the death of fireflies
nssp entry
angst
g
2319 words
He isn’t one for poetry, prefers his words sung rather than spoken but of course, over time and empty coffee mugs, one learns to make exceptions for the right people. You read to him by the unsteady light of sleepy cities, missing words when the lamps illuminating office buildings from the inside out go out one by one.
Fireflies dying, he says in a moment of morbid poetic humor and smiles that little crooked smile you’ve learned to fit your heart around.
He stops you when you reach to flip on the lights in this white, slightly foreign, boxy at the most room, wants to make friends with the antiseptic tinged shadows in the corner for a little while more. Poe and Tennyson trip clumsy past your lips best at times like these, twilight tinged lines of things fluttering in the dark, of deep love and wild regret.
So do you regret?
Regret? Regret what?
He draws invisible patterns, upside down on the margin of your book. Finding the right words in blank spaces.
Meeting me.
[rewind, replay, broken pop-up books of folded memories creased from being hidden away too long, undoing ribbons and unpacking boxes stolen up from the depths of mind crevasses]
Sometimes on good days with the sun playing lazy tag with cotton candy-esque clouds white overhead, high summer days when you think the right people could live forever, it feels like meeting should have been more like finding and flipped around at that. Perhaps he’d found you instead; one rainy Thursday sidestepping puddles until he’d bumped, splashed, tripped into your mundane little life.
Sorry, I didn’t see-…
It’s okay, really. It was almost finished anyway.
Lukewarm coffee running faded rivulets into the gutter, sidetracking and getting lured unsuspecting into puddles deep enough to float paper cups.
Let me get you another?
I’m fine, really I was-…
Brought up not to accept coffee from strangers?
Candy, yes, but coffee might be a different matter.
It takes one cup of coffee (dark, low calorie sweetener laced) and a glass of iced tea (green, sweet enough to rot smiles) sneaked between the cracks of conversations in cafes with low lights to scare away the rainclouds. By the time you step out into weak sunshine and onto wet pavements, you don’t think you’ll be getting any sleep tonight.
[single line text messages at 2am in the morning, sleep is for the weak and unloved, him standing outside your door at 2.25am, getting into unfamiliar cars with almost familiar people, so is a late night car ride considered candy or coffee?]
He’d been a choirboy, he tells you, one hand half out the window to catch the falling rain as he drives with his other. Takes corners at speeds that push the borderline of illegal.
Backslidden, though.
You don’t ask why and you’re contented enough to keep your eyes on the road for him, make up secrets to slip behind every tiny unexplained fact he shares at red lights.
I’ve never tried green tea till yesterday.
There’s a 24 hour convenience store down the road and he stops for a moment to get ice cream, a packet of lights.
Don’t get it all over the seat.
Says the man who bought it for me to begin with.
Eyes on the road please, not the food.
Speak for yourself.
One crossroad, two roundabouts, half a popsicle later.
Hand me a smoke, will you?
Perhaps your parents would have hated to love him, the way he kept a pack of always almost empty Marlboro lights in one back pocket and nicotine gum in the other, the way he only smoked in the car on rainy days because he hates the way stale gaseous cancer twists itself around the seams of his clothes.
It’s hell to get out, seriously.
Smoke out, rain in, it feels like a fair enough deal.
Wind up the window, fool, seat’s getting wet.
Why don’t you try and make me.
He inhales deep one more time, firefly light flaring bright for a moment before he flicks it out the window, makes you mutter darkly about littering and dying and how
I didn’t know you smoke.
Well you don’t know a lot of things about me.
Good or bad?
For me to know and you to find out soon enough.
He pulls over by the curb and you let yourself out, half slamming car doors with peeling paint that flakes away with every goodbye.
So, you sticking around long enough to find out?
You stand in the rain to shake the scent of airborne death, long late night car rides still clinging stubborn to your tee before turning to begin the lonely trek up to your little 3 room apartment on the 4th floor.
For me to know and you to find you soon enough, you retort and he smiles, drives off under the watching light of sidewalk streetlamps.
[count time in the form of 2am exoduses to city borders, coffee stained mugs, flavoured teas, days and weeks and hours lurching past like cripples learning to dance one two three and turn and one two]
He thinks he’s lost his religion but you know otherwise, it’s just a matter of remembering it, a far easier task than he’ll ever admit too. It’s still there if anyone cares to look hard, deep enough, flickering shadows of recognition hiding behind hooded eyes on the self imposed holidays the both of you declare. Noontimes, extended lunch hours spent standing in the washed out colours of stained glass windows within empty cathedrals.
