Fireflies

I stand in the yard, rain beginning to fall softly around me. It is dusk, and a storm is coming. The sunset makes even the air look pink. Both eerie and beautiful, and I can’t look away. Fireflies glitter here and there, in our yard and far beyond, in the pasture up the hill. This is summer, I think, reaching my memory back to so many barefoot evenings catching lightning bugs with the neighbors, giggling and exclaiming as we trapped them in jars. My dad had used the ice pick with the red handle to puncture holes in the jar tops so we could enjoy that momentary light. One of nature’s strange gifts.

My mind wanders to the book I’ve been reading: black twins growing up in the rural South. A black transgender boy growing up in Arkansas. Black families working for white families who abused and demeaned them. I think about the black siblings, the black trans boys, the black families in this town watching sunsets and fireflies tonight. How have we arrived here, this place that is not so different from decades ago? With black lives still not mattering? With riots and protests and cries for change? How are we still so cold, the doors of our souls so locked tight, just to keep out our own family? 

The murdered black boys. The abused black girls. The outwardly demeaned black families. Their lives are spotlights, shining into our eyes so we can’t look away. Showing us the bright beauty of humanity, telling us with the flash and drama of glittering insects: WE ARE HERE. WE MATTER. And what do we do? We grasp at the light, too blinding for us. Suffocate its glow in prisons and redlined districts and our own contrived narratives.

The sun sinks lower below the pasture. I imagine the horses there, swatting their tails back and forth, silhouetted against a postcard sky. An owl hoots somewhere in the woods. It sounds like a mourning cry, like the collective wail of a nation awakened in the dead of night, finally able to see the darkness in our own hearts.