Monday, January 13, 2014

Congratulations on Catching All Those Fireflies!



When you place the last one in the jar and seal it, you'll shake the jar ever so gently.  The bugs inside will flit about suddenly, lighting up their tails, shimmering briefly inside their confines.  You'll smile as you walk from your backyard to your daughter's bedroom and open the jar, permitting the fireflies to float out one by one until they fill the room with furtive spurts of luminescence.  You'll step back to a corner to watch your daughter awake, slowly at first, suddenly sitting up, rapt, upright, potently aware of the world around her.

She'll smell the prey.

Her tongue will roll over her lips, exposing rows of pointed teeth, perfectly formed for cracking the carapaces of various insects.  She'll roll to the balls of her feet with unexpected agility and suddenly leap to the ceiling, where she'll land, hands sticking to the top of the room, firefly clutched between her teeth.  She'll bite down just a little, applying just enough pressure to burst the bug's torso and send a spurt of cascading juice down her jaw.  The juice will not glow, but it will make your daughter look all the more animalistic until her too-long tongue swirls out from her mouth again to clear the giblets of bug off her face.

The ritual of this practice is unpleasant, but it's a lot more pleasant than apologizing to your warlock father in law.  So each day you catch fireflies and each night you release them in her room, not for comfort or succor, but for sustenance, because even if she is a horrible monster from a hell dimension, she's still your little girl.

Congratulations on Catching All Those Fireflies!

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