Metaphysical Furniture

  "Firefly" by Jojo Collins Chapter 21 – The Lost Residents   Every missing person eventually becomes two people. The first is the one everyone searches for. The second is the one everyone slowly invents afterward. The child who would have graduated. The husband who would have retired. The woman who would have become a grandmother. We build imaginary futures because reality refused to provide one. The file gets closed and a person becomes a question. By Monday evening, I had begun to suspect Laurel Lane contained more questions than houses. Night still refused to arrive. The sun remained pinned to the horizon, suspended in an endless twilight that had long since stopped feeling beautiful. No clocks moved. The fireflies still burned without blinking. People spoke more quietly now. As though loud voices might remind reality that something had gone terribly wrong. Walter Ashcroft hadn't left the street in nearly an hour. Arthur paced. Calico filled pages in a noteboo...

  Thumbalina Playing With Fireflies by Priya Rama Chapter 20 – The Fireflies Stop Blinking Time marches on, they say. Maybe it is a flat circle. Maybe it isn’t linear at all. It just moves and shifts as it pleases. But time does move. Morning matters because night eventually leaves. Summer matters because autumn eventually arrives. Children become adults. Songs reach the last note. Conversations find the courage to end while others find the place to begin. Endings are important thought. Without endings nothing ever becomes a memory. By Sunday evening, Laurel Lane had forgotten that. I found Walter Ashcroft already sitting on his porch without his tea or glowing jars. Just an old wooden chair facing the neighborhood. "What are you doing, Walter?” I asked. "Waiting.” "For what?" “Well.” He watched the first fireflies emerge. “Of that I'm no longer certain." That worried me more than if he'd offered an explanation. Arthur arrived a fe...

  Fireflies by Erte Chapter 19 – The Collector I collected baseball cards when I was a kid. Every time I got my allowance for doing my weekly chores, I would rush to the store to buy a pack. When I got them home, I spread them out and studied them they way a scholar might obsess over a recently unearthed manuscript by Shakespeare. Each new set of cards brought the possibility of finding a gem. Those baseball cards are in a box in a storage unit. I kept them because, like all collectors, they connect me to something I love, a passion. That’s how collections work. Each one seems to say: This mattered. Please don't let it disappear. By Sunday afternoon, I had become convinced someone in Laurel Lane understood the Firefly Hours better than the rest of us. Call it hunch. Call it intuition. Call it remembering something Arthur said to me almost in passing. But it gnawed at me the way some lady behind me at the coffee shop that morning was chewing her gum. Loud. Smacking. Annoying. An...

  Fireflies by Daniel Hughes Chapter 18 – Calico Crosses Over Every investigator eventually commits the same mistake. You begin by studying the mystery. Eventually, you forget the mystery has been studying you. By Saturday evening, Dr. Calico Verde had accumulated three notebooks, eleven rolls of exposed film, two cassette tapes, and enough observations to make a university psychology department very happy. None of it explained the Firefly Hours. She had merely documented them. The Hours, meanwhile, appeared increasingly uninterested in remaining documented. "We've been asking the wrong questions." Calico stood at the hood of my car, flipping through one of her notebooks. "I was afraid you were going to say that,” I said. "We keep asking what this place is." She looked toward Laurel Lane. "We should ask who it's for." Arthur overheard us. "I wouldn't." "You disagree?" "No." He slipped both ...