None Together

The broadcast ran its eleven minutes an hour ago. The light goes out of Shoal Creek. Then the lightning bugs begin at the water, a few and then a great many, and they come up past the glass of the library and in among the squash vines on the roof.

Children sit along the roof garden's low wall with their knees up, and you find a place among them. One has a phone propped sideways against her shin. On it a book lies open at a dim page, a paper firefly standing up out of the gutter. She touches its abdomen. The wing cases swing open on their hinges and the firefly's lantern lights up, and nine small lights appear over the page and flash, none together.

At the end of the wall Darius has a pad on his knee, ruled in columns, one for every light he tried to follow. The columns are all different lengths. He turns the pad face down and watches.

You stay until the last of the lightning bugs has gone down into the grass.