Lucy lay in bed, and stared around the room. She could hear her grandpa through the walls – the way he sucked in each breath between his silent sobs.  The window was cracked open, and every now and again a stiff breeze pushed the sheer yellowed curtains in toward the room, and they fluttered just enough to give Lucy a clear view of the yard.  Outside, hundreds of lightning bugs flashed as they rose from the overgrown lawn.

            
            Lucy imagined that they weren’t lightning bugs at all, but stars, that she was one of the celestial bodies, flying through silent space, circling the heat of the sun but never able to touch it. Lightning bugs lit up, and blinked out. Supernova. And then the same lightning bug floated a few inches and relit. The birth of a star. Over and over again.

            
            It was a warm night, and Lucy was beginning to sweat beneath the covers.  She sat up and pushed the cover down to the foot of the bed. The cover itself was threadbare and no longer soft.  She couldn’t see it in the dark, but it had been on this bed all her life.  She could easily imagine the off-white backdrop covered in golden yellow flowers with green stems and leaves intertwining in a never ending pattern.

            
            Of course, if she looked at it in the light she knew she would see how faded it was, how the colors weren’t really that vibrant. She knew she would see the tiny holes left from old cigarette burns, the tears caused by careless children. 

            
            Lucy swung her legs off the bed, and her feet sank into the white shag carpeting. She wriggled her toes down into the fibers before standing in front of the half open window. She pushed the curtains aside and let them fall behind her as she stood as closely to the glass as she could without touching it.  The breeze pushed past her bare legs and made the sheer fabric flutter against the backs of her knees.

            
            The window was grimy and a little bit hard to see through.  The lightning bugs had tiny halos around their bodies, like Christmas lights from far away. Lucy imagined them flying into the branches of the apple tree beside the smokehouse and landing. Blinking, blinking, blinking.

            
            Just to the left of her window was a sidewalk with a rusted red tricycle leaning crookedly on a flat tire in the middle of it. It was the same tricycle her grandparents’ bought her as a kid, and today it had been pulled from under old tobacco sticks in the barn for her second cousins to use. The flat wheel kept them from really riding it down the sidewalk and back, so they had ignored it.

            
            The sidewalk ran from the faded blue porch to the smokehouse.  In the dark she could barely make out where the cement had cracked and risen an inch or so. The roots from the apple tree had pushed it up according to her dad. The apple tree, when it was in bloom, always made her eyes itch, but she couldn’t help but go and sit at the picnic table beneath it. When the tiny apples would ripen and fall she and her grandma would go and fill bowl after bowl with the hard bittersweet fruits.

            
            “Don’t eat too many,” her grandma would always say after they’d gotten as many as they could from the ground. When she asked her why, she would just shake her head and say “Just trust your grandma.” She always did.

           The last few years the apples seemed to be punier, and there weren’t as many. The tree itself had one whole side that stayed brown year round, but it wasn’t the side she could see from her window.

            
            In the next room, Lucy heard the soft, regular rhythm of her grandpa snoring. She closed her eyes, and took a deep breath. She looked at the clock. It was only eleven.

            
            Lucy backed away from the window, letting the silky curtains slide against her arms and legs before falling back into place against the window. She didn’t want to wake up her grandpa, but she couldn’t fall asleep just yet.

            
            She slipped her tennis shoes, which sat by the door, onto her feet. On tiptoe she made her way into the kitchen, pausing to grab a thin black box from the medicine cabinet, before heading out and out the side door. The moon was shining in pieces through the large silver maple and onto the newly blacktopped driveway. She sat down in the chair by the door, where her grandma had always sat, starting at the cool metal of the lawn chair. She held the box in her lap.

            
            When they were preteens she and her cousins would sneak into the kitchen and steal their grandpa’s Zippo.  With muffled giggles they would go straight out to the porch, where they’d made a pile of short, thick, sticks. They would light the tips, pretending to smoke them like cigars, even though they had to be relit every few minutes when the wood stopped smoking.  With cigars in hand, they would plan ways to rob the bank, which was the barn. They were all mobsters.