You went to bible school?
Seminary.
Filtered light turns the dust mites in the air the colour of faded rainbows, jump twirl leap with every step and every careless finger tracing stone walls.
Tomayto tomahto, isn’t it the same anyways? But-…
Yeah.
He doesn’t talk much on days like this, prefers to sit in back pews and twine your hands together into shaky cages of bone and sinew over hymnals with frayed covers. Sing to you broken fragments of half remembered lines, grace and love and a faraway place called heaven.
It’s the start of another useless sunset when you leave, shuffling sneaker soles and footsteps ghosting your own, both evading the growing patches of non-light that creep out from distant corners
I don’t like the dark.
Well that makes two of us.
It’s moonrise by the time he drops you off, firefly spark of cigarette ends flicking goodbyes at you from the car window. One slow drag later and you reach for it, pluck it out from between surprised fingers to crush under your heel. Grinding ashen addictions into the pavement.
You could just tell me if you don’t like me smoking, you know.
I don’t like you smoking.
Okay.
[cough and cough and cough until it feels like a bad habit, nicotine lined veins, rusty blood seeping from the cracks between his lips, lies taste bittersweet and a little too much like a good smoke]
You tell him curt, eyes steady, that you don’t like him hiding blood stained tissues in his pocket either, don’t like him sneaking off to throw them into public trashcans when he thinks you’re not looking.
You don’t like a lot of things.
But I do like you.
Aha.
He coughs not so discreetly behind one hand and it comes away scarlet tinged, the third time within one sunset and maybe it’s just a wicked play of light, the golden red hues that bleed across the sky somehow leaking their colors onto his skin.
Are you okay?
The sun goes over the horizon and buildings catch faux fire, sky aflame. Skyscraper shadows reaching grasping hands out over late evening traffic.
And if I said no?
It’s too dark to see how serious he is.
[night time ER rooms, smell of antiseptic in the air, tired nurses with too long shifts and too little pay, there’s a man dying upstairs, code blue code blue]
They say it’s cancer and put him in a small, square-ish room, the kind with bedside tables attached to the wall, ornate little standardized vase on top of it with dusty plastic flowers undying. Bibles in the drawer.
Six out of ten people die within a year of being diagnosed.
What’re you looking at?
Seven to eight die within two.
N-n-nothing, it’s nothing.
50% of new lung cancer cases will be diagnosed at stage IIIb or IV.
Doesn’t sound like it’s n-n-nothing to me.
And only 5% will live for five years.
You don’t tell him but then again he doesn’t ask, prefers not to mention that he already knows.
[clear night sky, too long hours, too little sleep, needles cold in his arm, perhaps we could live forever if we tried hard enough, empty beds and unattached IV lines dangling unwanted, forlorn]
I don’t think I’m that afraid to die, he says and there’s a muted sort of defiance hiding between those words, the same kind that lurks in his eyes the nights you catch him sneaking a smoke on the hospital rooftop, quietly nursing the open wound the IV left behind.
What do you think you’re doing?
Isn’t it obvious?
He tosses the half finished cigarette over the edge of the building and watches it fall out of sight, confused embers following after like fireflies with broken wings.
I’m already dying anyway.
Don’t say that.
90% of lung cancer is caused by smoking,
Then what do you want me to say? That everything is going to be alright? That two years, maybe three from now if I’m lucky, I’ll still be standing here? Because face it, I don’t think I will be.
Then make it one. Two. Push it to four. Since when were you the kind to conform to rules?
We’re not arguing about how long it’s going to take for me to die.
No, we’re arguing about how long you’re going to live.
The fight goes out of his eyes and you stay on the roof with him a little while longer, make up fake constellations from night time skylines until there’re enough memories hidden up there to last you a lifetime.
One more thing, he adds almost as an afterthought, taking the stairs down two steps at a time.
What?
He waves his hand in your face and you wince at the sight of drying blood, crooked smile on his face.
Don’t tell the men in white coats.
[so tell me one thing: do miracles only happen to those who believe?]
The attending calls you out two months later, sits you down on the cold plastic chairs that line white walls. Up ahead, the nurses’ station is buzzing with subdued activity, reports being filed, calls being made with hushed voices. It’s four in the afternoon.
Do you know any of his immediate family members?
They…they aren’t all that close, actually.
But of course, he’d never gotten to telling them, the estranged parents who hide disappointment behind undialed numbers and salvation prayers for the lost.
There isn’t much more we can do.
