He was waiting on the platform so she saw him before he saw her. She’d retrieved her rucksack from the overhead rack and sat with it nestled on her lap as the other passengers milled in the central aisle of the bus. Sat wondering how many had also had their name pulled out in the Lottery, and how many had no idea and were living in alternative time streams, visiting ageing parents, here to start a hike into the mountains, simply passing through Knoxville. The teenager who’d sat next to her for  five hours unplugged himself from AirPods and stretched upwards into a beanpole of limbs.

     Tiff turned from the press of bodies standing, waiting, bottoms and crotches at her eye level. She pushed her face against the window and recognised him instantly standing out there on the platform despite the months and months since they’d broken up. Before the glass fogged under her hot breath, she noted a new jacket – a brighter blue than the favourite grey of their seven years together. Same brand. He was marching on the spot like a tantruming two year old. His face was serene. He was keeping himself warm.

     The weather forecast predicated the day would heat up nicely to just the right temperature for the fireflies.

     She was negotiating the angled steps down off the Greyhound when Aaron finally saw her. He saved her from her half fall onto the platform. They were hugging before they could look into each other’s faces and really take stock. And while in an embrace, you cannot look into someone’s eyes.

     ‘This is a good idea,’ he said as she pulled away to let the family behind her alight.

     ‘This is a brilliant idea,’ she said, smiling brilliantly so the wash of emotions had no way to surface.

     ‘I put my name into the Lottery out of habit,’ he explained again, as he had in the unexpected email. ‘It seemed a miracle we could do this sort of thing after the time we’ve had of it…’

     He’d never been one to call a pandemic a pandemic. His grandfather had died, and a second cousin. Yet he could still talk about miracles.

     ‘And it is a miracle your name was pulled out.’ Tiff allowed him that. Out of the thousands and thousands who entered, and after years and years of trying, the probability they’d be on their way to see the fireflies was infinitesimal.

     He nodded. Said, as if she needed reminding, ‘it was your idea in the first place. Your dream.’

     Had either of them allowed themselves to really remember back that far, to the time when they’d have done anything for each other, when a life apart was unimaginable? They must have at least briefly, for him to have contacted her and suggest they use the successful ticket to see the fireflies together, and for her to have sent an instant reply. Now neither could go near such memories as they waited for the luggage to disgorge from the belly of the bus nor as they tramped through the car park, Aaron hugging her case to his chest so it didn’t get wet in the puddles.

     ‘Lucky the rain has cleared. The forecast for tonight couldn’t be better.’

     Tiff watched Aaron carefully nest her case, wheels forward, in the trunk with his tent, a gas stove, buckets, gallon bottles of water, the spare tyre, plus his case, his half of the matching pair, bought for their honeymoon in Japan. How could she have walked out on such kindness and optimism? she asked herself. Knowing full well, that it was precisely because of these qualities she’d had to get away.

     In the car, too much was too familiar. The Bronco’s engine tickered into life after that short catch which always threatened it wouldn’t this time. The purple and yellow Karma sticker on the glove box had faded. Good.

     ‘How was your trip?’ she asked. Keep it neutral, keep it running along fine.

     ‘I took most of the week.’ He looked very much at home in the driver’s seat having crossed five maybe six State lines from Boston. ‘Only 150 miles today. Camped in the Cherokee National Forest last night.’

     ‘We’ll set up the tent before the viewing?’ she interrupted.

     ‘I booked a cabin.’

     ‘A cabin? That was never…’

     ‘I know you like your creature comforts.’

     With his sunglasses on, it was impossible to tell if his smile reached his eyes. She looked away and thought, so that’s what our arguments had boiled down to in his mind: she didn’t want children because she was selfish, spoiled, effete, with delusions of luxury and creature comforts.

     ‘I like your hair by the way,’ he said in the lull. Perhaps scraping the bottom of the conversational barrel.

     Tiff automatically reached up to touch it. Her mother on a Zoom call from Sydney had been less complimentary with her: ‘that’s a bit young for you, is it not?’ And in the first week after the cut, two colleagues had quietly, and separately, asked if she had… pause to indicate infinite compassion… cancer? The buzz cut had since grown out to a boy’s bob and the peroxide was less startling. She ran her fingers through the silkiness, a phrenologist searching for clues to her own character.

