Fireflies Read Online Free PDF Page A

and racing among other children. And just as Matthew when a toddler had been reluctant to leave the exuberance of his friends, so the darting firefly (no different from the swirling others but who the father knew with total certainty was Matthew’s soul) refused to come to his grieving father.
    “Matthew, I’m telling you! Get over here!”
    But still distracted, continuing to revel in incomprehensible gaiety, the soul of the son ignored the father.
    “Matthew, don’t disobey me! I want you back! Get over here!”
    At that, responding to the desperate insistence of the father who loved him beyond measure and mourned to the limits of sanity for his son’s absence, the firefly that was Matthew’s soul soared away from his satisfying companions, sped to within a foot of his father’s weeping eyes, halted abruptly, and hovered for an instant, suspended in time.
    “Dad, I want to play. At last, I’m having fun,” the firefly soundlessly said, the inaudible words echoing within the father’s head. “Don’t you understand? I don’t hurt anymore. I’m at peace. I’m where I belong. I’m okay. You’ve got to understand that. I’m okay. You hurt, and I’m sorry. But there’s nothing I can do. You’ll have to deal with it. I know how much you love me. If you didn’t grieve, that’d mean you didn’t love me. In that sense, grief is good. It hurts, but it’s good. It’s a tribute, and I love you for it. Grieve for yourself, for your emptiness and loss. As long as you understand I’m okay. I love you too, and I miss you. But it’s not your time to be with me. Please, if you truly love me, Dad, let me go back and play.”
    With a sob that wracked David’s soul, he nodded, and the firefly that was Matthew sped back to his swirling lights of friends. And with that, the vision ended.
    The fireflies disappeared. The bedroom returned to darkness.
    Kneeling beside the bed, sobbing with a greater sense of loss and yet a strange kind of joyous understanding, David slumped in exhaustion, then slowly, wearily, stubbornly stood. Because there were footsteps and voices from beyond the bedroom door, friends and neighbors, acquaintances come to offer food, respects, and condolences, and their gestures of compassion couldn’t be demeaned by being ignored.
    That had been the first of the three signals David received, making him suspect there was a mystical property in the universe.

11

    The second experience had occurred one evening later. It hadn’t been as dramatic as the first, but for all that, it had been affecting and in its way profound. This was on Monday. Matthew had died on Saturday; the eulogy had been written and the fireflies had appeared on Sunday. But now it was Monday, the evening of what is politely called the visitation at the funeral home.
    In this case, the visitation had not involved a view of Matthew’s corpse, for David and Donna had agreed that a thorough autopsy had to be performed on the frail, scarred, pain-twisted remains of their wonderful son, who wasn’t Matt anymore anyhow.
    “Examine his body every way you can,” David had said through scalding tears to the physician who signed the death certificate. “Take him apart. Learn everything you can. Perhaps what you discover will save some other poor kid’s life. Do so thorough a job that there can’t possibly be a public viewing. His body’s yours.”
    “Thank you,” the physician had said. “We appreciate your understanding. Sometimes commiseration for the family—and respect for their attitudes toward public viewing—prevents us from doing as complete an examination as possible and learning as much as we can.”
    “Some meaning has to come from this,” David had said, so dizzy he’d feared he’d collapse. “To keep this from happening again, to crush this fucking disease. Ewing’s sarcoma. It isn’t just cancer. It’s evil. It’s the Devil. Sometimes I think we didn’t need physicians. We needed an exorcist.”
    So there