimes I thought of them as suicide victims, glass bodies hanged and swinging from a cable.

A door loses its meaning if you don’t ever go through it. It becomes a wall.

There’s no creature more amazing than one that can make its own light.

“Like all fears are overcome,” she answered. She stood and went to the door, then held a finger over the switch and added, “By facing up to it.” She turned off the light.

Right then an unknown emotion was set off inside me. A spark that fought to catch fire.

The first firefly that arrived from the world outside. Just after I discovered I couldn’t visit that world even if I wanted to, because the kitchen door had always been locked. It was the first of all the fireflies that had come to die in my jar. The glass basement to which I’d condemned them.

A heartbroken sigh issued from her belly. She felt as if she could have vomited her soul.

Grandpa broke away from the embrace with his wife. She didn’t fight against it. She stood there with her arms hanging, her eyes moving from point to point on the floor without coming to rest on any of them. As if her gaze were nothing more than a ball of fluff.

I observed the two bits of important things in my life that had broken. Something much more important had broken inside me.

The fireflies flew up into the sky, free. I watched them until I could no longer tell them apart from the stars.

Because I know the light will always belong to people like him. And those unwilling to look beyond their own little world will be left in the dark.