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Glass Flies

by Gwen C. Katz

At dawn they poured from the ground, from crevices in the rock, from underneath tree bark. Glass flies. June 25. You could set your clock by it.

Newly hatched, they were clumsy. They collided with windows, smeared themselves across car grates, got entangled in hair. Jonas found one trembling on his porch, one transparent green and yellow wing shattered. He scooped it up. Its thread-thin legs clung to his finger.

“A glass fly is not a pet,” said his mother. Jonas didn’t listen. He placed the glass fly in a shoebox and offered it some Oreo crumbs.

“Jonas,” he said, pointing to himself.

“Jonas,” repeated the glass fly.

Outside, the world was carpeted with crystalline wings, blue and pink and violet. Some people trod on them without a second thought. Some did an elaborate hopscotch to avoid them. The glass flies investigated everything. They crept across bookshelves and into pantries; became trapped in bottles or; were taken home by children for bug collections. Already they were beginning to speak in their high, reedy, strangely human voices.

Jonas’s glass fly was a she, and he named her Sunshine. By breakfast she could fetch and do tricks. By noon she could speak in phrases. Her first sentence was “Time is short and I want to know everything.”

He taught her to read from his picture books. Her favorite was his children’s encyclopedia. She would crawl onto an entry—”bus” maybe—and he would read it, and she would say “bus,” and then, “Is it real?” It delighted her when things were real.

The glass flies were inventing languages of their own, a thousand dialects sprung from nothing. They sewed themselves clothes out of leaves and wrappers, fashioned tools and weapons. There were fights, songs, elaborate pageants with hundreds of roles. Outside Jonas’s window, a spurned lover flew into a spiderweb. Sunshine was reading chapter books now.

Sunshine grew restless in Jonas’s bedroom. She perched on his shoulder and he rode his bike around the playground, down to the quarry, up to the Wal-Mart parking lot where the teenagers hung out smoking cigarettes.

“I’m sorry I don’t have more to show you,” said Jonas as they sat on the roof watching the sun set behind the water tower. The dancing glass flies made the air shimmer.

Sunshine said, “There’s so much.”

She was failing. Her legs couldn’t support her weight. Jonas nestled her back in the shoebox and fed her drops of sugar water from the tines of a fork. She drank listlessly, then lost interest. At bedtime, he read her the first chapter of Percy Jackson. She raised her head so she could see the page.

Morning, June 26. The glass flies’ tiny bodies were dry husks, piled in heaps like snowdrifts. The street sweepers cleared them away, demolishing their half-built miniature cities, wiping away the snippets of strange writing scrawled on the sidewalks and parking lots.

Jonas wrapped Sunshine in a paper towel and buried her by the steps. She looked like any other dead bug. As he smoothed the dirt over her, he thought about how she’d never finished Percy Jackson. He looked out across the cornfields and wished that he, too, could see everything.

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Midsummer Refrain

by Wendy Nikel

Beware the fae, for when it comes to these woods, they are not only vengeful, but petty.

Beware the fae who tinker with the cables that wind through their tree-root burrows. With electricity in their digits, they meddle with human technology, manipulating impulses to set their trap. An invitation arrives on electric waves— no origin, no number or host to trace it back to. Party tonight. You know the place. You wouldn’t want to miss out. Come.

Beware the fae who hide in plain sight, blending in with hot pink hair and high-top shoes and sweaters stitched with maudlin lyrics. They know your friends, or your friend’s friend’s friends, or maybe their older siblings. Their laughter makes you want to be here—to come closer, to listen, to lean in. In the darkness, they look like an ally, like someone you’d like to know. In the darkness, they’re someone you’d like to be.

Beware the fae who offer food and drink and promise otherworldly experiences. Their voices are kind and clever and bright, and their gifts are unexpectedly generous. They’re right that no one will ever know; that you’re young; that you’ll only live once.

Beware the fae whose music fills the night without the aid of sound system or speakers. Their songs are hypnotic, and make time pass strangely—too slow and too quickly all at once—creating a fever-dream of twinkling lights and flashing smiles and shadows that dart through the trees. You’ve been here forever. You’ve only just arrived. Your battery is dead. Your watch has stopped ticking. Is it curfew yet, or have you missed it?

Beware the fae who whisper confidence, telling your mind what you itch to hear. They place your keys in your hand, then the ignition, though you can’t remember getting into your car. You can’t focus. You can’t think. You certainly shouldn’t drive. But surely you can make it home.

Beware the fae whose will-o’-the-wisps dance across the gravel, mimicking reflectors and distant tail lights. They guide your way. They mark a clear path. And you’re too ensnared to realize you’ve made a wrong turn until the tires leave the road, and you’re no longer driving, nor flying, but floating—sinking—in murky, pitch-black water.

Beware the fae who lurk in these currents, who will cheerfully drown those who displease them. Those like you, who dare to imagine that the world—and the forest—is your own, who dare to think, in your youthful arrogance, that nothing here can harm you. They will churn the waters like a cooking pot. They will season you in brine, and silt. They will gather around you, singing their wicked songs, smiling their bright, wicked smiles, and baring their razor-sharp teeth.

They will welcome you into their domain. They will make you disappear.

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Host Commentary

This is such a beautiful, melancholy piece. The accelerated lives of the glass flies are rich in wonder, and it perhaps makes sense that Jonas is warned by his mother that a Glass Fly is not a pet. Their lives are too brief to be loved as one might love a gerbil or a dog. They’re also unique, sentient and vulnerable, and better protected from humanity by being left alone. And yet: the hunger for experience is compelling. What Sunshine offers Jonas is a window into his own need to live, grow and experience…and the opportunity to see how little of that his home town offers. Is it yearning, we hear, in that final sentence? He looked out across the cornfields and wished that he, too, could see everything. Or, more darkly, is it the realisation or the fear that the desire to see everything is futile, that Jonas too will die before he achieves anything of meaning in his life?

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This story was submitted to our Flash Fiction Contest, and I absolutely loved it. It’s chilling and powerful, and it offers a slightly different window on experience and mortality. Here, the Fae hunger for the youthful ebullience of their teen victims. They are ancient, bored, stifled, and envious of the freedom to be young and carefree. They take advantage of the sense of immortality that so many of us have as teens – that tragedy and mistakes are things that happen to others, not to us. Beware the Fae, indeed.