I.
a. This morning, I saw a creature standing in the road. The size of a small dog with rust-colored fur. But even from a distance, I could see electricity shuddering just beneath its skin. A taut wildness that disappears with domesticity.
b. For years now, I’ve lived in the West, in places that once were desert. Where the air is dry, and the bugs are few and no one cares quite so much if you graduated from one of the Ivies. Sometimes, I return East in August and bemoan the muggy air, the sweat sluicing down my spine. I bat away the gnats encircling my head like an aura of flittering dirt. But mid-Atlantic summers have their charms. The fecund earth is covered in living green velvet. And every firefly I see transports me back to a time in my life when the world was ruled by magic.
c. The things we truly want we can’t buy on eBay. Like the wisdom we possess as adults housed in the relentlessly firm bodies of our teenage selves. Another conversation with our now-dead mother. A world whose leaders have our best interests at heart. All the cashmere scarves in the world, even at deeply discounted prices, cannot give us that.
II.
a. I do not have any chickens in my yard nor a small child playing in a sandbox. For me, a fox is not a threat. It is simply untamable beauty running back into the woods.
b. It is not just that a lightning bug is a delicate winged life with a body that lights up, although if really you think about it, those facts are mind-boggling. It is also the precise color of a firefly’s minuscule light. That strange luminescence that exists nowhere else in nature, except perhaps for lichen hidden away on cave walls or small plants found deep in the ocean or other places I have never been.
c. I held your hand that night after you climbed into bed. You lay there, listening to Rachel Maddow and struggling for breath, your chest rising, catching, falling as your oxygen machine clicked and whooshed. The light of the TV screen flashed through your bedroom, while something passed between us, silent and sacred.
III.
a. Forty years ago, this neighborhood was new, every home recently constructed. The old trees chopped down, houses erected, new lawns unfurled, foliage freshly planted. I used to think of this place, with its saplings all the same age, as a tree orphanage. Decades have passed and those trees have grown large, boughs shading subdivision streets like elegant, old-fashioned boulevards. But amidst this manicured suburban enclave, beyond the personal property lines, there are still a few small wooded areas with underbrush grown thick. Secret places once again feral enough to house a fox and the wild things a fox might eat.
b. I have only ever seen that strangely dazzling color in containers of DayGlo paint and on black-light posters and a million tiny parts of things sold at Toys ‘R Us. Things I left behind in childhood and am reminded of only in rare moments, like by the unearthly glow of a firefly.
c. I imagined the veined forest of your lungs opening, allowing in more air. I begged your arteries to widen, your blood cells to please, please carry more oxygen. It seemed like your body had just nodded its assent when you lifted my hand to your lips and kissed my open palm.



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