My 4-H creative writing project this year!

The small girl laughed as she chased the flashing pinprick of light through the grass, stumbling on stubby legs as she reached toward it.

    The light vanished before reappearing a few feet away. The girl giggled and ran to it, blinking back in surprise when it disappeared again, only to glow once more several feet away. This continued for a few moments, until the girl found herself standing at the edge of the woods. Dark trees loomed up overhead, but a short ways in, her firefly winked at her merrily. 

    The girl cocked her head and hesitated, contemplating the firefly’s light for a long moment. For an instant it looked like she might turn back, towards the safety of her yard and house —

    And then she plunged into the trees.

***

    I creep slowly forward, hands cupped and arms outstretched towards the tiny yellow light. Just as I’m about to reach it —

    The light vanishes. Frowning, I turn in a slow circle and scan our backyard for where the firefly will reappear. Many more blink in my peripheral vision; the tiny glowing bugs are everywhere tonight, lighting up both the yard and  the trees beyond. I pause to watch them spiraling through the air — their lights remind me of the stars dotting the clear sky above, and as I watch one firefly trail from its spot up above down to the ground I think of a falling star.

And yet even with their numbers, I can’t seem to catch a single one.

I sigh. When I was a kid, I was great at catching fireflies — they’d all but swarm to me, and I’d cup them in my hands and let them crawl around for a moment before letting them fly away. Now, though — well, the ability to catch fireflies just seems like one of many things I’ve lost as I’ve gotten older.

I know that as I’ve gained things too as I’ve grown: being able to drive, having more freedom — all the things that go along with growing up, things that my friends and classmates are all so excited about. But I still can’t help but miss the days when everything was simpler, before everything and everyone seemed to be changing faster than I could keep up. 

I give up on finding the firefly,  but by my feet, a small collection of the bugs twinkle from their place inside a glass jar — my little sister Maisie has had much better luck than me at catching them.

But I’ve not seen Maisie in a while, I realize suddenly. Every few minutes or so, she’s run up to me with yet another firefly for me to carefully slip into the jar, but she hasn’t done so for a while. The backyard is quiet, far quieter than it should be with an energetic six-year-old running around. 

“Maisie?” I call. She’s probably just wandered around to the front of the house, or gone inside and forgotten to tell me. Our parents are away for the weekend, and I’ve been left home in charge of Maisie; we’ve done this before, and nothing bad has ever happened. Maisie is fine, I tell myself.

But a quick check reveals that the house is empty, as is the front yard. “Maisie!” I yell again, this time a note of panic inflicting my voice. No answer. 

A particularly bright firefly blinks in the edges of my peripheral vision, drawing my eyes. It hovers just inside the tree line of the woods behind our backyard, and I can see more fireflies beyond it — the only lights in an otherwise gloomy forest. I barely suppress a shiver, even though the summer night air is warm and still. Although I’ve been in the woods countless times in daylight, the darkness of night makes even the familiar woods give me the creeps. But — if I were a six-year-old catching lightning bugs, and I’d seen more twinkling inside the woods . . . Maisie loves the forest, I know, and doesn’t seem to fear the darkness like I did at her age. She has to be in there.

I grab the firefly jar and turn on my phone’s flashlight, finding the narrow path between trees before I plunge into the woods. The trail is overgrown, and plants scrape against my legs, arms, and occasionally my face — I can only imagine how much poison ivy I’ll have in the morning — as I yell Maisie’s name. How far in could she have gone? My phone’s light turns the trees into creepy, angular shadows, and glancing behind me, I can’t even see the house — it’s like the trees have swallowed up the path.

Or maybe they’ve swallowed me.

I’ve only been walking for a few minutes, calling Maisie’s name all the while, when I realize that I don’t know where I am. The trees around me are unfamiliar, and looking down reveals that I’m no longer on the trail. My first instinct is to blame the dark, but when I think about it — I haven’t been beyond the very edge of the woods in years. Trees have fallen and new ones have grown, and the forest I knew like the back of my hand when I was a kid now feels like a stranger. 

When did I stop going into the woods? The same time I stopped being able to catch fireflies? A wave of nostalgia threatens to drown me,  a familiar feeling these days. The people around me haven’t just been changing, so have I — and the forest has too. A sensation of loss hits me, and I rub my eyes. If only things could just go back to the way they were.

A rustling in the bushes a few feet away jolts me out of my thoughts and straight into a state of panic. Is it a coyote? A raccoon? I’m seriously considering sprinting away when a small rabbit hops out of the bush.