     ‘I said I’d do something daring,’ she said. She smiled, mouth and eyes. Forgetting this statement had been made off the back of a fight in which he’d been condemned beyond reach as boring, predictable, an old fart of a fucked goose, and worse.

     She let her hand drop. And in the next lull, reached for the radio. She knew the controls by muscle memory. Old faithful Aaron would be unable to get rid of his first car until it rotted into the road beneath him. A touch on the volume and Johnny Cash flooded the car. Not unexpectedly, this close to Knoxville.

     The Bronco also had its original tape deck. ‘Try a cassette,’ Aaron suggested simultaneous to her thought that this would not do. She touched his arm as she rummaged in the box between the two seats, avoiding the mixed tapes with her handwriting, tiny and careful across the faintly dotted lines of the TDK cover. Settled for Dvorak’s Symphony for the New World. The cassette rattled in its case, a sound from a different era, one you didn’t hear any more. Hard plastic against hard plastic. She gave it a firm shove into the slot. Pressed play. Strings filled the space Johnny Cash had vacated.

     This felt like music written for and about the fireflies of the Great Smoky Mountains who came down to court and mate for only the briefest of time. The Lottery allowed a small, controlled audience for eight days, now, in late May and early June, and within twenty-one days they’d all be dead. Of starvation. The beetles did not eat during this time. Their bioluminescence called out, sending all other desires into the dark. Tiff closed her eyes to let the violins work their magic. The Bronco slowed. She opened them again.

     The highway signs announced Gatlinburg’s imminence.

     Gatlinburg had been part of the original dream, the jokey sidebar, this tacky sideshow to the sublime nature had on offer. They were never going to be the couple who heads to the Sweet Fanny Adams Theatre for a bit of musical comedy, or Ripley’s Mirror Maze, or the Christ in the Smokies dioramas. Or one of the twenty wedding chapels along the street. Their joy, they’d imagined, would be in making fun of the people who did, these crowds they now drove past, each individual with their own puny life, gobbling up the earth’s resources with their tack and crap and mewling brats in tow.

     Tiff ground through her cynicism as Aaron changed down gears and pulled into a park of faux rustic cabins.

     ‘I’ve booked a place for lunch,’ he said. ‘I think we passed it back there. We can freshen up and then head there. Then I thought we’d both want a rest, and I’ve organised a picnic basket for this evening.’

     Everything he said had the undertones of courtship. Given where they were, it wasn’t impressive that she was put in mind of courting fireflies. No, she changed her mind, he was like a bowerbird presenting a display of pretty blue things he’d created to impress her. Showing: see how good I am when I am a-wooing.

     A cabin with a gable roof loomed up. She’d had a toy as a child which built just such a house with just such a green roof, the building blocks – logs – bought in Grafton Street on a trip to the city, chosen because they were too exotic for words. Never imagining she’d travel so far.

     ‘Home sweet home?’ Aaron said. He laughed at the cliché of a log cabin in the woods and she joined in.

     The worst thing a man can do in a relationship is make a woman feel unimportant. And Aaron never had. He’d always listened to her end-of-times rants, understanding the deep, troubled fears beneath her words. She’d tried the dating thing since she’d left him. Sat through candlelit dinners without being listening to. Those empty hours made her remember Aaron’s listening face. The slight tilt of his head, the furrow between his eyes deepening as he followed her words. In their seven years together, the only bad luck they’d seemed to have was with the Firefly Lottery.

     Tiff stretched life back into her limbs. The air smelt of conifers and engine oil frying under the hood.

     ‘Ah, the fresh air,’ sighed Aaron. Even his nose only registered the good things.

 

     Later, fed, rested and freshened, their anticipation rising, they joined a stream of eager people out of the Jakes Creek Trailhead car park, waved onto the path by a ranger in Yogi Bear’s uniform, eyes shaded by the wide brim of his hat. The stream merged with the foot traffic from the Elkmont campground. The national park capped the numbers each night to a hundred, to arrive between 6 and 8 pm. It looked like most had aimed for the earlier time, making an evening of it with food; no alcohol.