Ah, I see. Thank you. For everything up till now.
You steeple your fingers into messy heights, shaking from the bottom up and inside out, build and take apart and rebuild until it makes sense to just let them lie clasped on your lap.
I’m sorry.
So am I.
[things unsaid, words meant for others, numbers dialed and redialed with the last digit missing so many times until you can ghost the whole thing blind, it’s not called lying when you’re only not telling the truth, phone calls answered on the sixth ring, you may not know me but please, won’t you-]
He isn’t too good at feigning anger or feigning anything for that matter when you tell him that they’re coming over at nine tomorrow so why don’t you go make yourself look presentable; just stares you down with sunken eyes and an argument lodged in his throat.
What did you do to get them here, pay them?
I called.
Scoff, push bland hospital food around a plate with disposable cutlery until everything is colour coded, fish to the right and carrots to the left. He looks up when he’s done with the peas, murky green arranged in a loose circle around the sides.
Thank you.
[sun climbing from outside hospital cafeterias, coffee gone cold half an hour ago, still resisting the urge to stand outside room 1263 and put your ear to door, eye to the keyhole, curiosity tangoing with selfish wants pushed down with a stale piece of bread]
So?
So what?
You don’t look up from your page flipping, book coughing dusty objections at every silverfish hole you pause to run your fingertips over. He settles deeper into his hospital issued pillow and reaches to snatch the bible out of your hands.
It’s given up indignantly, a compromise reached when he says something flippant about how he’s been singing to you all this while and now it’s your turn to read to him. He flips casually to the back.
Read this.
Here?
He underlines it with one shaky finger, I Corinthians 13:13.
Now these three remain; faith, love and hope. But the greatest of these is love.
There’ll be time enough later for poetry.
[rewind, replay, old film reels with their ends cut, dangling, open endings and black/white beginnings]
So do you regret?
No, you think four years later and wonder if he’d found anything of his own in the end, faith and hope and love and everything that falls between the spaces. Family. Religion. You’re pretty sure you fit in somewhere.
There are still fake constellations outside your window, strangely bright despite hospital room lights and you watch them drift away to flirt with satellites.
No, I don’t.
[secondhand smoke causes cancer in non smokers.]
Hey, stranger. This heaven place, why don’t you tell me more about it since we’re on our way there.
.fin
angst
g
2319 words
He isn’t one for poetry, prefers his words sung rather than spoken but of course, over time and empty coffee mugs, one learns to make exceptions for the right people. You read to him by the unsteady light of sleepy cities, missing words when the lamps illuminating office buildings from the inside out go out one by one.
Fireflies dying, he says in a moment of morbid poetic humor and smiles that little crooked smile you’ve learned to fit your heart around.
He stops you when you reach to flip on the lights in this white, slightly foreign, boxy at the most room, wants to make friends with the antiseptic tinged shadows in the corner for a little while more. Poe and Tennyson trip clumsy past your lips best at times like these, twilight tinged lines of things fluttering in the dark, of deep love and wild regret.
So do you regret?
Regret? Regret what?
He draws invisible patterns, upside down on the margin of your book. Finding the right words in blank spaces.
Meeting me.
[rewind, replay, broken pop-up books of folded memories creased from being hidden away too long, undoing ribbons and unpacking boxes stolen up from the depths of mind crevasses]
Sometimes on good days with the sun playing lazy tag with cotton candy-esque clouds white overhead, high summer days when you think the right people could live forever, it feels like meeting should have been more like finding and flipped around at that. Perhaps he’d found you instead; one rainy Thursday sidestepping puddles until he’d bumped, splashed, tripped into your mundane little life.
Sorry, I didn’t see-…
It’s okay, really. It was almost finished anyway.
Lukewarm coffee running faded rivulets into the gutter, sidetracking and getting lured unsuspecting into puddles deep enough to float paper cups.
Let me get you another?
I’m fine, really I was-…
Brought up not to accept coffee from strangers?
Candy, yes, but coffee might be a different matter.
It takes one cup of coffee (dark, low calorie sweetener laced) and a glass of iced tea (green, sweet enough to rot smiles) sneaked between the cracks of conversations in cafes with low lights to scare away the rainclouds. By the time you step out into weak sunshine and onto wet pavements, you don’t think you’ll be getting any sleep tonight.
[single line text messages at 2am in the morning, sleep is for the weak and unloved, him standing outside your door at 2.25am, getting into unfamiliar cars with almost familiar people, so is a late night car ride considered candy or coffee?]