I stare at it, taking deep breaths as my heart rate slowly returns to normal. “Shouldn’t you be asleep right now?” I say, shaking my head. The rabbit merely cocks its head at me, and something about the tilt of its ears randomly reminds me of my old stuffed bunny Carrots. I lost him when I was nine or ten, and it’s been years since I’ve thought of him.

Another burst of nostalgia rushes over me, but I shove it down. I can’t worry about this right now; I need to find Maisie. I call for her, but yet again receive no reply. 

I take a shaky breath as, for the first time, a worm of real fear for Maisie begins to creep through me. She’s not responding, and I as far as I know she didn’t have a flashlight when she went into the woods. Has she tripped and fallen? What if she’s hit her head? 

I need to get help. I fumble to turn my phone on with fingers suddenly stiff with worry, my mind racing as I try to figure out who to call first. Our parents? Our closest neighbors, who live about half a mile away? Or maybe —

Everything goes dark. With my eyes adjusting, it takes me a minute to realize why — both my phone screen and flashlight have shut off. The hairs on the back of my neck rise as I try to turn my phone back on. It doesn’t respond to anything I do, but I’d have sworn that it was at least halfway charged when I left the house. 

The flashlight must have drained the battery. Anger at myself for not charging it more mixes with my fear for Maisie and of the darkness, and as I turn in a circle I realize that I don’t even know which direction the house is in. I suddenly feel very grateful for my small jar of fireflies, now my only source of light. In fact, looking around, it seems like all of the free fireflies in the woods have gone dark.

All but one, at least, its pulsing light hovering brightly a couple feet ahead of me. I instinctively take a step towards it, but it goes out before reappearing a few more feet away. 

I’m supposed to follow it. The thought pops into my mind unbidden, and almost immediately I dismiss it. I need to find Maisie and get out of the woods, not waste my time following a glowing bug. The idea is ridiculous. 

To an adult, anyways. But to a little kid like Maisie . . . following a firefly through the woods sounds exactly like something I’d have done at her age. 

I hesitate, wondering if I’m making a mistake, if this is just a misguided attempt to prove that I can still be a kid — then follow the small bug as it blinks out and reappears further away. I’m not sure how far I’ve walked before I can make out dim light up ahead, glowing from behind some trees. Did it actually work? Has the firefly really led me back to the house? I break into a run, and a moment later —

I burst into a small clearing ringed with trees, the house now here in sight. Disappointment flares inside of me, but it fades just as quickly as I register my surroundings.

The light I’d seen is coming from thousands of glowing fireflies. They perch in the trees ringing the clearing, fly through the air around me, and crawl on the piles of junk that seem to be everywhere; everything from clothing to silverware to old toys is scattered across the ground, lit by the dim, pulsating green-yellow light from the fireflies.

There’s no way that I’m still in our woods. There’s an . . . atmosphere to this place, a strange feeling that I can’t place and yet is achingly familiar. It feels like long summer days and staying up past bedtime to look at the stars, like popsicles and scraped knees and the wonderful simplicity of knowing who you are. It feels like being a kid, and it’s a feeling I’ve missed — but that’s not exactly what it is. And suddenly it hits me, a word for this strange feeling.

It feels like magic.

A firefly floats past me and joins the rest, and as I turn my head to follow it — is it the one that led me here? — my eyes land on something entirely different.

“Maisie!” I yell my sister’s name and run across the clearing, stumbling over a large pile of mismatched socks. “What were you doing? You were supposed to stay where I can see you, not go into the woods!”

She turns, her face lighting up as she sees me. “Anna, Anna, isn’t this place so cool? Look what I found!” Maisie holds something small and raggedy up, and it takes me a minute to place —

“Carrots?” I ask. Sure enough, it’s my old stuffed rabbit, right down to the bent ear and patched side. I set down the firefly jar and reach for it; it’s as soft as ever, and feels familiar in my hands. “How did —”

“The fireflies showed me where he was!” Maisie gives me a gap-toothed grin. “They told me you were coming, so I wasn’t scared or anything.”

As much as I want to scold her for running off, I’m distracted by both our surroundings and by what Maisie’s saying. “Maisie, did you — the fireflies told you I was coming?”

“Yep! They said that you were already feeling lost, so it’d be easier for you to get here. And you did!”

Already feeling lost . . . On any other day, I would’ve dismissed her words as an overactive imagination, but I’d just followed a firefly to an unknown clearing in the woods where I’d found both my sister and a stuffed animal I’ve thought gone for years. “Maisie, can the fireflies tell you — where we are?”

