Glittering Dark: Fiction (excerpt) by Jeremy Packert Burke

The insects revolted that summer. No one knew why. Grasshoppers, locusts, beetles, and bees, buzzing and chirruping, jumping from the grass. The houses of Holloway watched them come in chitinous hordes. Crawling from the earth and shaking the dirt from their gossamer wings. We would crunch and squish across a half-inch layer of locusts, ladybugs, and Hercules beetles to get the morning paper, only to discover it had been eaten clean through by moths.

We wore flu masks to keep the airborne creatures from burrowing into our mouths, goggles to protect our eyes. We didn’t allow the children outside, afeard by rumors of entomic masses carrying kids off and stripping them of their flesh, leaving only pure white skeletons.

Those were only rumors, but the insects did strip a whale that way. It washed up on the shores of Lake Hesperus, beached and moaning in the breeze, surrounded by thousands of flitting, scuttling, green-gold shapes, until – like a magic trick – it was reduced to a gargantuan white nightmare. In the cage of its ribs, a large nugget of ambergris, which Travis Gehry stole and sold to Bucky Foucault, the perfumiér.

Sunsets were incredible that summer. We all stood on our porches and watched the red-speckled dusk sink towards full dark, rays of sunlight bent through the wings of insects, disco-balled in the many facets of their eyes, so that patches of every colored light imaginable danced over the woods and the walls, over our upturned faces. Sweeping over the town as if it were a roller rink. And even at night, the moonlight caught their many shifting carapaces.

The leaves fell, red, along the paths of the forest, the roads of the town. Then winter came, and all of the insects froze to death. In the spring it took a week to sweep up most of them, and even then there were little frozen bug carcasses found under piles of melting snow for months.

I never spoke to you again after that summer and fall. Never saw you but at the mandatory gatherings: the cleaning of the town, parentteacher conferences, the puppet shows on the solstice.

During that summer, when none of our children could go outside, they grew restless and agitated. They tied twine to the backs of cans and pitched them past their window screens, let the seething waves of insects carry the cans across town, twine unraveling, unraveling until another kid spied the can from their window and, reaching with a telescoping back-scratcher or a runcible spoon, plucked the can from the glittering mass and grasped it firmly in hand, brushing aside stray insects that clung to it still.

—Hello? Who's there?

—Fidel. Who are you?

—Bonnie. Are you stuck inside?

—Yep. You?

—Yep. As more and more children caught on, sending dozens of cans out to all corners of Holloway, a web of twine rose over the town, a network of string that crossed and double-crossed itself. The lines gathered, dense above the bug-filled streets, thick as a rainforest canopy. The strings were every color from rose-gold to ultramarine, a rainbow of pareidolic lines that described a vast array of shapes in the air like constellations: mythic beasts, gods, heroines of antiquity, all drawn in multicolor between the land and sky.

Where the strings touched, they rubbed secret voices into each other so that, if you were quiet, you could eavesdrop, hear others talking about their pink eye and their missing cat or singing loudly to each other.

I stood on the porch, beating the waves of insects back with my broom, staring at the net above me and the patches of brief blue sky that broke through. My wife was in the basement, buttressing the defenses at the windows and doors, and I thought of the Christmas party a year prior, my wife likewise basement-bound and seeking wine, the red and green polish of your nails, the way they trailed across the braceleted beads that spelled out my son’s name, Poker, which he had given me in some deranged gift-giving game. Your eyes behind your thick glasses shining like carapaces. The moment my fingers moved towards yours the footsteps returned. Your wife’s from the bathroom, mine from the basement. Like fate. Fingers falling to our sides.

I swept. I knocked a dragonfly from the air. I swept more. My body held, in hazmat suit, between seething insects and still suburban dreamcatcher.

When our work was done, my wife practiced her timpani late into the night. BOM BOM-BOM BOM. BOM-BOM BOM BOM. Each BOM sending queasy shivers through me, making me long for your painted nails.

The strings became so dense that sometimes the insects would get caught in the web, and their beating wings would punctuate the children’s conversations with bursts of distortion.

—My PRRRR-arents are fighting again.

—I'm ZHHHH-rry.

—Dad sma-ZHHHH-ed six plates this time, and when they sto-BZZZZed fighting he tried gluing them together again. So now everything tastes like glue.

A silence full of humming.

—I wish I could THTHTH-ee you. —I FWFW-ould like that very much.

And so on.

Unlikely friendships formed. Relationships. Teenagers discussed various sex acts they would perform on one another if they ever left their houses again. They would sneak out right now, they said, except that Denis Tribulant had been eaten by a colossal swarm of gnats (they'd heard) and, well, they didn't want to turn out like Denis. I searched through Poker's cans, testing them with whispers to see if you were on the other end of them. A map would be helpful. Or better, an exchange, an operator. —Hello, hello? I called, but was met with buzzing, or silence, or the voices of children:

—I wish you could come here.

This is the end of the excerpt, but the story continues if you purchase the full issue.

by Jeremy Packert Burke