Firefly Season

The fireflies are big as basketballs and float across the yard in the late summer evening like paper lanterns. The tourists snap photos with their phones and mill around with paper plates of food and cans of beer trying to grab at the bugs, as if they had jars large enough to hold them should they happen to catch one. Nobody ever does.

One of the tourists, a middle-aged woman in a flowery sundress and her hair pulled loosely into a bun at the back of her head, waves me over. “Do they ever bite?” she asks.

I look at a bug floating a couple yards away. We call them fireflies, but they’re not. And aside from the fact they glow, they don’t actually look anything like the little insects that blink around the lawn most summer evenings. These bugs are big and round, with little legs at the bottom. They look like little balls of light, and staring closely, I can’t see any mouths to speak of. They must eat, but I don’t know how or what.

“I’ve never heard of that happening,” I tell her. “I don’t think they can.”

She swigs from her beer and squints her eyes at an iridescent cloud of bugs hovering by the road. “How heavy are they?”

“I’m not sure. I’ve never touched one.” I haven’t known anyone who has managed to touch one. For as long as people have been showing up to watch the bugs, we don’t really know all that much about them. The tourist woman looks uncomfortable, as if she’s searching for something else to ask me about the bugs, trying to make conversation. I spare her the hassle and walk back to the house.

This time every year, during the couple weeks the bugs come out, my parents set up a barbecue in our large front yard. We have a small town corner lot, with more green space between our house and the street than anyone really needs. My folks sell pork shoulder and baked beans to tourists, coastal people who stop flying over flyover country long enough to see this one thing they think we have to offer. We set out picnic tables and benches in the front and side yards, draped with hokey red-and-white checked tablecloths you’d see in Hollywood versions of Midwestern picnics. A few years back, my dad bought a sign he could put out by the curb to attract attention. It’s blue metal and lights up where you slide in plastic letters like a movie marquee. On top is an arrow with little light bulbs to point people toward our house. Most of the year, it sits at the back of our garage, but in late July he has me help pull it out, and we run an extension cord all the way from the kitchen door. The sign has said the same thing every year since we got it:

My brother used to just hold a sign and wave at people by the road, but since he left, I refused to do that.

Tonight the crowd of tourists dies out shortly after sundown. The fireflies show up as usual, just before dusk and float around till the daylight finally fades. Then their lights go out and the bugs seem to vanish into the dark. Sometimes the tourists stay later and drink until my folks run out of beer. Right now it’s late August, the firefly season has stretched on a few weeks and people have already started to lose interest. The crowds are thinner and soon they’ll disappear, too.

Sauterelle Falls swells in the closing weeks of July with people from all around the world showing up to see the giant fireflies. The population goes from just over a thousand to nearly ten thousand people packed into the streets. People around town rent out their spare rooms and backyard sheds and put up rows of tents on their lawns for out-of-towners who sometimes stay the whole three or four weeks while the bugs are here. When I was little, someone got the brilliant idea to build a Holiday Inn by the highway at the edge of town to help accommodate the surge in visitors. Within a few years, the hotel was shuttered because it couldn’t run while being empty eleven out of twelve months.

As August wears on, we start to get our town back; school’s starting soon and the clamor of the last few weeks starts to ebb away. Every year, this month was the only time my brother Darren liked being around town.

I help my parents by cleaning up left behind trash, which was easier when Darren was around but it’s not too difficult a task. During the evenings in firefly season, Darren always chatted with people to hear about where they came from, what happened in places he’d only ever heard about. Growing up, we went to Topeka sometimes, Kansas City once on a school trip. Most of the time, all we ever saw were the endless, rolling fields, waves of farms and plains lapping at the shores of our town. Once a year the fireflies showed up like glowing ships carrying people from all over. Darren probed them about where they came from, what it was like there. He especially liked talking to people from the coasts—the farther away, the better. Whenever the crowds went away, some part of my brother always left with them.

One night late in firefly season five years ago, the last one Darren was here, he sat in a lawn chair next to a couple from New England, asking them all about the ocean and the cities, crouched toward the front of his chair like he was ready to sprint off and east till he saw rocky coasts and lighthouses.