     The woman in front of Tiff and Aaron called her teenagers back from striding ahead, pointing out the portable restrooms. ‘Well you were desperate half an hour ago in the car,’ she called after them as their new interest propelled them forward. ‘Kids!’ the mother said to her companion. Tiff could only see the backs of their heads. She could see their eyes roll.

     Tiff and Aaron had themselves exhausted small talk over lunch, and exchanges of gossip about mutual friends and frenemies and department colleagues over the afternoon. After the split it’d been too much to ask that they continue to work at the same college. Tiff stayed put in Raleigh, Aaron found a position in Boston. His teaching was admired, his research output steady. Aaron didn’t know Tiff had gone for the same position, thinking she should be the one to leave. The professional rejection had hurt. She blamed her reputation as a difficult writer, forgetting he had a five year start on her, already forty. Though obviously physically fitter than her too. She had to concentrate on her stride to keep in step and to calm her panting breath.

     The older and slower still, the obese and the complacent, stopped along the trail first, colonising the viewing areas with paved surfaces. Tiff and Aaron silently agreed to keep going. Trees stretched out of sight in either side of the built-path, tall, straight of trunk, spaced like those in a fairytale book. In a good way. Before the wolf. Before the witch’s house. Until they came to a ridge overlooking a cleared glade, the opposite side sweeping back up into the forest. Perfect.

     Tiff slipped one of the camping chairs off her shoulder where the legs had bounced against her hip, and the strap had chaffed her neck, making her feel like a mint-new soldier heading to the frontline, Gatling gun hoisted on her back. Out of the nylon tube of its carrier bag, the contraption – not a weapon – became sentient, resisting her attempts to unfold, to shake, to snap it into the contours of a chair. Aaron stood beside her. He couldn’t sit until she did, but he hadn’t forgotten how much she hated to be helped, so his arms hung casually at his sides. He saw her looking at him, and busied himself taking off his light jacket and draping it over his easily erected chair, squaring the shoulders. Opened the top of his pack to forage through the breads and cheeses, dried tomato and hummus, the carton on orangeade, though it was clearly too late to notice if anything was missing from the picnic. The temperature was beginning to dip with the sun. He put his jacket back on.

     Finally, she sat. He sat.

     ‘Don’t run,’ called a man to the right. Children slowed from their dance around their parents. ‘The females are in the grass,’ their mother warned. ‘There could be some this close. Watch out. We don’t want to do them harm.’

     The children barely interrupted their made-up song about lightening bugs but they did keep out of the tall grass. Tiff wanted to sing too, but she kept quiet while an old nursery rhyme sang round and round in her head, coming back again and again to the chorus, firefly, firefly, fly by my side.

     ‘Here,’ Aaron said as he offered one of the sheets of red cellophane he’d fished from a side pocket of his knapsack. It crackled and flashed in imitation of fire as he handed it over. ‘I thought rubber bands were easiest,’ he added, ‘to strap it to…’ He demonstrated.

     ‘You think of everything,’ she said without looking at him, as they were both concentrating on covering their smartphones with the red filter and securing it tight. Because lights interfered with the fireflies, put them off their courting ritual, but red light was less intrusive. In case fidgeting humans thought they needed the torches within their devices. They tested. Checked. Felt satisfied.

 

     At the fall of dusk there was the occasional flash from the fireflies. Short, sporadic, distanced flickers, like an orchestra tuning their instruments before the big performance. And as if they were in a theatre, the human audience at first chattered softly amongst themselves pre-performance, though there were more pauses, longer silences as the sun sank. Tiff fell completely silent early, Aaron soon after.

