Flight of the Fireflies

I am the dark. The wide, quiet throat that swallows the day. I watch the light happen to you— a frantic, gold braille scratched against my skin.

It began as a lifting. Hands like pulleys, winching her high until the earth let go. A voice spoke her name like a secret—the only sound I had to hold. Then, the first flight: tiny, volt-lit gods zigzagging through the wicker of her ribs, mapping the heat of becoming.

I watched the light thicken. The kitchen at 3 a.m., a sanctuary of stolen glow. Hip to counter. Mouth to the salt of a collarbone. They moved like a fever in the dark, their pulses mimicking the fireflies outside the glass— brief, wet sparks of here, I am here, I am here.

But the world began to unmake. The reef turned to bone in the mouth of the tide. The forest stripped off its emerald, burning down to a red, gasping throat. The ice—a great, cold sheet—slid off the mountain's shoulder, leaving the earth naked and shuddering. I am the silence where the name used to be.

But look— against my own ribs, the fireflies still rise. They do not know the reef is ash. They do not care that the ice is a ghost. They are stupid with hunger, weaving their gold-wire signatures through the ruin. Burning for each other— not for the world, not for the end.

Just for the flight. The fever. The find.