The Light of the Fireflies

by Paul Pen

She gripped my free hand, then picked up her toothbrush and dipped it in the froth I’d spat out.

gross

Because the face that appeared behind the mask changed everything.

smiling at the camera that captured that image without ever suspecting what it would finally be used for.

The child they stretchered away was no longer the boy who a few hours earlier had enjoyed, openmouthed, a sunset that would mark the end both of that day and of his life as it had been. Nor was he the same boy who, to remember it forever, had breathed in the magical air of that enchanted place at the top of the lighthouse. A feeling he never remembered because it disappeared into the tangle of brain connections that were knocked loose by the impact against the edge of the step that cracked open his head. The skull was left as fractured as the daughter’s relationship with her parents and grandparents, who from then on made her the gangrenous limb of the body formed by the six members of the family.

Her son was reduced to a foggy blob pulsating in front of her.

Her voice failed when she remembered the two times the boy had run off in the last few days. And how he’d shown up soaked on the road to town. The woman closed her eyes. The darkness showed her an image of her son thrusting his pelvis over the girl’s battered body.

The woman contained a sob as she remembered the lethal consequences of her son’s love, which turned the rodent into a purée of hair and blood that she cleaned from his fingers with an ammonia-soaked rag. And it occurred to her that it was the same thing they were doing now: cleaning away the girl’s remains by hiding her in a septic tank.

She spoke in a voice as deep and as dark as the sea they had looked out on as a family from that tower on so many nights. She spoke without pause. Tears, blood, and saliva fell on the receiver. After identifying herself, she told the man how her brother had found the girl on the rocks. How he’d kept her existence secret in order to live for a few days in a crazed fairy tale in which the two of them made a family together. Until the girl’s body faded forever. She told him how her brother had then brought the corpse to the old lighthouse. The decision her family had made to hide the body. And she told him also that the girl lay in the septic tank. Under a pile of stones that they later sealed off with concrete.

But nobody was listening at the other end of the line. Her last words were reduced to an electrostatic crackle emanating from the receiver of a telephone left lying on the floor. Because the man who’d answered, and who had dropped the receiver when the voice mentioned the concrete that they used to cover the body of his daughter—the girl he’d

dressed in pink one spring morning to teach her to ride a bicycle—that man was now moving frenetically around his garage. Searching among empty cans. Praying to the God he no longer believed in that he wouldn’t find a full one. When he found one, he changed his plea. Now he prayed for the strength he would need to stop himself. To prevent himself from going through with the idea that had germinated in his mind.

“I did it.” “The police?” “Her father.” The reply filled the man’s chest with air contaminated with guilt, with remorse. He let it out in an agonizing sigh, a wretched, high-pitched wail that rose up the staircase. His daughter heard him from upstairs. Never in her eighteen years of life had she heard her father cry. And she smiled.

And that was when, without having made a decision to do so, Grandpa pushed his granddaughter, who rolled down the stairs. A deep grunt emerged from her stomach when an eyebrow was cut open on the splintered edge of a step.

In front of the officer, he let it all out in a heartbroken crying fit. Like a storm breaking at sea. And he used that state to tell his story.

Which was why the thick edge of the bottom of the bottle hit him on the mouth. His bottom lip split in half. Blood and saliva streamed down his chin. Pieces of glass opened unnatural mouths on his face. Then he felt the liquid. The same liquid his parents and grandmother felt. Grandma swallowed some of the gasoline, her mouth open in shock. That was when the strip of fire and ash turned the liquid into heat. Then the heat became pain. The daughter moved away from them, away from the fire. She sat on the floor, her back resting against the door, watching her family beat themselves to put out the flames.

“Leave me in peace,” she whispered, while her family burned in front of her. “Leave me in peace.”

“So what does this mean?” the daughter continued. She looked at her father with her eyes wide open. Finding in the baby a reason to finally bring an end to the imprisonment that had gone on too long. Six weeks.

The corners of my lips pulled downward. I felt pressure on top of my eyes. And an itch in my throat. My chin began to tremble when I thought that my chick could be another invention. “My chick . . .” I didn’t know what else to say.

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

It became clear to me at that moment. Mom knew, too, that the Cricket Man really existed. Even though she’d always denied it to me.

“Because we want you to leave, not escape,” Dad explained. “We’ve been hoping for a while that you’d come to the decision yourself. But not even making you sleep in the bathtub made you want to go.” A hint of a smile curved Dad’s hair scar. “Son, you’re going to have to forgive us for many things. I just wanted you to stop liking this place. So that leaving wouldn’t be so difficult.”

Because the fireflies had never existed, either.