     There was a thrum of expectation in Tiff’s chest from 9 pm onwards. By 9.30, with the sun completely gone, it was an ache. With an added ache further up in her throat at each held breath. All talk around them petered out. The occasional flashes became less occasional. An invisible conductor had raised their baton, hush falling – they could have heard a pine needle drop – and the next flash came quickly, igniting another and so on until the lights moved as a wave across the glade. Each pinprick of greenish-yellow came from the males, flying and flashing, showing the females stationary in the grass what they had on offer. And there, the females responded across the ground, with fainter lights, but clear enough, letting the males know they were there, they were interested, this display wasn’t for nothing.

     The evening tipped and Tiff lost the ache. She was no longer in her body. She was light herself. An incandescent globe of awe. Watching each firefly light up in personal paparazzi flashes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, then falling to darkness. And then, without warning, the fireflies began to work as one. In unison they burst with bioluminescence through the forest, in a synchrony, a symphony, of light. Then abrupt darkness for eight long seconds. Then again, the light show. Then the darkness for eight seconds. Then the show going on.

     Eight seconds. So much can happen in eight seconds.

 

     The spectacle was not for them. Or only in a skewed anthropocentric world. Each firefly found a mate as the crowd shuffled back to their tents or their cars, the path ahead bathed in red lights from sensitive torches. The females would lay eggs, and die along with the males. Leaving the rest to some greater lottery.

     Ahead of Tiff and Aaron on the path, a toddler slept against its grandfather’s chest, its cheeks resting on his shoulder, a moon face rising and falling. The word replete surfaced on Tiff’s lips to describe the drunken happiness of this face. The family headed home away from her, taking the trail to the left into thicker forest. Their own car park was not much further on. An end.

     Tiff knew she too had been wooed by the night. Aaron had done everything right.

     ‘So, was it as good as you’d imagined?’ he asked as he poured hot tea from a thermos left in the Bronco to refresh them at the end of the outing.

     She warmed her hands around the old tin cup, hesitated as if she was thinking, though she’d known the answer before he asked. ‘Better.’

     These weren’t their first fireflies. There’d been a tiny cage of them in a Kyoto palace. They’d crept over a creaking wooden floor, a nightingale floor, and seen it in the distance, sparking. Everything on that trip had seemed magical, not just the imprisoned fireflies, all seen through love-coloured lenses. How could she have forgotten that feeling of being exactly where you should be…

     There was no debating – they’d been perfect together, until he’d wanted children and she hadn’t. There’d been no sense of self-sacrifice in leaving him, she just couldn’t keep living with his silent martyrdom once he’d given into her arguments. It had been easier to get away and live in the present. If the world was ending – and the forest fires and the storms and the floods and the mudslides and the droughts said it was – there was only one way forward. And that was to assume no future.

     And yet she’d just seen with her own eyes the fireflies continuing to cycle through their lives, propelled to produce a new generation.

     A new idea flashing across the synapses of Tiff’s brain. When he’d finished his tea, she’d lean forward and kiss Aaron and taste the three sugars he always stirred into his.

     ‘I should have told you in the email,’ he said between sips. His turn to pause thoughtfully. ‘I met, I’m in, her name is… We’re pregnant.’

     Tiff turned and threw the dregs of her tea into the grass beside the cars. ‘She’s pregnant?’ she repeated, overloud.

     ‘Three months. We’ve just started telling people.’

     ‘I’m so glad for you.’ Tiff wondered if Aaron could see the wideness of her smile across the night. Knew he couldn’t see any light in her eyes.

     ‘It seemed right I share this with you.’ His arm swept out to encompass the Great Smoky Mountains in their entirety. ‘Still can’t believe we actually won the Lottery.’

     Driving north through the national park along Fighting Creek Gap Road, Tiff found true words to voice. ‘You’ll make such a good father. That was never in question.’

     He reached over and squeezed her hand. ‘I know. Thank you.’

     A trail of taillights glowed red in front of them as cars queued to leave the park, driving slowly in the same direction. The occasional light flicked manically as someone turned off to a further camp or a log cabin.

     Tiff hunched over in the cab. Busied herself searching through the box of cassettes again. She tore off the red cellophane filter and lined each one in turn under her torch to read the labels. Born to Run. Jagged Little Pill. Out of Time. Nevermind. The past mocked her in print. It took a while to find music she wanted to listen to.