Underneath Central's Frequency

By midsummer the antenna was broadcasting every evening in the grackles' eleven minutes, and Diego had a desk on the third floor of Central with a radio receiver, a kettle, and a window onto the creek.

That was the summer the lightning bugs came back.

Nobody had seen many in years. Then the creek banks were rewilded, the lake was cleaner, the city turned off half its streetlights to save power, and in June they rose out of the grass along Shoal Creek in numbers people's grandparents had described and nobody had believed. They drifted up to Central's rooftop garden and blinked among the squash vines. Children came at dusk to sit on the stairs and watch them. It felt, people said, like being forgiven for something.

Then someone at a canteen meeting pointed out that they were edible.

The question went around the building the way questions did. Food was tight that year; the second planting had failed in the heat. Lightning bugs were protein, and there were millions of them. Wasn't it wasteful, a man asked, to sit and admire food? A woman from the kitchen garden said that some things were not food, even when you could eat them, and the meeting ran an hour over.

Diego listened to it continue on the radio for a week. People called in to the evening broadcast. They pinned notes to the bulletin board by the stairs, the one everyone called by its address, ///enabling.present.clocks, until the cork was layered three deep. My abuela ate chapulines and she lived to ninety-four. They came back because we stopped taking. Don't start again. Has anyone asked the kids?

He didn't have an answer. He had a list of the people who had written, and he noticed that nobody who had actually sat on the stairs at dusk had argued for the eating.

One night, near the end of the broadcast, he turned the receiver down and listened to the room instead. Someone in the canteen below was playing nikodimov's "weeds," the low synth line looping under the noise of dishes. On the roof the grackles were settling. Out past the glass, over the dark creek, the lightning bugs rose and fell like breath.

The grackles had opinions about the antenna, and the antenna had begun to listen.

He wrote that sentence down without knowing why. Later he would think it was the first true thing he understood about the building: that it was not only sending. It was taking something in.