Fireflies Read Online Free Page B

life-affirming pulse of music, whose throbbing chords continued to reverberate like a neverending tape through David’s head, but as well a poem, one of many, this one written during the disorientation and nausea of chemotherapy, a poem that Matthew had later submitted for an assignment at school.
    Fifteen years old. With verbal gifts far superior to those of his father who defined himself by and made his living out of words. Fifteen years old, and in a panic at 4:00 A.M., the boy had wakened Donna, who slept beside him on a cot in the IV-stand-filled room, to dictate to her his sudden terrifying insights. A poem. Not linear, not rhymed and metered, not the singsong unintentional parody of a poem you’d expect from someone his age. Instead a gestalt of fear and memory. A jumbled synthesis of reaction to when life was perfect and then collapsed. A metaphor of a jigsaw puzzle, of each piece having been beautifully assembled and then perversely ripped apart; of lost hair, fading friends, and fractured hopes; of the prejudice ignorant people showed toward cancer patients whose bald heads and gaunt cheeks looked like skulls; of dreams become tears and parties about to turn into wakes. Death and a jigsaw puzzle. If the poem wasn’t perfect, it was better than the father could have written at fifteen, or maybe could have ever written, and if a perceptive reader paid it due attention, the meaning was clear; the craft matched the content.

JIGSAW

    Remembrance of the days of ecstasy.
A natural buzz from life was created
As every piece of the jigsaw puzzle
Was prime and in place.

A sledge hammer, chain saw, and a rototiller
Shred through the jigsaw puzzle,
Through the good memories
Of a lot of Cokes
And late night burgers.

A mane of hair,
A symbol of what you believe in.
And so many good times gone by … Gone.
Déjà vu rings strong in your ears
But brings not a smile to your face,
Instead tears to your eyes.

Prejudice rears its ugly head.
Social matters become shattered.
Limits are put in place.
The jigsaw puzzle is slowly destroyed.
Leaving only one piece … Alone.

10

    Fifteen years old. Vomiting at 4:00 A.M. Dictating a poem.
    God love you, son, David had sobbed on his knees, hunching over a bed, with his fingers like claws scraping into his tear-ravaged face. You are dead. I’m not unconscious on the kitchen floor. I’m here. I’ve just written your eulogy. And my existence, never content to begin with, will be forever empty until my own death.
    A remarkable occurrence took place then. Fireflies filled the dark bedroom. They seemed to blink, and yet their light was constant, like flaming balls from Roman candles; but Roman candles dwindle in brilliance and flash in a straight-line arc, whereas these lights zigged and darted, zagged and swirled. They spun at the same time they soared. The room was ablaze with them, and David thought of them as fireflies because of their random dashing radiant pattern.
    Fireflies. Splendrous! Of varying colors but all of equal magnificence. Rushing with the energy of joy. Ecstatic. A swirling cluster of what David intuited beyond any question were rapturous souls.
    He made allowance for his grief and stress, his weariness and shock. He wasn’t thinking clearly at the moment, he readily granted. But the brilliant colorful fireflies were spinning and zooming before him, so patently real, so vivid, that he couldn’t dismiss them, couldn’t reject their beauty by denying the exquisite vision allowed to him.
    Whether they were a hallucination or a visitation, he gave in to them and embraced their rapture. Of the thousands, among their myriad flashing colors of joy, he identified one in the cluster who he knew beyond doubt was his son. How he was sure, he couldn’t tell. But that he was sure, he had absolute faith.
    “Matthew, come to me.”
    For no reason he could account for, the spinning specks of flying fire reminded him of children in a playground, of his son as a toddler laughing