He’d been a choirboy, he tells you, one hand half out the window to catch the falling rain as he drives with his other. Takes corners at speeds that push the borderline of illegal.
Backslidden, though.
You don’t ask why and you’re contented enough to keep your eyes on the road for him, make up secrets to slip behind every tiny unexplained fact he shares at red lights.
I’ve never tried green tea till yesterday.
There’s a 24 hour convenience store down the road and he stops for a moment to get ice cream, a packet of lights.
Don’t get it all over the seat.
Says the man who bought it for me to begin with.
Eyes on the road please, not the food.
Speak for yourself.
One crossroad, two roundabouts, half a popsicle later.
Hand me a smoke, will you?
Perhaps your parents would have hated to love him, the way he kept a pack of always almost empty Marlboro lights in one back pocket and nicotine gum in the other, the way he only smoked in the car on rainy days because he hates the way stale gaseous cancer twists itself around the seams of his clothes.
It’s hell to get out, seriously.
Smoke out, rain in, it feels like a fair enough deal.
Wind up the window, fool, seat’s getting wet.
Why don’t you try and make me.
He inhales deep one more time, firefly light flaring bright for a moment before he flicks it out the window, makes you mutter darkly about littering and dying and how
I didn’t know you smoke.
Well you don’t know a lot of things about me.
Good or bad?
For me to know and you to find out soon enough.
He pulls over by the curb and you let yourself out, half slamming car doors with peeling paint that flakes away with every goodbye.
So, you sticking around long enough to find out?
You stand in the rain to shake the scent of airborne death, long late night car rides still clinging stubborn to your tee before turning to begin the lonely trek up to your little 3 room apartment on the 4th floor.
For me to know and you to find you soon enough, you retort and he smiles, drives off under the watching light of sidewalk streetlamps.
[count time in the form of 2am exoduses to city borders, coffee stained mugs, flavoured teas, days and weeks and hours lurching past like cripples learning to dance one two three and turn and one two]
He thinks he’s lost his religion but you know otherwise, it’s just a matter of remembering it, a far easier task than he’ll ever admit too. It’s still there if anyone cares to look hard, deep enough, flickering shadows of recognition hiding behind hooded eyes on the self imposed holidays the both of you declare. Noontimes, extended lunch hours spent standing in the washed out colours of stained glass windows within empty cathedrals.
You went to bible school?
Seminary.
Filtered light turns the dust mites in the air the colour of faded rainbows, jump twirl leap with every step and every careless finger tracing stone walls.
Tomayto tomahto, isn’t it the same anyways? But-…
Yeah.
He doesn’t talk much on days like this, prefers to sit in back pews and twine your hands together into shaky cages of bone and sinew over hymnals with frayed covers. Sing to you broken fragments of half remembered lines, grace and love and a faraway place called heaven.
It’s the start of another useless sunset when you leave, shuffling sneaker soles and footsteps ghosting your own, both evading the growing patches of non-light that creep out from distant corners
I don’t like the dark.
Well that makes two of us.
It’s moonrise by the time he drops you off, firefly spark of cigarette ends flicking goodbyes at you from the car window. One slow drag later and you reach for it, pluck it out from between surprised fingers to crush under your heel. Grinding ashen addictions into the pavement.
You could just tell me if you don’t like me smoking, you know.
I don’t like you smoking.
Okay.
[cough and cough and cough until it feels like a bad habit, nicotine lined veins, rusty blood seeping from the cracks between his lips, lies taste bittersweet and a little too much like a good smoke]
You tell him curt, eyes steady, that you don’t like him hiding blood stained tissues in his pocket either, don’t like him sneaking off to throw them into public trashcans when he thinks you’re not looking.
You don’t like a lot of things.
But I do like you.
Aha.
He coughs not so discreetly behind one hand and it comes away scarlet tinged, the third time within one sunset and maybe it’s just a wicked play of light, the golden red hues that bleed across the sky somehow leaking their colors onto his skin.
Are you okay?
The sun goes over the horizon and buildings catch faux fire, sky aflame. Skyscraper shadows reaching grasping hands out over late evening traffic.
And if I said no?
It’s too dark to see how serious he is.
[night time ER rooms, smell of antiseptic in the air, tired nurses with too long shifts and too little pay, there’s a man dying upstairs, code blue code blue]
They say it’s cancer and put him in a small, square-ish room, the kind with bedside tables attached to the wall, ornate little standardized vase on top of it with dusty plastic flowers undying. Bibles in the drawer.
Six out of ten people die within a year of being diagnosed.
