Where Did the Fireflies Go

A father sits in a dentist’s waiting room holding his ten-year-old daughter’s phone, and the afternoon takes him back to 1985 — his grandmother’s house, fourteen cousins, a mile-and-a-quarter walk to Pruitt’s for Dr Pepper, and a creek hole nobody ever measured.

That was the last summer. His cousin Red drowned in the third week of June. He was ten. Red was twelve. He has been calling it the last summer for forty years, and it is not true, and he says it anyway.

Now he is taking his daughter to the creek. The question is what a man keeps, and what he is allowed to share with a generation never out of reach of a phone.