Authors: Paul Pen

1503933547 (37 page)

A second flash flies in front of us.

Followed by two more.

Joy springs up in my son’s throat.

“See them?” I ask.

A cloud of fireflies hovers over the blades of grass swaying in the sea breeze. They’re real fireflies, not like the ones in the basement. The moon has answered the call of the crickets and is beginning to tinge the sea’s surface with silver. The garland of green flashes captures all of the boy’s attention. He’s absorbed in the magical, intermittent lights that float in the darkness enveloping us.

Then my son stands up.

And his hand releases my pants.

Maybe the day has come when his desire to know is stronger than his fear of the unknown. I hold out a hand over the metal surface of the trapdoor when I see myself reflected in my son’s silhouette. I imagine Mom’s hand coming up from underground. I stroke the wrinkly fold between two of her knuckles. The circle of burned skin at the base of the thumb. The wide, smooth scar near the wrist.

Behind me I hear some accelerated footsteps. My nephew appears beside me, panting from the effort of his running. I let him sit next to me, over the entrance to the basement that he doesn’t remember. My mother’s imagined hand becomes the real hand of my nephew, who squeezes mine with a smile. They’re the same fingers that grabbed at the darkness on the other side of the bars the night I imagined that we’d gone out, looking at our reflection in the window.

“We’re outside now,” I tell him, repeating the phrase I’d said to him back then.

He gives me a mocking look because he thinks I’ve said something obvious. I catch him by the neck with my arm and kiss his temple before turning my attention to my son.

Emotion blurs my vision when I see him advancing with his arms outstretched to touch the fireflies, a miracle happening for the first time in front of him. Although a tear slides down the side of my nose, I smile when he waves his arms among dozens of dots of light.

Because I know the light will always belong to people like him.

And those unwilling to look beyond their own little world will be left in the dark.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Photo © Eduardo P. V. Rubaudonadeu

Paul Pen is an author, journalist, and scriptwriter. In 2014, he won the Gonzoo Prize for author of the year from Spanish newspaper
20 minutos
, awarded by popular vote. His first novel,
The Warning
, also earned him the title of Fnac New Talent in 2011 and has been translated into German and Italian. Pen’s short stories include a digital-format collection of suspenseful tales titled
Thirteen Stories
.
The Light of the Fireflies
is his second novel and is available in English for the first time.

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

Simon Bruni is a literary, academic, and general translator of Spanish texts. He has translated everything from video games to sixteenth-century Spanish Inquisition manuscripts to literary novels. Bruni is a two-time winner of the John Dryden Translation Prize, first in 2011 for Francisco Pérez Gandul’s cult prison thriller
Cell 211
and again in 2015 for Paul Pen’s harrowing short story “The Porcelain Boy.”

For more information, please visit
www.simonbruni.com
.

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