The Last Firefly

I promise you this. I will not grieve my own brief signature of existence. My green light is a solitary star blinking in the Coriander Forest of Cherry Hill, unseen under the domed glow of the nearest city’s gathered light. Three short bursts of bioluminescence followed by three longer ones followed by three short ones. I float up and repeat the pattern, float down and repeat it. No one comes. No one like me. No one in the grass answers with flashes. Not anymore.

The people got together and made light for themselves, to see in the dark. They built large nests of buzzing steel and wire to make this light and make more of it, keeping it on for longer and longer and in every season. We could not find each other anymore as their light consumed more of the dark, illuminating the low parts of the sky. At first, it thinned our gentle flashes, but we still found each other in our slow meandering flights. But then they added more lights along the streets and around their homes, in front yards and backyards. The distant towers grew higher and their lights stronger at every height and our small pulses dissolved faster into that perpetual low-hanging glow.

I traveled further to the woods of Borton Mills and those of Croft Farm. I traveled to the Bunker Hill Trails and even as far as Wallworth Park. I land exhausted on a spate of dry earth. I take flight and pulse. I land again and rest. After I rest, I float up again, hundreds of times by night’s end. No one answers in Borton Mills or Croft Farm or the Bunker Hill Trails. No one answers at Wallworth Park. No one like me joins me on my rest or in my flight. My time is short and I am thinking there is at least one like me, there must be, but maybe given up their search and now spending each night on a branch or on a stone by a stream, not flashing, not doing anything, but waiting for the end.

The people’s light is a quiet oblivion. But I do not blame them for it. They are doing what they need to do for themselves. Yet the ones who are open-hearted, who once cupped us in their hands to delight in our luminescence and our calling, they now look out into their yards and into the forests and there is no more visitation and joining, no more flickers of joy in our clandestine meetings, just darkness uninterrupted. And they turn away and go inside. I have seen them do this, with looks of disappointment on their faces. They do other things and forget about us. They assume we have forgotten about them too. I have not forgotten about them. There is one house at the end of a long street where a number of them live. When I have finished my searching, I go there to hover by their downstairs window and sing my light out toward them. But the strong lights of their space take up too much of their eyes and flood their hearts and pull their attention to flat surfaces spilling every kind of colorful light, and so they do not see me and come out with their excitement and their cupped palms.

My wings are weaker now. My body aching. I cannot fly as long or as high. I need more rest on the ground or on a branch. But the strange thoughts still come to me as they have since I became aware, drawing me toward one of their steel and wire nests not far from the Borton Mills forest. It is one that all their light must pass through in order to spread out into the world and up into the sky. I have just enough strength in me to get there this evening. And so I go at dusk. It will take me most of the night to get there, leaving me no time to send my pulses out. I am convinced there would be no one to answer me anyway.

As I get closer, the light from the generation of their light feels heavy around my body and disorienting. But I am pulled, as if by a knowing, toward the buzzing of light’s passage through three large-ringed spirals that rise up from gray boxes planted in concrete. This is where I must go, toward the middle spiral. It will be my last flight. My body knows this. My heart knows this. As I approach, my weakened luminescence gathers somewhere deep in me to surge forward, as if gathering for one last gasp of calling.

I am so close to the spiral now, inches from it. The buzzing deafens, the flooding light from poles around the boxes making me so heavy that my wings cannot work and I begin falling from my height, but I am right over the spiral now and about to land on it, pulled down onto it, and just before I touch it, that last gathering of light in me pours out like a green fire whose brightness pushes back the floodlight from above. And I touch that spiral and there is a tremendous explosion as I feel my body release me from its small delicate confines into a blinding light, a sudden evaporation of form and shape, with a thunder that rips open the sky and engulfs the ground beneath me and the air around me in an incinerating heat. And as I go into it, I feel the people’s light that has for so long domed the sky from the near city and from scattered pools of light along streets and around houses and from their yards, go out. And there is darkness again. Pure darkness, solid and untouched. And as I leave my thoughts, the brief knowing of a world, the remainder of my inner light extinguished with it, one last tiny glowing pulse escapes, miniscule but answered by one long pulse followed by three short ones, somewhere in the dark beyond me.

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