Fleeting Sun
by Elisabeth Giffin Speckman
The boy has a way with fireflies. He asks them to love him in colors: like a rainbow, like something special. They come to him again and again. He never needs to stalk, just holds a pinky to the sky and they come. They come and they land and he smiles. You try to snap a picture but it's always blurred. There are some things you can’t ever capture. Like this feeling of weightlessness; the gravity of it. The speeding summer and fleeting sun. The sight of your son in low light. He appears like a mirror. Reflecting. He’s you. He’s already a memory. He’s fading. He’s growing too fast. Your son and the weeds and the night – all growing around you. His grin holds a secret. His palm holds the past: the firefly, fading. You learned that a firefly lives in the ground for a year, maybe two, before gaining its wings. This firefly, flying, flies towards its death. Three weeks, maybe four, must be all it has left. Your son doesn’t know. He expects light and life to go on but you’ve seen it extinguished. Endings are inevitable, but look how he cradles it. Watch as he wonders and wanders the grass. See how he glows. He knows only love, and you want to prepare him, to soften the blow, but dare you betray such innocence? Next summer, maybe. You must delay it, allow youth to last. Now’s not the time. Night’s falling fast and you’ve almost lost sight of him, but you call and he comes. He comes, and he turns, and he lets the bug go. You watch as he does it so simply. How he whispers good night. How he takes off for the house, throws open the door, and how just before stepping inside, he turns to be sure that you’re following.
Elisabeth Giffin Speckman writes in multiple genres and received her MFA in Fiction from Butler University. Plays include Clyt; or, The Bathtub Play (O’Neill Finalist 2023) and have been produced throughout the US and abroad. Published plays can be found through YouthPlays and Next Stage Press. Other work appears in Pink Ochre Literary Magazine, Midwestern Gothic, Flash Fiction Magazine, and CHEAP POP, among others.