“Does it smell great? The ocean?” he’d asked.

“Not incredibly,” the woman said. “A little like seaweed and wet rocks. Kinda salty.” She glanced at the man she was with. “I mean I guess, if—”

“I bet it’s amazing,” Darren cut in. “It’s gotta be better than cow shit and tractor fumes.” He leaned back in the chair and looked over the peak of the house at the darkened sky, a few bright stars twinkling over the roof line. “I’m gonna see it one day. Someday soon.”

In our family photos, my brother is always toward the edge of the frame, edging his way out, always leaving. He’s usually not smiling, either, just looking past the camera with a level, unbreaking scrutiny that he cast toward anyone who asked something of him. At school, he’d had our parents called in on several occasions for “acting disrespectfully.”

“The principal said he was asking too many questions,” my parents would tell people when they wanted to brag about their son’s inquisitiveness. “We said, ‘I thought asking questions was a good thing.’ That principal just said, ‘He’s asking things they don’t know how to answer.’” Then, always fighting off snorts of laughter, they’d add, “Sounds like they need better teachers down there.” Now, whenever I raise my hand in class, I can see my teachers—the ones who had Darren in class—brace themselves. They think they know what’s coming, that whatever lies behind his drive to push and challenge and find the answer is somehow part of me, too. He still irks them.

That’s the kind of guy he is. To get shots of him smiling, you had to catch him at the right time, in the right mood, snapping the photo before he knew what was happening. It’s as if his joy was a private thing, only given to those closest to him.

As soon as he graduated high school, he was gone. He didn’t even wait until dinner—while we were at his graduation party in the front yard, he’d thrown some bags into his car out back and drove away. We didn’t even realize it till it was time to cut his cake. My parents don’t brag about him anymore. They don’t even talk about him.

When we were both younger, we wanted to find where the fireflies came from. Nobody had ever figured it out—in the couple centuries since white people had swarmed in themselves, no explorer had discovered it, no scientist had explained it, no pastor had ever had a divine revelation. Every summer, they just show up and then one day, a few weeks later, they go. The indian tribes that lived here might have known, but nobody thought to ask before they chased them away from the land and started claiming pieces of it. But Darren and I—we were going to figure it out.

One weekend that March, Darren grabbed my coat sleeve and pulled me after him out of our backyard. He was a few years away from driving, so we walked down the street toward the river. In the early spring, the water was low enough that we could climb down the bank and sit on the jagged rocks lining the side of the riverbed.

“I came down here last summer,” he said. “I saw them all along the river—must’ve been thousands. They stayed here past dark, too. Way past.” He stamped his heel into the rocks at his feet, trying to knock them loose. “The bugs were all lit up, too, and there were some under the water.”

“No there weren’t,” I said, climbing back up the bank to the grass alongside the river. “They can’t go underwater. They’re not fish.”

“I swear they were in there.”

“They were just reflected in the water.”

“The bugs were under it. I think that’s where they live. That’s why nobody can find them. Everybody thinks all they do is float around, that they’ve gotta live in the trees or something.” Darren picked up a rock he’d pried loose and tossed it into the water at the bottom of the riverbed. It created a little splash, but we could hear it crack against another rock just beneath the surface. It sat, half-submerged, where it landed.

“Not everything stays where you think it’s supposed to go,” he said. “Maybe they go where they want. Maybe they live under the water.”

“Where?” I asked. “There’s no water here.”

“Let’s look,” he said and cocked his head away from me. “Maybe there’s more that way.”

We followed the riverbed for a mile or so, finding nothing except a few plastic shopping bags and empty beer cans along the way. When we reached the dam where the river entered the reservoir, I asked him if we could go back.

“You go ahead—I’m gonna look around some more.”

“What are you even looking for?” I said. “The bugs aren’t here.”

“They’re somewhere. They go somewhere—they come from somewhere and it’s not here. I need to know where they go.”

