Fireflies Read Online Free Page A

The center cannot hold. Watch out for the boogeyman. Eat your Wheaties. Say your prayers. Walk around ladders. Brush your teeth after every meal. Stay away from the teddy bears’ picnic. And count every second without pain or disaster as a major stroke of luck.
    Entropy. That was the secret. The messiness of the universe.
    As Sarie held his weakening hand in Intensive Care, David heard faintly, through the wheeze of the oxygen pump and a humming in his ears, the words she’d recited at Matthew’s funeral. How proud he’d been of her that day, how filled with love. The strength and composure she’d mustered against intolerable grief had made it possible for her somehow bravely to stand before the mourners at the church and to recite that day’s gospel, a text that with bitter irony happened to be from St. Matthew.
    Sarie repeated it to him now. God bless her, she’d remembered the passage all these years. She spoke it again as she had with the same trembling voice combating sorrow so long ago. If he’d had the strength, he’d have reached up and hugged her just as he had before the mourners in the church so many years ago when she’d stepped unsteadily down from the lectern. The words were beautiful.
    Come to me, all you who are weary and find life burdensome, and I will refresh you. Take my yoke upon your shoulders and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble of heart. Your soul will find rest, for my yoke is easy and my burden light.

    Comforting thoughts. If a person believed.
    But David at best had been an agnostic.
    Until three incidents made him suspect there might be a spirit within the universe, a greater power than his pessimism allowed.

8

    The first had occurred one night after Matthew’s death. Having somehow managed the strength to write Matthew’s eulogy, David had staggered to the master bedroom, where in a rare gesture of obeisance to a God whose existence he doubted, he’d sunk to his knees. The time was night. The room was dark. David’s eyes were raw with tears. Hands pressed to his swollen face, he’d prayed with a fervor that he swore would kill him.
    Matthew, Matthew, Matthew! I want you back, son! This has to be a nightmare! Soon I’ll waken! You’ll be here!
    One day before the septic shock that had ravaged Matthew’s body and eight days later killed him, David had used some brief time alone, when he and Donna weren’t sharing anxious hours together watching over Matthew in the hospital. David had driven home to change clothes. On impulse, based on a twenty-year daily habit, he’d decided to exercise, to run as was his custom, to clear his head and sweat tension from his body. After four miles, the farthest he could manage given his stress and weakness, he’d staggered into his kitchen, sipped a glass of water, and collapsed. Surely while he was passed out on the floor, this nightmare of his dear son’s death had come to him, and he hadn’t wakened yet. That was the explanation. None of this had happened. It was a nightmare.
    So he’d hoped forty years ago as he’d knelt in trembling anguish beside the bed. While he squeezed his hands to his face and tears seeped through his clawlike fingers that threatened to tear his cheeks away, he’d prayed with all the desperation his soul could sustain that he would wake up from his stupor on the kitchen floor and his son would still be alive.
    Oh, please! he’d prayed. Oh, Jesus, please!
    But he’d known in a terrifying recess of his remaining sanity that he had indeed revived from his stupor on the floor, that he had indeed staggered back to the hospital, that his son had indeed suffered septic shock one day later and died eight unimaginably traumatic days after that.
    Matthew! Matthew! Please! Come back to me!
    Forty years ago, in his kneeling paroxysm beside the bed, his thoughts flashing through his mind like lasers, David had suddenly remembered yet another example of his wonderful son’s promising gifts. Not only the