The moral of the story is...

I used to think of fireflies as "God's Sparkles."

This was because I only saw them at dusk, when the day had simply faded away without a sunset so that all that was left was a dull grayish landscape waiting for the horizon to die. Dusk is soft and pretty in its own right, but it's magical and perfect when sprinkled with little flickers of floating light. Sparkles.

It is very different when you are running down the road in the middle of a June night, with no cars or houses or even a moon to ruin your night vision. There is nothing but the sticky air, and a jagged black horizon and the charcoal shade of the road. You could be running in a vacuum, except for the feel of asphalt under the pale smears of your sneakers, and the air moving past the inside of your knees.

The fields to the left and the right of your pumping fists are blanketed with flashing lights.

The lights are brighter and quicker and denser than any tacky Christmas strings, stretching in packed thousands and millions along the road and back into the fields, climbing the trees like hoards of silent paparazzi, frantic and dancing and brilliant and bright. Your legs are burning and your lungs are heavy, but you are running through fields of white fire.

There is no sound but the crickets and the frogs, your mouth and your shoes, and the strange lonely call of a peacock chasing you down the electric hill.

~Maria