The Firefly
Old Zhou watches a riverside melon patch alone. Each summer a bright firefly he names Little Green settles on his shed pole and he leaves it syrup. One stormy night the firefly wheels in frantic circles and leads him to a boy drowning in the backwater. The firefly never returns to the pole, yet every summer the field glows denser, and Zhou still sets out the syrup for a light that no longer comes.
Old Zhou tends a small plot of muskmelons on a sandbar by the river and sleeps in the watchman's shed through the nights. His wife died three years back; his son runs deliveries in the provincial city, his daughter married into a neighboring county. In the shed he is alone, with no one to talk to at all.
When summer comes, the fireflies rise thick from the reed beds beside the field. Every night he squats at the shed's mouth with his dry tobacco and watches the green glimmers drift among the weeds. One of them burns brighter than the rest and runs larger; it always lights on the crooked bamboo pole by the shed, winking as if it listened to his rambling. He calls it Little Green.
He has nothing else to do, and the days turn it into a habit: each evening, after he gathers the melons, he leaves half a bowl of cooled sugar water in the stone mortar at the shed's mouth. Fireflies do not drink, of course—it is only what he has left over from his own thirst—but he likes to think he sets it out for Little Green. Little Green does not stand on ceremony; it comes night after night, crouches on the pole, its light breathing in and out as if nodding.
Mid-July brings days of hard rain, and the river gnaws at the dike and swells. On the night the rain stops, Little Green is not on the pole. Instead it wheels in tight, frantic circles out among the reeds, its light flickering wild and urgent. Old Zhou's skin prickles; he lifts the storm lantern and wades over to look.
In the backwater a length of driftwood rides the current, and on it clings a child—Little Fish, the Li family's grandson from upstream, who slipped in while sneaking out to catch snails. He hangs to the wood and cannot cry out; the water has risen to his chin. Little Green has gathered a clutch of fireflies above the boy's head, bright as a lamp. Zhou kicks off his shoes, wades in to his waist, and hauls the child up.
He carries the boy back to the shed, builds a fire to dry his clothes, and feeds him a bowl of hot congee. At dawn the Lis have searched themselves frantic; seeing the boy alive and kicking, they thank Zhou with tears. He waves it off and says it was not him—it was the green light beyond the shed that led him there.
After that, Little Green never returns to the pole.
Yet every summer the fireflies around the shed glow denser than any year before, a green carpet thrown across the ground like someone scattered a handful of broken stars. Old Zhou still leaves half a bowl of cooled sugar water in the mortar each evening; he will not drink it himself, saving it for a light that long ago stopped coming.
His son comes home once and hears him muttering in the shed; he laughs that the old man has gone soft, talking to a bug. But the son gets up in the night and sees, at the mortar's edge by the shed, a single point of green—it flashes once, and is gone. He does not say a word, only turns the lantern lower.