March
By Fewthistle

She remembered summer. She remembered the feel of hot asphalt under the bare skin of her feet and the sticky sound of the road as they sailed down the hill on their bicycles, the motion of the tires and the heat of the pavement setting a rhythm that seemed in time with her heart.

She could still smell the grass, freshly mowed, the moisture of sprinklers making the lawns gleam in the late afternoon sun. She remembered the metallic taste of tepid water spurting out through a faded green plastic hose, the texture of the metal rim against her lips and tongue, the rasp of her teeth along the worn steel sending an involuntary shiver down her spine.

She could still feel the weight of the mayonnaise jar that held tadpoles. The liquid was murky from the muddy bed where she had dipped the wide-mouthed jar under the greenish water, scooping up hundreds of frogs yet to be. The layer of silt along the bottom of the jar rose to swirl like a miniature tornado as she trudged up the hill, carrying it clutched to her chest, huge water stains creating a haphazard pattern on her shirt.

She remembered the coolness of the summer evenings, the grass moist and fragrant under her body, the sunburned skin on her arms and legs welcoming the dampness like a salve to a wound. All around her, as she lay on the slope of the hill behind her aunt's house, the fractured bursts of light from a thousand fireflies spelled out the mysteries of the universe in a code she couldn't quite decipher.

She had captured the lights in a mason jar, to study more closely the intermittent Morse code, but to little avail. It was only in her dreams, as the jar sat solidly on her nightstand, its inhabitants still sending out their strange messages, that the signals made sense and all the answers were revealed to her. Yet every morning, they faded slowly from her mind as the bright morning sun slipped through the broken slats of the blinds.

She tried to hold on, to drag the answers with her into the sunlight, but like the fireflies themselves, it seemed that the answers too, were only creatures of the night, their brilliant flashes scattered across the dark sky of her dreams.