The Firefly Hours (A Silas Sharp Metaphysical Mystery): Chapter 15

 

Firefly Forest
 by Lindsay Sherbondy

Chapter 15 – The Firefly Map

Using a map requires optimism. Every map quietly assumes the world intends to stay where someone left it and you trust the assumption. Roads remain roads. Rivers keep flowing in familiar directions. Property lines remain intact.

Reality, in my experience, has never signed that agreement.

By Wednesday morning I'd accumulated enough evidence to convince myself the Firefly Hours weren't random. They had patterns that suggested geography. Geography suggested maps. Unfortunately, the only people who seemed to know the terrain were under the age of twelve.

Lily was waiting for me at the park. We hadn’t arranged to meet but children possess an unsettling ability to anticipate the adults who finally start asking the right questions.

"You found Danny,” she stated as if she had been there.

"I did." She nodded.

"We knew you would."

"We?"

She pointed toward the picnic shelter where six children sat around one of the concrete tables with crayons, colored pencils, and several sheets of poster board spread before them. One corner had been reinforced with duct tape. Another was held flat with a juice box.

"What are you making?" I asked.

Lily looked surprised. "The map."

As though there were only one.

The poster board was covered with streets. Though not perfectly to scale or even particularly accurate, it was unmistakably a map of Laurel Lane.

The park occupied the center. Arthur McCreary's old house sat at one end. The Collins' backyard had been drawn with surprising detail, complete with Murphy's dogwood tree. Scattered across the neighborhood were dozens of circles; some colored blue, others green or yellow. Near the edge of the subdivision someone had drawn a large red X.

"What's that?" I pointed to the X.

"The empty house," Lily said.

"It isn't empty,” I said.

"No." She corrected herself without hesitation. "It only looks empty."

The children gathered around as I studied the map.

"This blue circle?" I asked. “What is it?”

"A place where you can hear people,” a little boy of around eight said.

"The green?"

"You can see them,” Lily said,

"And yellow?"

“They notice you,” a little girl named Emma answered.

That made me pause. "Notice you?"

She nodded solemnly. "If you're not careful."

“But only sometimes,” said another boy who leaned over the table.

The others nodded. Apparently that distinction mattered.

I noticed several yards outlined with dotted pencil marks.

"What do these mean?"

Lily lowered her voice. "They're thin."

"Thin?"

“You don’t stay there long.” She tapped one of the backyards.

"Why?"

She shrugged. "It's easier to accidentally keep going."

I wasn't entirely sure what that meant. Unfortunately, I suspected she was.

Dr. Calico Verde arrived carrying two cold lemonades and the expression of someone who had expected to spend the afternoon interviewing children but not being outnumbered by them.Lily immediately slid the map toward her.

"You can look,” she said.

"Thank you,” Calico said, handing me a lemonade.

"But don't fix it,” Lily said.

Calico furrowed her immaculate eyebrows. "I wasn't planning to."

"Adults always do."

“I’ll do my best to disappoint tradition,” Calico said with a smile.

She studied the map in silence for nearly a minute.

"Who drew the circles?" she finally asked.

"We all did."

"So everyone agrees?"

The children exchanged puzzled looks.

"About what?" Lily asked.

"The locations."

Another shrug.

"They're where they are,” Emma said and the others all stated the same.

Calico glanced at me for backup.

"They never argued,” I said. "Not once."

Calico crouched beside the table.

"How do you know when a place is...thin?" she asked the children.

The smallest boy at the table answered.

"You can feel it."

"What does it feel like?"

He frowned. "Like when you almost remember something."

Calico looked at me. Neither of us spoke. The answer was too good.

I unfolded a copy of the county assessor's parcel map beside the children's drawing. The streets mostly matched The lot lines, too. Mostly. Houses were all in place. And there was that red X. On the assessor's map it sat over the vacant lot. On the children's map it rested one property farther south.

I frowned. "Lily."

She looked up.

"Did you move this?"

"No,” she said with a laugh. "It moves by itself."

The other children nodded as it were as common knowledge as H20 means water. Just correcting another adult mistake.

"It isn't always there," Emma said.

"Sometimes it's behind Mrs. Collins' house,” Lily said.

"Sometimes it's by Arthur's woods," another child added.

"And one time," Tommy said proudly, "it was in the middle of the street."

Calico leaned closer and asked, "When does it move?"

The children all looked toward the western sky.

"When the fireflies change,” Lily said.

"Change how?" I asked.

Lily looked at me and Calico as if we were dense.

"They don't blink the same every night."

---

That evening we decided to test the map. The oppressive July heat cooled only a little from a gentle breeze. As twilight settled over Laurel Lane, Calico and I stood exactly where yesterday's red X had been drawn. The fireflies emerged. The familiar hush spread across the neighborhood. However, there was no unusual feeling or shift in the air like before. Tommy came jogging across the grass carrying the map rolled beneath one arm.

"You missed it,” he said.

“We've been standing here."

"I know." He pointed fifty yards away. "It moved."

Calico and I turned. At the far end of the block, beyond a row of mailboxes, the fireflies had gathered into a dense, shimmering cloud. Tommy carefully unrolled the map. The red X was no longer where we'd seen it that afternoon. It had shifted as if the crayon itself had changed position. The wax line now marked the place where the fireflies hovered. I looked at Calico. She looked at the map. Then back toward the waiting lights.

Quietly, almost to herself, she said, "Maps aren't supposed to do that."

"No." I watched the fireflies pulse in slow, deliberate rhythm. "They're not."

Somewhere beyond those blinking lights the neighborhood had quietly redrawn itself.

Again.

*****

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