Fireflies
by Kevin Prufer
He was fifteen
and feeling hassled
and he asked his mother to
please fuck off,
so she slapped him
hard
and told him to get out of the car
because he could
walk home.
+
As he walked,
his anger smoldered.
He imagined her car
crushed against a tree,
he imagined her pleading
for help
as he strode right past
toward home
exactly as she’d commanded—
+
​
and half an hour later,
as he rounded the corner
to their yellow house,
he saw her blue Honda
in the driveway,
and knew
she was already at her desk
because
+
it was evening,
because she had homework,
because
she had her accounting class
early in the morning
at the college
and still he was angry,
though his anger
had lost its focus—
+
why had he said
what he’d said?
Why had she slapped
her own son?
Anyway,
he wanted to hate her
​
+
but it was a beautiful summer evening,
the chirring of crickets,
the fireflies—
he would remember the fireflies years later
rising and falling
in the gloom,
+
his old gray cat
uncurling on the porch steps,
walking
up to him, purring
and rubbing her cheek
against his leg
there beneath the streetlamp.
+
The cat was long dead,
but his mother was still alive.
Just today
he’d brought her another mystery novel,
then sat with her in her
hot little apartment
while she went on
about what someone or other
said to someone else,
he didn’t try to keep track,
+
but as she spoke,
his mind reached back to that evening
long ago,
how he’d stood in front of their old yellow house
in the hot evening,
his hatred dissipating
among the now-extinct fireflies
that rose and fell
above the rhododendrons.
​​
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I’ve always been interested in the way a poem can move through time, making use of white space and shifts in narration to accomplish that movement. Also, how memory works in a poem—how, in this case, the boy’s conflict with his mother in his memory is every bit as real as the present day, when she has grown old and reads mystery novels in the hot little apartment they never lived in together. It’s this telescoping of time and memory that excited me as I wrote this, and the complex dissipation of childhood anger.
​
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