When he got hold of it, quickly without pause, he ripped the pulsing green bulb from the insect’s body.

Once, a boy down the street, David, * who was my first crush, clasped my shut palms with his and asked me to pass him the glowing bug.

They were sacrificed in rituals some nights, too. The lightning bugs on Tinkers Creek were actually magic, I think, and maybe it was my first foray into witchcraft when at five years old, I held up my tiny hands and let their iridescent wings flutter against the lines of my palms. It felt immense though, in its expansiveness, in its ability to act as a landscape for so much joy and so much agony-the place where I caught lightning bugs on summer nights, attempted somersaults next to broken-down cars, chased playfully after our Newfoundland mutt the place that absorbed the gasoline mixed with blood from my father’s skull, that acted as a landing strip for the emergency helicopter, that muffled my mother’s screams as she collapsed against the soil upon discovering his mangled body.īut the lightning bugs are what I remember most vividly, which is a gift, given the circumstances. As a young girl, I thought the front yard went on for miles, but when I go back to Ohio as an adult, I see it’s just about twenty-five feet of grass. Our first home was a modest ranch house on Tinkers Creek Road, tucked in between the quiet, rural street and the crick, where we’d go to skip rocks and hunt for treasures.

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