She nods cheerfully. “It’s a place of lost things! Whenever something gets lost, it ends up here.” Maisie pauses. “You probably coulda figured that out from the name, though.”

My brain whirs, and I look around the clearing as if with new eyes. A place of lost things . . . what secrets are hidden here, buried in piles of what I’d previously taken for junk? Part of me wants to get down on my hands and knees and sift through it, discover all of this clearing’s treasures. I glance at Maisie. “Why can you talk to the fireflies, but I can’t?”

She tilts her head, considering. “They say that they only talk to little kids like me, ‘cause grown-ups and big kids like you don’t listen good enough.”

My heart, an instant before feeling as light and bright as one of the fireflies, sinks down to my feet. There it is, the clarification that I’d been dreading: that I’ve finally fallen over the cusp between childhood and adulthood. Maybe it’s my imagination, but the clearing seems slightly darker than before, as if the fireflies’ lights have dimmed.

I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to hold back the tears pressing against them. Why can’t I go back, back to being a kid? Everything was simple and easy, and there wasn’t this — this change around every corner. My brain flashes to what Maisie said earlier, that it was easier for me to get here because I was already feeling lost. I thought that she’d meant because I was literally lost in the woods, but — I let out a small, bitter laugh. I feel just as lost internally as I was physically.

Lost. My eyes widen. I’m literally in a place full of lost things; where better to find — I don’t know exactly what I’m looking for. My childhood? Some sense of self? I drop to my hands and knees and start sifting through a pile, ignoring how stupid I feel. I need to find — something, anything.

What you’re looking for — it’s not here. The words seem to sprout in my mind, and I look around in surprise. Maisie grins at me. “You can hear them, can’t you!”

“The — the fireflies?” I’m frozen, my eyes darting around the clearing as the fireflies blink on and off all around.  “They’re talking to — me?”

Change doesn’t have to equate loss. The words have a strange harmony to them, light and lilting. This is the same forest as when you were a child. But it’s grown and changed — just as you have.

I swallow hard. “But —"

You don’t have to fear  change. You don’t have to fear growing up — what you’re looking for isn’t here, because it’s still inside of you. 

I hesitate, brain spinning, but somehow I find myself nodding. “Th—thank you.”

The voice — the fireflies — is silent. I stand still, staring at the firefly jar by my feet for a long moment, trying to comprehend what just happened.  The fireflies spoke to me. The fireflies spoke to me. 

Maisie tugs on my arm. “Anna, look!” 

I glance up and see — nothing. The clearing is gone, as are the lost items, and the only fireflies are the ones in our jar plus a few floating around the woods. I glance at Maisie, then at my hand — still clutching Carrots. My eyes widen. “It was —”

“Awesome!” she says, grinning.  had been about to say ‘real,’ but —

I smile back at her. “Awesome,” I agree. I don’t feel as sad about the clearing’s disappearance as I thought I might; it may not be right here anymore, but somehow I feel that it’s still out there. Changed, but — not lost. 

 Not lost.

***

We’re able to make it back to the yard relatively quickly; my phone starts working again shortly after the clearing disappears, and with its light and Maisie’s help I realize that I recognize more of the forest than I thought. Maisie begs me to let her stay up just a little longer, and even though I know she’ll be horribly tired in the morning I agree to five more minutes — there’s something I want to do.

I creep slowly forward, my hands cupped and arms outstretched towards a small yellow light floating just a few feet in front of me. It blinks out, but I can just barely see its outline —

I gently close my hands around it and pull the firefly close to my chest. It crawls around in my hands, and I’m smiling down at it when a question hits me suddenly. “Why are fireflies in the place of lost things?” I whisper to the tiny creature in my hands. “Are — are you lost, too?”

Of course, it doesn’t answer this time, but I don’t mind. I open my hand and let the firefly crawl out; it looks around, light flickering on and off, before spreading its wings and taking off. I watch as it spirals higher and higher into the night sky —

 Looking for all the world like a star going home.

As I mentioned above, this was my 4-H creative writing project this year!

Growing up, change, and the feeling that my childhood is slipping away or maybe even already gone is something I've been thinking about a lot lately, so this story was sorta my way to try to process all those things.

I'm quite proud of how it turned out, and I actually got grand champion at our county fair! (To be fair, there were only four people who did it, but I'm still proud XD). However, by far highest compliment for this came from my dad, who said that when reading it he "got a little misty-eyed," an emotional state he usually only reaches when we watch Cars.

(He also said that I should try to publish it, so I'm kinda considering entering it in some kind of young writers' contest? Do you guys think I should/do you know of any good contests for this kind of thing?)