The January Special Guest Writer is Brent Monahan

Please feel free to visit Brent at: http://www.brentmonahan.com/

FIREFLIES
by Brent Monahan

City folk. Suburbanites. They've killed too much of nature, with their concrete sidewalks, asphalt streets and parking lots, decks and chlorinated swimming pools, their pesticides and herbicides. Remember all the birds of your youth, their colors and melodies? Remember how, on a hot night, you timed the chirp of the nearest cricket rubbing its hind legs together to attract a mate in order to estimate the temperature? Can you even hear them now? What about the butterflies? Not only the rare ones. The Common Buckeye, the Orange Sulphur, the Monarch, the Painted Lady, the Tiger Swallowtail? When was the last time you saw a Praying Mantis, you owners of McMansions?

So, what do these oblivious murderers do to "get back to Nature?" They come out to the mountains and the rural lakes and ruin our lives during the best months of the year. You can tell without even seeing them, by the amount of trash they throw out their car and camper home windows.

I own and run a country version of their convenience stores, a log-cabin-style 7-11. I would love to serve only the locals, but there are--fortunately--not enough of us to make a living off of. So I unwillingly stock the extras the Vandals, Visigoths and Huns neglect to pack--the toilet paper, condoms, beer and bottle openers. Also the kitschy, down-home trash they haul home as souvenirs or gifts: the potpourri, "If God had wanted me to clean pots/He'da given me aluminum hands" class of kitchen hang-ups, the jump-a-peg games. But I refuse to sell three items that are too frequently asked for: butterfly nets, killing jars and ether. It isn't enough that they've exterminated all the flying insects in their own plastic world; they want to deplete our populations to the point of extinction for the fleeting fun of examination or just pure torture.

In other parts of our country there used to be a summer mania of catching lightning bugs, alternately known as fireflies, in Mason-type jars, until enough were crammed in to make a concentrated glow that one might even be able to read one's watch by. Now, of course, the time glows on the smart phone, and there's a flashlight built in, but reading time is not the point; capturing wildlife and then leaving it trapped in the jar until it all dies is apparently the goal. In the cities and suburbs they've killed off this source of merriment. But they resurrect it here with relish when they see the first winking in the twilight.

My store sits right between R29 and Lake Pindy. Exactly one square acre of property, which means my back wall is less than a hundred feet from the lakeshore. Ralph, the owner of the rent-a-boat enterprise next to me, is a good guy. He always backs me up when we see the butterfly nets and capture jars. We both say the identical thing:

"Please don't catch the fireflies. We want Lake Pindy to be a place of life, not death."

And they look at us like we've been interbreeding for centuries and then glance down to see if we have six fingers. Some of them have even laughed in our faces.

"What's the harm, Old Man?" asked the leader of a recent pack, college kids that looked like the gang from Scooby Doo. "They're just bugs. And they do reproduce, don't they?"

"Not when you trap them in jars and then forget to release them," I replied.

"Listen, fella," his buddy told me, "Where I came from, we used to pinch off the back ends that glowed and threw the front away, so it looked like a miniature collection of street warning lights."

"Don't tell me:" I responded, "You've gotten civilized since then."

The little bastard did a slow sweep of my store with his judgmental eyes and said, "Certainly more civilized than you."

The leader touched his friend on the shoulder. "Bro, lighten up. When in Droolsville, do as the mouth breathers do." He smiled at me. "We'll try to remember to let them go after we're done . . . providing we're not too drunk."

They, naturally, lacked any bills or change and paid with a debit card. I watched with appreciation as their two female companions undulated toward the front door with the bottoms of their butt cheeks protruding from their short-short shorts.

I kept an eye on them through the front window, until I was sure the pack was sauntering toward Ralph's Boat Rentals. Then I picked up the phone.

"Ralph, it's me," I said. "You got four Einsteins headed your way. You ought to know they came in here asking for a Mason jar to catch lightning bugs." Ralph made an unhappy sound. "I gave them my usual lecture, but they're determined. Bought a jar of mayonnaise, which I'm sure they'll pour onto the ground and then soak the label off."

"I could say everything's rented," Ralph said.

"That's up to you. Or you could rent 'em the General Slocum."

"I'll see how they treat me.  Thanks," he said and rang off.

I took care of a couple of customers but glanced now and then at Ralph's place. Sure enough, Ralph had rented the four the most repainted flat-bottomed aluminum boat in our state. Its engine was a low-horsepower trawler, the hitch of which Ralph had customized to stand an extra foot away from the stern. The two guys piled into the boat, half listening to Ralph's instructions on using the engine and observing proper water safety and courtesy. They managed to start the engine and steered off toward Sunset View Campground, which lay just around a promontory that hid the eyesore from our view. The two young women jumped into their late-model, flashy-red Mustang and scattered several buckets of gravel in leaving Ralph's parking lot.