“Mom will be mad if I’m alone.” Darren was five years older than me, so our mom always wanted him to keep an eye on me if we were out playing. At seven or eight, I still relied on him to go with me everywhere. I didn’t want to walk all the way back along the riverbed alone.

“You’ll be fine,” he said. “I’ll catch up.”

I didn’t go. I sat on top of a cement spillway while Darren walked back and forth along sections of the earthen dam that bordered the reservoir. After a few minutes, he sighed. “Fine, let’s go,” he said.

As we walked to town, I could tell Darren was trying to look farther up the riverbed, past Sauterelle Falls and on north, wanting to keep going.

“You’re going to have to get used to doing things by yourself,” he said. “I won’t always be here. Not much longer.”

After he left, I heard from him once—a postcard from Ohio, saying he was working his way east. The picture on the front was a grainy black-and-white photo of old football players in leather helmets, standing stalk-straight, hands behind their backs and glaring at the camera. Darren always hated football, sneered at all the guys in letter jackets walking in the school hallways and crowding two or three booths every time we went into the pizza place attached to the gas station. I wondered where he’d gotten the postcard, if he’d visited some museum, or if he’d just stolen it from a truck stop along the interstate. On the back, it said, “I’ll send you photos of the ocean when I get there.” It’s been four years and I haven’t heard from him since. The closest my parents ever come to mentioning him is to warn me about being responsible when I get older.

When the last tourists leave, I finish dumping all the plates, cups, and cans into a large black trash bag and throw it into the rented dumpster behind the garage. Inside, my parents sit at the kitchen table counting cash and writing up a list of supplies for a grocery trip as soon as the store opens tomorrow. My dad will be up at three in the morning to start his smoker and prepare the meat for the evening’s visitors. My mom will get up a few hours later, just after sunrise, and go buy everything, stocking the refrigerator on the side porch with cases of beer, filling numerous crockpots with baked beans and corn. I stop in the kitchen doorway to watch my parents for a minute.

They both save up all their vacation time throughout the year to take off the entirety of firefly season, then devote all their time for those few weeks to hosting parties for strangers. It isn’t hard to get the time—most of the town closes up for a few weeks, except for restaurants, gas stations, and the grocery store. There must be some money in this, otherwise why would they do this to themselves? Why else would they stay in Sauterelle Falls if the rest of the world is just waiting for them? That’s what Darren wondered, too.

Their work during firefly season wears on them so much more than the work they do the rest of the year. All month, my dad’s face has grown a scraggly, peppered half-beard and his eyes are ringed with red from the lack of sleep and the smoke from his barbecue. My mom’s mouth is constantly drawn tight at the corners and she seems to space out constantly from the lack of sleep. Throughout the day, I catch her staring into the corners of rooms, motionless, as if trying to understand the concept of right angles. When the fireflies go back to wherever it is they come from, and the tourists do the same, my parents will be left here as husks, hollowed out by the plagues of people using up all they have. They will sleep through the weekend and go back to work on Monday—my dad to selling pesticides to farmers, my mom to the real estate office—having not taken a break for as long as I can remember. Next year they’ll do it all again. I can’t figure out why. It’s a mystery as difficult as where the fireflies come from. I want to ask them why they do this to themselves, what’s the draw of living this hard, this cloistered. I don’t ask, though, because I’m afraid of what the answer is, that it’s nothing more than a perpetual motion machine, kept running by trapping people and feeding off their energy till there’s nothing left for them to move on from here.

I wonder if this is what they expect me to contribute to when I finish school or if they have plans for me that don’t involve this town, the fireflies. I’m about to start my last year of high school and they haven’t talked to me about college or anything to do with the future, really. Not since Darren left.

“So what’s the plan?” I say. “After this.”

My dad looks up from the stack of dollar bills in his fingers, squinting. “We’re just finishing up then we’re getting to bed.” He goes back to flipping the bills. “Why? Need something?”

“No, not that,” I say. I flick at a spot on the doorjamb where the paint has started to flake. “I mean how long are you doing all this for? Is this how it’s always going to be?”