            
            Lucy opened the black box and the spicy sweet smell hit her in the face. She drew out a long black stick and a short plastic lighter.

            
            She brought the sweetened black filter to her lips, and rolled the metal wheel with her thumb, striking the flint. The sudden light blinded her a bit, as she brought it to the tip and inhaled just the tiniest bit. She blinked a few times and the tiny green spots went away.

            
            All her life, she’d chastised her grandparents for smoking. 

            
            “It’s bad for you,” she would tell them, even as a kid, “you need to quit.” Her grandpa would just shake his head, and go into the living room to smoke. But her grandma would sit and listen as Lucy explained all the reasons why it was so bad. One day, she told Lucy she’d finally convinced her to quit.

            
            A few weeks later, Lucy caught grandma smoking in the bathroom. When Lucy walked in, her grandma’s brown eyes opened wide, and the wrinkles on her forehead stood at full attention. Sweet smoke had spilled from the door as her grandma dropped a black stick into the open toilet.

            
            “Grandma, you don’t have to pretend for me.”

           Her grandma had just sighed, and shook her head. “Lucy, when you’ve had a habit all your life, it’s hard to just up and quit it.” Her grandma had then raised a crooked finger and held it in Lucy’s face. “But don’t you ever start, or I’ll go cut a switch, I don’t care how old you are.”

            
            Lucy pulled the sweetened smoke in through the filter and held it in her mouth. She didn’t inhale, but instead savored the way the smoke stung the back of her throat before exhaling again. She licked the clove taste off her lips.

            
            Across the porch, a rickety wooden step led up to another sidewalk that led to the road. Beside it was a long rectangular sandbox outlined by painted gray-blue cement. 

           Her grandpa, when she was just a baby, had dug up a flowerbed and filled it with sand. When her brother turned five, he rolled a remote control truck into it, and the sand got into the gears and broke it. When her grandma had cats, they used it as a litter box, and the kids weren’t allowed to play in it as much. And now it was part sand, part dirt, part leaves and twigs. The great-grandkids didn’t come over enough to use it.

            
            The lightning bugs weren’t so heavy on this side of the house. Only a few graced Lucy with their light as they hovered over damp moss covered tree roots.  The trees on this side of the house were so thick that the grass didn’t grow.

            
            On warm, summer nights, her grandma would get mason jars ready, and poke holes in the top of the lid with a kitchen knife. She’d put grass in the bottom and find a stick or two to lean against the side.

            
            “Now, kids, I want you to go out and catch me as many lightning bugs as you can.” She’d always made sure to make a jar for each of the four grandkids. They would each grab a jar, and run into the field in front of the house, where the lightning bugs were the thickest.

            
            They would carefully scoop a lit bug out of the air and hold it in a loose fist before dropping it into the jar and hastily screwing the lid back on. Everyone except Brooklyn, who would sneak and squish the lit tails, and watch her fingers glow, then fade. Once, Lucy told on her. Grandma made Brooklyn go insideand give back her jar.

            
            “No need in being mean to a little bug that ain’t done you no harm. Go on in.” Brooklyn was very angry with Lucy and didn’t talk to her until the next day, but Lucy remembered not caring, because her grandma didn’t want the bugs to be hurt either.

            
            During Lucy’s freshman year she had gotten a pamphlet from a guy wearing a black PETA tee shirt with the words ALL LIFE COUNTS in bold red print across the front.

            
            The next night she had gone to her first PETA meeting.  She sat next to a very fashionable girl with a University of Nebraska folder in her lap.

            
            As the new girl, she had been asked why she was there.  She told them all about the lightning bugs, and her grandma, and how angry Brooklyn’s treatment of the lightning       bugs had made her.  There had been a few nods around the room.

            
            The fashionable girl with the Nebraska folder just laughed lightly.

            
            “Your accent is so very cute.” She had placed her manicured hand over her protruding collar bone. “I wasn’t sure what you meant at first. Where I’m from we call them fireflies.”

