Fireflies - By David Morrell Page 0,8

had wakened Donna, who slept beside him on a cot in the IV-stand-filled room, to dictate to her his sudden terrifying insights. A poem. Not linear, not rhymed and metered, not the singsong unintentional parody of a poem you’d expect from someone his age. Instead a gestalt of fear and memory. A jumbled synthesis of reaction to when life was perfect and then collapsed. A metaphor of a jigsaw puzzle, of each piece having been beautifully assembled and then perversely ripped apart; of lost hair, fading friends, and fractured hopes; of the prejudice ignorant people showed toward cancer patients whose bald heads and gaunt cheeks looked like skulls; of dreams become tears and parties about to turn into wakes. Death and a jigsaw puzzle. If the poem wasn’t perfect, it was better than the father could have written at fifteen, or maybe could have ever written, and if a perceptive reader paid it due attention, the meaning was clear; the craft matched the content.

JIGSAW

Remembrance of the days of ecstasy.

A natural buzz from life was created

As every piece of the jigsaw puzzle

Was prime and in place.

A sledge hammer, chain saw, and a rototiller

Shred through the jigsaw puzzle,

Through the good memories

Of a lot of Cokes

And late night burgers.

A mane of hair,

A symbol of what you believe in.

And so many good times gone by … Gone.

Déjà vu rings strong in your ears

But brings not a smile to your face,

Instead tears to your eyes.

Prejudice rears its ugly head.

Social matters become shattered.

Limits are put in place.

The jigsaw puzzle is slowly destroyed.

Leaving only one piece … Alone.

10

Fifteen years old. Vomiting at 4:00 A.M. Dictating a poem.

God love you, son, David had sobbed on his knees, hunching over a bed, with his fingers like claws scraping into his tear-ravaged face. You are dead. I’m not unconscious on the kitchen floor. I’m here. I’ve just written your eulogy. And my existence, never content to begin with, will be forever empty until my own death.

A remarkable occurrence took place then. Fireflies filled the dark bedroom. They seemed to blink, and yet their light was constant, like flaming balls from Roman candles; but Roman candles dwindle in brilliance and flash in a straight-line arc, whereas these lights zigged and darted, zagged and swirled. They spun at the same time they soared. The room was ablaze with them, and David thought of them as fireflies because of their random dashing radiant pattern.

Fireflies. Splendrous! Of varying colors but all of equal magnificence. Rushing with the energy of joy. Ecstatic. A swirling cluster of what David intuited beyond any question were rapturous souls.

He made allowance for his grief and stress, his weariness and shock. He wasn’t thinking clearly at the moment, he readily granted. But the brilliant colorful fireflies were spinning and zooming before him, so patently real, so vivid, that he couldn’t dismiss them, couldn’t reject their beauty by denying the exquisite vision allowed to him.

Whether they were a hallucination or a visitation, he gave in to them and embraced their rapture. Of the thousands, among their myriad flashing colors of joy, he identified one in the cluster who he knew beyond doubt was his son. How he was sure, he couldn’t tell. But that he was sure, he had absolute faith.

“Matthew, come to me.”

For no reason he could account for, the spinning specks of flying fire reminded him of children in a playground, of his son as a toddler laughing and racing among other children. And just as Matthew when a toddler had been reluctant to leave the exuberance of his friends, so the darting firefly (no different from the swirling others but who the father knew with total certainty was Matthew’s soul) refused to come to his grieving father.

“Matthew, I’m telling you! Get over here!”

But still distracted, continuing to revel in incomprehensible gaiety, the soul of the son ignored the father.

“Matthew, don’t disobey me! I want you back! Get over here!”

At that, responding to the desperate insistence of the father who loved him beyond measure and mourned to the limits of sanity for his son’s absence, the firefly that was Matthew’s soul soared away from his satisfying companions, sped to within a foot of his father’s weeping eyes, halted abruptly, and hovered for an instant, suspended in time.

“Dad, I want to play. At last, I’m having fun,” the firefly soundlessly said, the inaudible words echoing within the father’s head. “Don’t you understand? I don’t hurt anymore. I’m at peace. I’m where I belong. I’m okay. You’ve got to understand that.