The Firefly Hours (A Silas Sharp Metaphysical Mystery): Chapter 22

 

Fireflies & Jewelweed
by Susan Eley

Chapter 22 – The Long Twilight

 

Most disasters announce themselves. A tornado has sirens. A flood starts with torrential rain. An earthquake has the decency to shake your coffee before it shakes your house. The Firefly Hours never believed in warnings. They simply became longer.

By Tuesday evening, no one in Laurel Lane asked whether the phenomenon was getting worse. The only remaining question was how much worse. When I stepped onto Arthur McCreary's porch, the sun was touching the western horizon. It had been touching the western horizon for almost an hour. Arthur didn't bother looking at his watch anymore.

"They've all stopped," he said, nodding toward the kitchen table. Seven clocks. Seven different styles. Every one frozen at 7:48.  "I keep winding the pocket watch."

"Any luck with that?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

"No." He smiled without humor. "It makes me feel involved."

Across the street, Mrs. Collins tried to water her flowers. The stream from the hose arced toward the flowerbed and seemed almost reluctant to land. Droplets lingered in the air for heartbeats before surrendering to gravity. She watched them with exhausted resignation.

"I've given up trying to understand it," she called. "I just hope my petunias appreciate the effort."

People laughed. I guess because laughter reminded everyone they still belonged to the present.

The children no longer played outside. They watched. Every porch held families facing west. Lawn chairs appeared. Coolers. Blankets. It looked less like a reality-bending cataclysm than a neighborhood gathering. The sort of thing people might organize to watch fireworks. Except no one was roasting marshmallows.

Dr. Calico Verde joined me on the sidewalk. She carried another notebook, pages nearly full with her frantic notes.

"I've started writing in the margins."

"Running out of room?" I asked her.

Running out of certainty." She stared toward the sun. "It hasn't moved in forty-three minutes."

Walter Ashcroft overheard us.

"It has. About the width of a fingernail." He demonstrated by extending his thumb toward the horizon. "You only notice if you've been watching for years."

"Is that good news?" I asked.

Walter considered it. "It means we're still moving."

"And the bad news?"

"We're slowing."

The fireflies emerged long before they usually did. Thousands of them rose from every yard in Laurel Lane. From drainage ditches, flowerbeds and gutters. From the woods beyond the subdivision. Children breathlessly counted them, giving up before reaching fifty. There was no point anymore. The air itself seemed alive.

The memories no longer waited for full twilight. A father taught his daughter to ride a bicycle in broad daylight. Murphy the Dog sprinted after a tennis ball across three separate lawns. The dancing couple crossed an intersection. Harold waved to people who had not yet been born when he first rode that bicycle. Nobody seemed surprised. The memories had stopped asking permission.

Calico closed her notebook and said, "I think we've crossed a threshold."

“Then what’s going on?” I asked.

“They’re taking over.”

People from neighboring streets began arriving. Word had spread. Some came carrying cameras. Others, binoculars. A local television crew parked near the entrance to Laurel Lane. The reporter practiced her introduction five different times. Each attempt ended the same way. She'd stop. Look toward the impossible sunset. Forget what she'd intended to say.

"It's spreading." Arthur watched unfamiliar faces gather near the park. "I was afraid of that."

Walter didn't answer. He simply looked tired.

The moving place from the children's map no longer moved. It didn't have to. Every yard had become thin. The entire neighborhood had begun to overlap with itself. Children from different summers passed one another without noticing. Mothers called children who hadn't yet been born. Old men laughed with younger versions of themselves from thirty years before. For brief moments, entire families existed in three generations at once. Not together. Adjacent. Like pages in a flipbook no longer turning. I caught sight of Evelyn standing near the basketball court. She smiled when she noticed me.

"You're seeing more now," she said.

"I don't know if that's a good thing," I said. “Memories belong in the past, Evelyn.”

"It begins with places." She looked toward the frozen sun. "The remembering. And then?  Eventually..." Her voice grew quieter. "...people forget which life they're living."

A breeze finally stirred the leaves. For one hopeful second I thought the spell had broken. Instead, the breeze carried laughter from dozens of houses. Birthday parties. Graduation picnics. Barbecues. Wedding receptions. Conversations layered together until the neighborhood sounded like every happy summer afternoon it had ever known. The sound was intoxicating. I understood, in that moment, exactly why Walter had fought to preserve it. And exactly why it couldn't continue.

Tommy wandered over carrying the Firefly Map. He unrolled it across the hood of my car. Calico joined us as we studied it. There were no longer blue, green, or yellow circles. The colored pencil markings had spread until every inch of Laurel Lane shimmered beneath overlapping strokes. The entire map had become one enormous thin place.

"I don't think the map is helping anymore,” I said.

"No," Calico said softly. "I think it's trying to keep up."

I looked west. The sun still hung on the horizon. Its lower edge had finally dipped beneath the trees. Barely. I checked the clock on my dashboard out of habit. 7:48.

"How long?" Calico asked, joining me in looking at the sky.

We then turned to the motionless shadows stretching across the neighborhood.

"It should've been dark hours ago," I said.

Neither of us spoke again. Because there wasn't anything left to say. The sunset had lasted three hours.

*****

My new comedic sci-fi novel, Someone Else's Book Club, is available on my website or through Amazon!