A Single Firefly, a Thousand Rats

The cold-blooded killer puts down the book she is reading. A thousand fireflies in Manhattan? It’s all very well to write about home from far away, but she doesn’t share her compatriot’s nostalgic sentiments. After all, she is a cold-blooded killer. So she launches her own plot starring a woman who dies without ever seeing a single firefly.

From her own far-off location in space and time, the killer spies Epon and her strange habits. Yes. At the stroke of midnight, while her husband slumbers, Epon will leave her house and head to the cemetery to see the firefly, for Epon believes this firefly – a shimmering female, who transforms herself to attract the male, only to prey upon him later – appears nowhere else. Of course, Toha, her husband, will grow agitated. In the peaceful, tight-knit village of Cibeurit, women do not roam about in the dark and especially don’t visit the cemetery. His wife could be thought a devotee of black magic.

A few nights before the sad event, Toha will ambush Epon as she is tiptoeing out of the room.

‘Where are you going? Why are you creeping around like a mouse?’

Epon, heavily pregnant, will return to bed without seeing the firefly.

At the end of her life Epon will have never seen a real firefly. But a tiny baby will be born into the arms of Aunt Icih, a healer and midwife. The baby will be a girl, lovely, as if gifted with gleaming wings. A beautiful firefly, Epon will murmur before she dies.

Our killer agrees, although she also has her eye on a firefly in another graveyard.

—

The cold-blooded killer is still skulking around Cibeurit, even though it remains indistinct and fragmented. She knows that Toha named his daughter Maimunah. Although nothing connected Maimunah with fireflies, the villagers agreed that she glowed.

At thirteen, Maimunah attracted the young men of Cibeurit. Yet many were reluctant to approach her because she was too tall, or at least taller than average for girls of the village. Her childhood friends nicknamed her Longlegs. The unmarried youth felt inferior before her, worried about being ridiculed as midgets by jealous rivals. They also worried when picturing Maimunah ten years hence, remembering that the girls of Cibeurit tended to plump up after marriage and their first child. After passing her prime, Maimunah would be a large, tall woman, a giantess. Even now she was quite imposing.