I keep my place open until ten p.m. during tourist season, letting my nephew open up at seven in the morning and myself working from one until close-up. My hours partly compensate for the guff I take from our invader lords and masters who think it's "fun" to leave their air-conditioned homes and offices, their Starbucks and Au Bon Pains and their personal trainers at the gym to "rough it" for a week. I get to watch the aforementioned sunsets in the distant pine trees on the opposite side of the lake, see the flights of egrets, geese and loons, and also enjoy the lake follies of the human loons from time to time.

Such was the case on this evening. From around the promontory came the General Slocum, with its four boisterous sailors, doing their unlevel best to tip the boat over with their erratic, drunken movements. The pilot, who was the nastier of the two males, throttled the engine down, then shut it off and let it drift to where I had a perfect view. Clearly, they thought it would be oh-so-funny to show me just how little they thought of my advice about catching lightning bugs, or fireflies--which they thought were the same thing. I know this because the blonde, buxom beauty with the rounder butt held up the now-clear-walled mayonnaise jar for me to see. It was already three-quarters filled with the little creatures who had glowing rear ends. But that was not enough. They had managed to get their mitts on not one but three of the sort of net wands used in pet shops to capture fish. To my amazement, in spite of the erratic darting of their quarry over the water and their obvious drunkenness, the trio was going for a new record in flying bug jar density.

The hour was eight o'clock. Ralph usually closed at seven, but he had stuck around. I like to think that he has a sixth sense about the likelihood of such occasions. He stood about twenty feet from the shoreline, staring at the display with his arms crossed, calm as could be.

"They're pretty close to shore," I said. "Don't you want to take a couple more steps back?"

"Nah," he replied. "That's a Hellman's medium jar, ain't it?"

"Yep."

"Here's more than far enough."

The leader, who held the jar, was particularly adept at clapping the lid down after each new bug was added. Few escaped. The jar pulsed brighter and brighter. The two young women oohed at the primitive entertainment.

"Wanna bet on how much longer?" I asked.

"Sure. Ten bucks says less than three minutes."

"You're on." I consulted my watch.

The seconds ticked by. I really did think I had it won this time. Two-minutes, fifty-two seconds passed, and I drew in a big breath to celebrate my shrewd calculation. Two seconds later, Ralph won.

All four of the urban wise-guys were standing when it happened. First came the lightning, as critical density was reached. The jar exploded with a tremendous noise that echoed across the lake, sending glass and metal flying at lethal speeds in all directions. All four would-be bug-killers hurtled backward into the lake. The screams from the pain of the penetrating shards and the instantaneous second-degree burns were punctuated by coughs as one after the other inhaled water from the waves they had caused. All of them had managed to stay conscious. They did what they could, splashing, paddling, even swimming toward the boat for their salvation. None had bothered to don the life vests Ralph had provided. The problem was that they had captured not just our county's singularly dangerous lightning bugs but also our own unique species of fireflies as well. The inside of the boat, which Ralph periodically protected from rust with a petroleum-based coating, was completely ablaze.

Even in August, Lake Pindy is darned cold. After the sun goes down, the air also gets cold fast. These factors, combined with the grievous wounds from the glass and metal and the burns, insured that the four bug-catchers did not make it to shore, even given that they were less than three hundred feet out.

"You warned 'em; I warned 'em," Ralph said calmly, as if that were enough to exonerate us. "'Please don't catch the fireflies. We want Lake Pindy to be a place of life, not death.'"

"Maybe we should add one more word:" I suggested. "Not your death."

"Oh sure. That would scare the  cocky know-it-alls. How many New Yorkers died with the real General Slocum fire?"

"One thousand and twenty-one," I reminded my friend.

"Let's see. These four bring our total up to thirty-six. A long way to go."

I handed Ralph the ten dollars I owed him and affected a hillbilly drawl, even though Lake Pindy is nowhere near the Southern Appalachians. "Cheer up, good buddy. Them flatlanders is gettin' more sadistic and uppity every year. I say we reach fifty by end of next summer . . . if your General Slocum holds up and you don't run out of aluminum paint."

Brent Monahan has been writing supernatural thrillers for thirty-five years. His reimagining of the vampire mythos in The Book of Common Dread merited quotes on the caliber of "Easily the best addition to the vampire genre since Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire.” (Indianapolis Star) His "An American Haunting/The Bell Witch" was the second of his novels to become a film, starring Sissy Spacek and Donald Sutherland. He also writes an American Progressive Era detective series that take place at gentlemen's clubs in the U.S. and abroad. His web site is HERE