1503933547 by Paul Pen Read Free Book Online Page B

night?” Grandma said. “How’s your daughter going to sleep? She has to sleep in this room, too.”
    “And anyway, the baby has to get used to the dark,” my mother added. Dad sighed. He flipped the switch again.
    We were left in darkness.
    The baby began to cry again.
    “You, go to bed,” he ordered me. “You know what the Cricket Man does to boys who misbehave.”
    Before letting go of the crib, I whispered to the baby, “Don’t worry, I have an idea.”
    My father waited for me to go out in front of him. Then he went back to the living room. The striped armchair scraped along the floor as he turned up the volume on the television.
    I walked down the hall with my eyes scanning it for the new firefly. I stepped on the screw again. Next to my foot the insect’s greenish light came on. It flew to the jar as if visiting a relative in an entomological jail, the two of them communicating with light signals from each side of the glass. I opened the lid to usher it in there. Both fireflies accompanied the action with flashes of green light.
    I smiled when I thought of my nephew, who I could still hear crying.
    “Hang on,” I whispered. I got back in bed, impatient. I parroted the lines from the movie that my father never tired of watching, my brother never fully understood, and my sister probably hated. Until the same old music had ended. The saddest melody ever sung. That woman’s voice filled the basement with a much deeper darkness than the mere absence of light.
    My brother came into our bedroom and climbed onto his bunk. The springs squeaked under his weight when he lay down. Then they squeaked again, rhythmically, for a few minutes. First slow, then faster. Faster and faster. Until my brother groaned. And the springs stopped squeaking.
    Soon he was snoring.
    I waited a while longer, to make sure everyone was sleeping. When I couldn’t hear anything except the cistern’s dripping and the baby crying, I got out of bed and picked up the firefly jar.
    In my sister’s room I could hear my grandmother’s slow breathing.
    I leaned into the crib.
    “Give him light,” I whispered to the fireflies. “He’s still scared of the dark.”
    I positioned the jar beside him and covered both of them in the sheet. Two green flashes illuminated his face.
    Before I left the room, the baby stopped crying.

8
    The next morning, I sat up with a start in bed as I remembered the jar with the two fireflies. There was already a lot of noise in the house. The toaster went off a few times in the kitchen, the chairs scraped the floor around the dining table, and the cistern filled in the bathroom.
    I arrived in my grandmother’s room dressed in the same underpants as the night before. I bent over the crib, but it was empty. No trace of the baby or my jar. I lifted the sheet I’d covered them with. Nothing.
    Mom called my name from the kitchen, the smell of toast in the air. First I went to the bathroom to wet my face and hair. It was always on end when I woke up.
    “Come on, sit down,” Mom said when she saw me, getting the butter out of the fridge. “We’re having breakfast now. See what happens when you stay up so late? Then you don’t wake up.”
    My brother was waiting with cutlery at the ready for my mother to serve breakfast. He pointed at the chair next to him with his knife, then made a face that lowered his scarred bottom lip to reveal his gums. I sat down. In front of me, Grandma was smiling at nothing. She drank coffee with the tip of her finger in the cup to check the level. To her left, my sister breast-fed the baby. Dad stared at him.
    “He slept in the end,” he said.
    My sister turned her mask toward Dad. When she found him looking at where the baby was suckling, she covered the visible part of her nipple with her hand. Dad frowned.
    “See?” my mother said from the toaster. “He just needs to get used to the dark.”
    My sister looked at me without turning her head.
    “Or not,” she said.
    I thought I