FIREFLIES
by Jacques Rancourt
Melissa liked to store things: confirmation cards, copper bells, old shoelaces. She saved all her Halloween candy until Christmas and all her Christmas candy until Easter, and saved that until her eighth birthday that summer. Melissa was afraid of forgetting, so she kept a notebook charting everything. That summer alone, she had already played 33 games of hopscotch; ate 22 hot dogs, three which were overcooked and their black, crusty skins had to be peeled off; caught three fat toads, one who peed into her palm, and twelve grasshoppers, who she kept in a glass jar with holes poked through the cover. She hadn’t caught any fireflies yet, because she could only see them at night and she wasn’t allowed in the tall grass behind her house when it was dark out, but the fireflies were next on her list of things to catch. Out of the 53 days since school let out, 27 were sun-streaked, 12 beat with steady rain, and the remaining 14 were either grey overcast or picture-clouds or somewhere in between.
Melissa learned how to use a calculator in school, and she kept one in the back pocket of the overalls she always wore. Whenever she and her mother would go for a drive—the seat belt pressing against her neck—she’d add up the numbers of the license plates of the cars in front of them.
L32096.
“Twenty!”
9016 HR.
“Sixteen!”
8574 NL.
“Twenty-four!”
She wanted to be an astronaut when she grew up, so her dad gave her a telescope for her birthday. She waited for a clear night when she could squeeze her left eye shut and peer up through the eyepiece at the white specks in the sky. She soon became bored with the telescope and laid back down on her porch, listening to the buzz of crickets. In science class, she learned if she counted how many times the crickets creaked during a fifteen second period and added 37 to that number, she’d know the temperature. “Fahrenheit, of course,” she explained to her father. It was 78 degrees out.
After he left, she got out her calculator and added the remaining days in July – 14 – to 31 for August. The block numbers on the tiny screen told her there were only 45 days left of summer, left to eat hot dogs, collect shoelaces and catch grasshoppers. She cleared the tiny digital screen, and multiplied 365 by 70—because she figured she only had a good 70 years to live—and realized she only 25,550 days left to become an astronaut, to see the moon up close; 12,775 days until she couldn’t have babies anymore, like Mom; 4,745 days until she graduated college; 3,285 days until she graduated high school; and 730 days until she wasn’t a kid anymore.
She tossed aside her calculator, wrapped her arms around her knees and for the first time in her life, felt like she was dying. She listened to the cricket’s metronome—the temperature had dropped one degree—and saw, behind her house, out in the reedy onion grass, a firefly spark.