stopping the chorus

All of the city's fireflies were electric eyes. Everywhere that I would go; green and orange hellos. I couldn't sleep. I drew down the shades but they still peered in. I drew up the sun but the lights just folded their wings and waited to be painted, waited to color inside the lines. So I went to work where I was ironically one of the people responsible for managing the city's electrical grid system. I baited my fellow employees out of the room with promises of pizza, then went back to the massive control board and managed to shut off half of the city's lights before someone came in and stopped me. The darkness lasted about half a minute and I was fired and four people were critically injured in car accidents involving faulty street signals. But screw it. It was worth the thirty seconds that I could look out of the building's window and see nothing except for night sky and silhouettes.

Predictably, I moved out into the country three weeks later, saving up my unemployment checks and selling a few antiques. My daughter protested but I told her we had to go because daddy was becoming an insomniac. She said she didn't know what that meant but she did know that I looked tired. A sweet girl, she acquiesced to accept our leaving.

I tried to think of how to transport my grand piano but it wasn't worth the trouble. I left it for the overpriced maid that I couldn't afford to keep. She said thank you and immediately proceeded to tune the wretched thing, something I had never learned how to do.

Out in the hills and farms, even here, I could not sleep. All of the country's fireflies were buzzing eyes. They watched me in sparks outside my window every night, told one another jokes at the expense of my restless nights'. So I hired an exterminator to get rid of them. He said he would come in a week. I impatiently waited, and during that week my daughter had managed to collect every single firefly she could find and put them in a giant jar that must have previously stored something like boiled eggs or giant olives. She filled it full and hid it under her bed. The same night that the exterminator finally arrived (an hour late) she had collected the last chorus of lights. The exterminator told me there were no fireflies in my yard to kill. He seemed disappointed. I gave him some money for gas, at least, and he went on his hapless way. It was almost midnight by then, and for the first time in seven months I was able to enjoy a couple hours of soundless, lightless sleep, until the lid of my daughter's jar came loose under her bed and our house was lit up like a city.

I opened my bedroom door when I noticed a swell of viridity from the hallway outside. The fireflies were swarming in fluorescent blizzards. I could hear my sweet daughter laughing, wading her tiny hands through their illumination. We're back home, she said. The contours of her face shifted through shades of bright pond green from the lights shining underneath wings. Her dimples dried in lily pads, her hair swung down over her turtle eyes with vines. Home, I told her, was just a noun. She said she didn't know what that meant but she did know what right now looked like.