Fireflies at Dusk

A short story about the shadows within us and the fireflies that guide us

I couldn’t take the sorrow anymore, so I began to walk. Always at night, just before sundown, returning when the moon was nothing more than a spotlight in the inky untenanted sky.

As I walked, I thought about the past. My children who are now grown, my wife now buried, and I, but a ghost.

As I walked, the shadows followed one by one.

I’m an old man with a limp in my right knee. A reminder that some wounds never heal. On each walk, I could feel my white cotton hair swaying in the wind. There was always a chill breeze littering those nights with a solemn moan. My only friends left now were insomnia and that sleepy cat, Nabokov, who has reached the ripe old age of twenty-two. His time, too, would soon be up. Just like mine. Eighty-six years old. Where did the time go? I wonder. It seemed to leave only a bitter taste in my mouth and constant tremble in my hands. I could barely button my shirts anymore.

I walked to remember and to forget. Insomnia is a mistress that keeps on asking for more, whispering promises at the edge of night and steals them back by daybreak. I walked to ignore her. I walked to find my final moment in time’s great divide.

Why is it so hard to die? I asked the emptiness upon my strolls through each night. The only thing that answered back was the silent stalking shadows.

For with each footstep, memories flooded into my mind — flashes of uncontrollable truths. The hot iron rod burned in my throat with each swallow. Grief is a hunger that is never full. And the roots of sorrow infiltrate deep inside the soils of a man’s soul to where eventually you can’t tell the difference between it and joy. The shadows know this; they cast each bet upon this unalienable truth.

And when the hurt was too much, I counted the stars above.

The most I’ve ever counted to was four thousand, one-hundred and ninety-three. To me, the stars held other stories, countless many love tales, and civilizations trying to find their ways among a universe bound to chaos and it’s brutal reign. The stars connect us across these cosmic islands of endless and glorious time.

I’m a romantic to my core, you could say. My imagination as wild as my heart that did not dull with age but only became less grounded, a horse galloping free in a field. My once pragmatism is almost lost now. When life got this old, to dream is the final doorway before death. So, that’s what I did. As I walk along this path, I also carried my fantasies and rumination of other worlds. The dark was a canvas where I could paint my ideas on and see the truth within.

A place where I could count those infinite nuclear furnaces of hope.

During those walks, I noticed that those inexplicable shadows were growing closer now, like a lioness waiting in the long grass to pounce. They came in many forms. At times, I noticed them reaching out to grab me from the plants beyond the path. My heart would race as my footsteps quickened.

“Who out’ dare?” I asked, not expecting a reply. “I’m an ole man, with no money or time. I’m not worth ya trouble.”

Whatever was hiding in the shadow didn’t respond or care to reveal its shrouded self. It crept along, nonetheless, and it waited.

Then, after enough time passed, the shadows began to speak to me. At first, I thought I was going crazy, but after a while, I figured it wouldn’t matter anyway, for an old bag of regrets like me, I would go mad eventually. For in time, all those neural connections I made were intended to snap. And I was lonely.

The shadows spoke, and I listened. My feet were striding along with each heartbeat.

The shadows were also shape-shifters, and they took many forms during those walks. Like fog and dust, self-forming into magical shapes in an instant. Always of memories and loved ones lost. The night puppeteer’s that taunt. Every walk was a different lesson — a different memory.

Sometimes they were of my mother sitting in her rocking chair crocheting a new blanket and telling me about our ancestors in Ireland. Once bootleggers in New York, to politicians in Kansas City. Other days, it was my father who survived Vietnam physically but not mentally. A quiet and depressed man who wrote poetry in secret. Tattered whiskey-stained notebooks found after his death. Words that contained the secrets to the meaning of life, if only I could understand their idyllic riddles. Other days the shadows took the form of my wife and kids. Memories in San Francisco, walking along the pier. Or the time we got lost in Paris looking for the spot where Sartre once sat. First bike rides and days at school and birthdays and the first kiss with my wife and the time I dropped her birthday caked in the lake, oh! how we laughed — all of it mixed like kaleidoscopes of the heart.

Memories shuffled in the shadows, showing me pieces of a forgotten life, as I stepped unto the path.

Eventually, I walked not to forget, but to remember.

Tears and laughter comforted me. That was until they stopped. For ultimately, my well of memories ran dry, and the shadows grew silent. I knew then, what those shadows were and what they wanted. I knew what was to come. The end was nearing. And when the realization came full, the shadows got hungry. So I ran.

I ran without a destination. I ran from fear and towards a sliver of hope.

I ran, and I counted the stars.

Heart palpitating, with every lost breath and with each star. I traveled farther than usual along the path, fleeing the slithering shadows that came for me. I could see them morphing and moving in their transformative scythe-like embrace. This part of the trail was unknown to me. But I didn’t care. I needed to flee that which came. So, I escaped into it with a surgeon’s calmness.

At the end of the path, I saw a green aura in the distance. Though the shadow lurked quietly beyond me, I sought only the mystery that lay ahead.

I continued and came to the edge of a massive hill and meadow. I stood and looked out. The field seemed endless. The darkness ebbed overshadowed brooks and giant trees of dogwood and oak to northern white cedar cast their shadows about, while others twisted and residual formations from Russian sage to snowberry bushes and the distorted heads of bulk thistle bobbed and sat within that dark. Bluegrass swayed and brushed itself along my shins and moved delicately across the high hills into the unseen world of the field. But in the forefront and within the night danced the creature that made their light — the insects of summer. The lumens of delightful childhood memories played out their movie reel of warm nostalgia inside my heart. Behind me, the shadows crept closer, and before me, truth danced along the grass.

The fireflies flicked on and off as their synchronicity of a tireless love song bore the beauty of the night in an everlasting instant. I watched not only amazed but understanding, at that very moment, the secret of nature and the universe was hidden among the flickering of that bioluminescent twilight.

I understood then that the Lampyridae truth was one of purity and the cosmic unraveling of all human folly. It was simple and unique and glorious and raw all at once. It was as if the great kingdoms of every civilization were but a monument to this very act of harmonious love between the light and the dark. These were elegant yet straightforward creatures beyond a dimension of emotion we could know again, for we had forsaken nature and the ways of these shadows that stand to highlight this graceful moment. Yet, I felt it was ironic that humans have tried every way to undo the habits of her azure streams and pure skies and twinkling dreams that exist in the impermanent now. This was the truth. What I had been walking to find. My final battle before the end.

Beautiful, cosmic, and unchanging. The fireflies were all that was — nature in its most authentic ways. Off and on reality went — every second dawning comprehension of life, both bounded and unbounded at once.

The meaning of life was as simple as fireflies at dusk.

“These are my stars,” I whispered. Knowing I could never count the millions upon millions of fireflies that now filled this night. I understood, too, that it didn’t matter. That wasn’t the point. It’s as if the ground and sky have switched, a giant mirror in time cast down upon these lands and reflected in the ever-expanding cosmos. And I, Orson Fredrick Clarke, was but a blade of grass watching those fireflies dance in the endless expanse of a single rock upon the billions of rocks in a unique garden of a meditating monk. I felt small but also an immense warmth, embracing me like a lover’s hug at the first meeting.

I watched and waited and fell in love with the moment. All the while, the shadows approached me. They, too, grabbed at me, taking pieces that I no longer needed. They fed and drank and absorbed the heat of my life. This moment was my end. And I no longer cared. Because in the twinkling wishes of the night, I saw my wife again among the fireflies at dusk, and for the first time in months, I knew I would sleep serenely in the bed of time.