Fireflies

A terrible wind blew out of the East, solid strips that pushed on her, jostling her, holding her back her progress, like a crowded street in the old days.  Inside her hood, she reminisced about the time before when life had been different, when there had been crowds, and crowded streets, and segeas of faces that bobbed on the surface of the planet, variations on a common theme, a nose, a pair of eyes, a mouth, set geometrically on a round face, supported by a skull, a pair of ears on either side of the visage.  Some were rounder, fuller than others.  Some had sad eyes whereas some had glimmering joy in their pupils.

Some had creases, at the corner of the eyes, at the corner of the mouth.  Some were blotched with brown age spots.  Some had long hair, some short. 

But they all carried the same theme, a sort of persistence, expressed in their motion, moving forward, so that walking against them was impossible.  Those faces, a horde, a procreating invasion, unstoppable, inescapable, a mass.

The howl of the wind roared in her ears, snapping her back to the emptiness of the present.  The multi-storied buildings she walked among cast long shadows upon the narrow roads and hid a bright morning sun which had not yet climbed to their roofs.  She could feel the impending glow of the burning star behind the thick structures, could see the golden light radiate around their sides, and she smiled underneath the scarf wrapped tightly around her face.

She imagined the ghost of the city merged itself with the morning wind and flew through the streets like its citizens used to.  The wind tried to imitate the best it could the speed of taxis, the hush of buses stopping and starting, the multidirectional travel of so many vehicles turning about its mazes, going everywhere and nowhere at the same time.  She liked being caught in the wind, even though it pushed so hard on her, just like she liked being in the middle of crowded streets where people pushed you in one direction or another. 

She liked standing still trying to stop time, to stop the motion, the jostling, the rush.  She liked being the rock, the structure around which people and wind had to move around.  She imagined back to that time when the people filled the street, and how irritated they were at her for being an obstructionist, for being a boulder in a stream, an agitator.  Never did they say anything, only huffed at being inconvenienced at having to alter their own direction. 

Did people think that way?  Mathematically?  As her middle school math teacher use to drill into her, the shortest distance between two points is a line.  Or was it her science teacher?  And she would be the intersection between two parts of the line, the little dot placed in between on that line so that the line would have to curve around her. 

It was her habit to stop suddenly, a quirk she had developed as child, something she had learned also, from her father, in the nights in the suburbs, at one or two in the morning, when he would sneak into her room and wake her gently without her mother knowing anything, and get her to put on her robe and accompany him in the backyard.  Everytime he would put his finger to his mouth to beckon her to remain quiet, as if she did not know already, that sound would destroy the moment. 

On kitten feet, they would slip unnoticed through the house to the back porch, carefully opening the sliding glass door and out onto the wooden deck to view the night.  Above them, the stars tried to penetrate the light pollution of the suburban night.  Down below the deck in a field that border a creek, an ocean of yellow and green lights floated around popping lit and meandering through the thickness of the night until sputtering out and then disappearing altogether.

And her father put his hand in hers, and communicated soundlessly that he had stopped the world for her, and had created the inky blue sky with its pinprick stars and the floating fairy lights moving in swirling magic.  He communicated her without a word or sound that all of this world was hers if she just stopped moving.

And so when she was on the street with a flow of feet pushing one way or another and a wave of happiness would flow over her, she would stop moving her feet suddenly, letting whoever who was walking behind her nearly bump her.  And although they would complain and grumble, she would put her finger to her mouth but making no sound.  She would reach out stopping the world to watch and wait for the pinprick of the sky to appear and the fireflies to glimmer, even if it was daylight out and the noise was too loud, too much.