My mom tears her list from the pad and walks to the fridge, sticking the sheet in place under a magnet our neighbors brought back from Seattle when we watched their dogs while they were on vacation. That was the spring before Darren left. He asked them about the city, the trees, the ocean. He said he didn’t know if he could handle all that rain, would probably need to go east.

“The guy on the radio said it’s another day or two, then the bugs are gone again,” she says. “You should know that; you’ve done this all before.”

“No, it’s—” I start, but cut myself off. This is the part about them that frustrated Darren the most—the myopia that prevents them from seeing further out than a day or a week, than the edges of town. Even with the evidence of a wider world drinking beers on their lawn all evening, the existence of anything outside of Sauterelle Falls and firefly season is lost on them. I’m about to be old enough to leave, to decide on my own where I’ll live, but they aren’t making plans beyond tomorrow’s grocery run.

“Good night,” I say. I head to my room, take off my clothes, and turn out the light to get into bed. My windows still have blackout curtains from when I was younger and my parents would put me to bed before the fireflies vanished for the night. If they’d left the windows open, the light from the bugs would shine into my room, making it feel like Times Square. Even as I got older and started going to bed, I left the thick curtains over my windows because, as Darren used to say, it’s nice sometimes to pretend what’s out there is something different.

The following evening is the last night of firefly season. We can always tell it’s the final evening because the bugs start getting frantic. Instead of drifting across the yard like miniature glowing blimps, they zip back and forth, shooting up and diving down, the hum of their large wings like nervous laughter. Whenever they start acting like this, they’re about to disappear until next year, whirring away like spinning tops skirting the edge of the table.

Every year since Darren left, I’ve waited for him to appear again during firefly season. I always expect him to show up one evening, ask for a beer and some barbecue like a tourist, and sack out in his old room for the night. My parents haven’t touched anything since the day he graduated—they’re too busy, and I honestly think they’re hoping the same thing I am. Every time the bugs come around, I have one eye cast down the road all month long, watching for Darren’s beat up Civic to turn into our driveway.

With the fireflies acting erratically, the tourists don’t feel in the mood to stay. They know it’s the last night, and dodging large projectiles isn’t nearly as pleasant as the ambient floating orbs.

“I’ll be glad to get home,” I hear one man say to his wife as they leave a picnic table and head toward their car parked across the street. “I miss civilization,” he says, not even looking for cars as he steps into the road. For a moment I fight the urge to run over and kick his car door, but I know what he means. Sometimes it’s overwhelming to be in a place so quiet you can hear the hum of the power lines.

Our yard clears out earlier than usual, most of the town having emptied over the last week, and the few tourists left getting discouraged by the fireflies’ behavior. There isn’t much in the way for me to clean up, so I decide to go for a walk. I don’t want to go down Broadway, the main street through town with all the restaurants and businesses only open during the day. I decide to walk down Maria Street, a block north of Broadway heading out toward the edge of town. It’s mostly quiet, with houses on large lots backed against the darkened businesses. Nobody’s out watching the fireflies tonight, so the whole road is still and silent like a ghost town.

It dead ends at the railroad tracks that haven’t been used in decades. Nothing is left at the old station at the end of Broadway except the cracked concrete platform where people used to catch commuter trains to Atchison and Topeka. A little way beyond the tracks is the river, a little further downstream from where Darren took me years ago. I cross the overgrown tracks and head toward the treeline obscuring the river from view, walking out past the reach of Broadway’s streetlights, the dusk disappearing in the shadows of the trees.

When I make it past the row of trunks, I see them, just as Darren had described. Hundreds—maybe thousands—of the fireflies hovering along the riverbed, as far up and down as I can see. I sit down at the edge of the bank where it drops toward the water below and watch them float around, placid and slow like they are most of the time, not darting in every direction like the ones around town have been this evening. When they dip low toward the water, it really does look like some are swimming beneath the surface.

“Darren, you goofy son of a bitch,” I say.