           After a year away at school, Lucy had proudly dropped all but the most subtle hints of her southern accent. She worked hard to enunciate each word correctly, and she made sure never to use any sort of southern slang if she could help it.

           She would go home some weekends, and on those Sundays she would get in the car with her parents and drive the twenty minutes from their house to her grandparent’s. After only a few minutes of conversation, her southern twang was back. Her grandma would squint her eyes as Lucy spoke, but never voiced her thoughts.  Lucy would feel those eyes, and feel her old words slipping back. She had to redouble her efforts the next week to hide them again.

            
            Now, she let her words fall out of her mouth however they wanted.

            
            Lucy finished her clove and walked to the road to stub it out. She licked her lips over and over as she crossed the small private street and tossed the butt into a field of weeds. Frogs and katydids sang from the tree line.

            
            On nights like these, when their mason jars were full, their grandma would tell them to empty them out and start again, to see who could catch the most.

            
            “But be careful,” she’d say. “Don’t squish them by accident.”

            
            Lucy walked back to the house, grabbing her purse from the chair, and quietly opened the squeaky glass door. The kitchen always smelled the same. Her grandma always cooked with lots of salt and lots of fat. The kitchen had soaked in the smell of southern food, and it seeped out of the wood, even when no cooking was taking place.

            
            She stopped and inhaled that smell. She wanted to take it with her when she left so that she would never forget it.

            
            She walked through the kitchen, letting her hand trail along the edge of the smooth stove and across the almost jagged counter top where her grandma said her dad had kicked it as a kid and left a chip. She let her body follow her feet as she stepped down the half step from the kitchen into the living room and made sure not to bump the television as she walked by it.

            
            She stopped by the bathroom door and put her hand on the knob. She knew her grandma’s red prickly brush was still sitting on the counter and that her hairspray and blush were still on their stands above the toilet. She pulled her hand away and turned toward her room.

            
            She quietly pulled her door till she heard it latch shut and sat the box of cloves on the dresser. Holding herself up against the wall, she nudged each shoe off with her toes and sat down on the foot of the bed.

 
           Her feet sank into the soft carpet, and her fingers clutched the blanket that was pushed down to the edge. She closed her eyes and focused on the coarse fibers between her fingers and the worn carpet in the arches of her feet. Her grandpa still snored in the next room.

            
            The lightning bugs wouldn’t be around much longer. At the end of every summer, they started disappearing. When it was the coldest, and their lights would be the prettiest against the ice and snow, they were gone.

            
            “Where do they go?” Lucy had asked her grandma one evening while they sat on the porch eating watermelon straight off the rind and watching the lightning bugs flash.

            
            “I guess they go to sleep,” she’d said, spitting a seed into the yard.

            
            “But, you can’t sleep for that long.”

            
            Her grandma had looked at her and nodded, thinking as she wiped red juice from her fingers onto a napkin.

            
            “Maybe they die. They can’t live as well in the cold.”

            
            Lucy jerked her head up.

           “Can’t we bring them inside, so we can see them all year?” she had asked as she picked the seeds out of her melon and flicked them into the yard.

            
            “Wouldn’t do no good. They’d die anyway,” her grandma had said picking up a salt shaker from the ground and salting her fruit before taking a bite.

           Lucy had frowned, and her tiny shoulders had slumped toward her folded legs.

           “There’s a season for everything,” her grandma had said, sitting her slice of watermelon on the plate in her lap. She started rocking her chair. “Watermelons have a season. They only grow certain times of year. And just like them, lightning bugs have a season. When their season’s over, it’s over. No use being sad about it, they had their time.”

           Lucy opened her eyes and looked out the window one last time. It was almost midnight, and the air coming through the window was the tiniest bit cooler than it had been before. The lightning bugs thinned out as the air cooled. In another month they would all be gone.

            
            With heavy arms she scooted back into the center of the bed.  She pulled the cover up to her chin, and turned away from the window. She could still hear her grandpa’s wheezy night breathing in the next room.  Lucy curled her body up and pulled her knees toward her chin. She pressed her clove scented hands against her closed eyelids until the darkness turned white.