What’re you looking at?
Seven to eight die within two.
N-n-nothing, it’s nothing.
50% of new lung cancer cases will be diagnosed at stage IIIb or IV.
Doesn’t sound like it’s n-n-nothing to me.
And only 5% will live for five years.
You don’t tell him but then again he doesn’t ask, prefers not to mention that he already knows.
[clear night sky, too long hours, too little sleep, needles cold in his arm, perhaps we could live forever if we tried hard enough, empty beds and unattached IV lines dangling unwanted, forlorn]
I don’t think I’m that afraid to die, he says and there’s a muted sort of defiance hiding between those words, the same kind that lurks in his eyes the nights you catch him sneaking a smoke on the hospital rooftop, quietly nursing the open wound the IV left behind.
What do you think you’re doing?
Isn’t it obvious?
He tosses the half finished cigarette over the edge of the building and watches it fall out of sight, confused embers following after like fireflies with broken wings.
I’m already dying anyway.
Don’t say that.
90% of lung cancer is caused by smoking,
Then what do you want me to say? That everything is going to be alright? That two years, maybe three from now if I’m lucky, I’ll still be standing here? Because face it, I don’t think I will be.
Then make it one. Two. Push it to four. Since when were you the kind to conform to rules?
We’re not arguing about how long it’s going to take for me to die.
No, we’re arguing about how long you’re going to live.
The fight goes out of his eyes and you stay on the roof with him a little while longer, make up fake constellations from night time skylines until there’re enough memories hidden up there to last you a lifetime.
One more thing, he adds almost as an afterthought, taking the stairs down two steps at a time.
What?
He waves his hand in your face and you wince at the sight of drying blood, crooked smile on his face.
Don’t tell the men in white coats.
[so tell me one thing: do miracles only happen to those who believe?]
The attending calls you out two months later, sits you down on the cold plastic chairs that line white walls. Up ahead, the nurses’ station is buzzing with subdued activity, reports being filed, calls being made with hushed voices. It’s four in the afternoon.
Do you know any of his immediate family members?
They…they aren’t all that close, actually.
But of course, he’d never gotten to telling them, the estranged parents who hide disappointment behind undialed numbers and salvation prayers for the lost.
There isn’t much more we can do.
Ah, I see. Thank you. For everything up till now.
You steeple your fingers into messy heights, shaking from the bottom up and inside out, build and take apart and rebuild until it makes sense to just let them lie clasped on your lap.
I’m sorry.
So am I.
[things unsaid, words meant for others, numbers dialed and redialed with the last digit missing so many times until you can ghost the whole thing blind, it’s not called lying when you’re only not telling the truth, phone calls answered on the sixth ring, you may not know me but please, won’t you-]
He isn’t too good at feigning anger or feigning anything for that matter when you tell him that they’re coming over at nine tomorrow so why don’t you go make yourself look presentable; just stares you down with sunken eyes and an argument lodged in his throat.
What did you do to get them here, pay them?
I called.
Scoff, push bland hospital food around a plate with disposable cutlery until everything is colour coded, fish to the right and carrots to the left. He looks up when he’s done with the peas, murky green arranged in a loose circle around the sides.
Thank you.
[sun climbing from outside hospital cafeterias, coffee gone cold half an hour ago, still resisting the urge to stand outside room 1263 and put your ear to door, eye to the keyhole, curiosity tangoing with selfish wants pushed down with a stale piece of bread]
So?
So what?
You don’t look up from your page flipping, book coughing dusty objections at every silverfish hole you pause to run your fingertips over. He settles deeper into his hospital issued pillow and reaches to snatch the bible out of your hands.
It’s given up indignantly, a compromise reached when he says something flippant about how he’s been singing to you all this while and now it’s your turn to read to him. He flips casually to the back.
Read this.
Here?
He underlines it with one shaky finger, I Corinthians 13:13.
Now these three remain; faith, love and hope. But the greatest of these is love.
There’ll be time enough later for poetry.
[rewind, replay, old film reels with their ends cut, dangling, open endings and black/white beginnings]
So do you regret?
No, you think four years later and wonder if he’d found anything of his own in the end, faith and hope and love and everything that falls between the spaces. Family. Religion. You’re pretty sure you fit in somewhere.
There are still fake constellations outside your window, strangely bright despite hospital room lights and you watch them drift away to flirt with satellites.
No, I don’t.
[secondhand smoke causes cancer in non smokers.]
Hey, stranger. This heaven place, why don’t you tell me more about it since we’re on our way there.
.fin