The sound of my voice causes the fireflies near me to stir and dart away. In that moment, I realize how silent it is. The night is still, no wind shaking the tree leaves, and the water is low, not moving much at all. It’s a little startling to notice that the fireflies, despite their sheer numbers, don’t make any noise at all. When they aren’t rushing about, they’re completely silent. They could be strings of large paper lanterns rocking back and forth from riverbank to riverbank. I decide not to interrupt the silence, just to watch and let the bugs fill the space of the river.

I’m not sure how often Darren came down to watch the fireflies here. He only ever mentioned it once when we were younger, the day we went searching all the way to the dam, but hadn’t since. I can imagine him doing this, though, on the nights when he’d disappear from our yard and the crowds of tourists, watching an otherworldly light show dance noiselessly across the water. It would be easy to forget where you are, being immersed like this in the silent swarm.

It hasn’t dawned on me, sitting and watching the fireflies, how close they’ve been getting to me. In my effort to be silent, the bugs have returned and their swirling paths have edged nearer to me more quickly than I’d noticed. If I want to, I can probably reach out and touch a number of them within an arm’s length of me. In all the years I’ve watched the fireflies show up and float around my yard, I’ve never actually touched one. I’ve never known if I should, or could, or would touch one of these massive, bulbous insects. I’ve watched too many tourists try, convinced that it would have to be so easy—they’re so big, and they move so slowly—only to grab at the air time after time, their fingers passing through the space as if swiping at ghosts.

Their nearness starts to make me nervous, so I stand to back away. When I move, I find they’ve shown up behind me, too, surrounding me. I’m being swarmed, though that’s likely not the right word, given that they aren’t aggressive or particularly organized. The space between me and the bugs steadily disappears. One is resting on my back, then another on my shoulder, and another, and another, until I’m surrounded from the waist up in large balls of soft, glowing light. I can’t move anywhere or raise my arms or do much of anything, though I’m not being squeezed or pinched or muscled at all. In a strange way, it’s like being hugged.

When my feet leave the ground, I feel a moment of panic. Without being able to see past any of the bugs, I didn’t notice we were rising. I can’t tell how high I am, where we’re going, or even if we’re moving. No one has ever talked about the fireflies kidnapping a person—I don’t think it’s ever been considered possible before. I’m worried that if I struggle too much the fireflies might drop me, which would be terrible if we’re a hundred feet up. I try to stay calm and still. Don’t upset the bugs, I tell myself. Shut up, don’t move.

I can’t tell how long we float. It’s a while, though, and the soft orange glow of the fireflies makes it tempting to nod off. They move so gently, so imperceptibly, like the half-wakened feeling of lying in bed, sure you can feel the rotation of the planet. Where are we going? Since they’re leaving tonight, could the fireflies be taking me to where they come from? That would make Darren flip—he wouldn’t believe it if I managed to figure out where the bugs go, and that they’re the ones that carried me there. Or maybe he’s already found it and that’s where he is, happy and content, having finally made it. Maybe that’s why he hasn’t written since that first postcard, and he’ll be happy when he sees me coming, floating on a light from home.

My feet touch the ground again and slowly, after a few minutes, the fireflies disperse. The river is gone, though there are still hundreds of the bugs floating amongst the trees all around me. It’s impossible to tell where we’ve landed, and I don’t recognize anything. I pick a direction and start walking, hoping I’ll come through the treeline and see Sauterelle Falls sitting there, the porchlights welcoming me back. Or perhaps another place with new streets and a different heartbeat to learn. I’m not sure which I want more. After walking awhile, though, I just find more trees. I turn to the left and keep going, but that way only has more trees, more fireflies. Same with the other direction, though I’ve determined to just keep walking, sure I’ll stumble onto a highway or farm along the way.

After a few minutes, the light around me starts to dim. The fireflies are turning out their lights, the way they do at every sunset, disappearing into the darkness. Darren isn’t here, and I’m not even sure where here is. One by one, the glowing balls disappear and I’m left alone, the night sky blocked out by the trees. I look around for some clue, some sign that tells me where I’m supposed to go, what I need to do, and I find nothing. I call out, searching for help, only to be answered by the empty dark.