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went to the kitchen. It must have flown out of the window there.”
    “There’s nothing on the other side of the windows. Just more concrete.”
    “There is for a bird,” she said. “The chick was very small, it could fit through any crack. I bet you it managed to get out somehow.”
    I considered it.
    “Is the chick OK?” I asked. I imagined it alone in that world made of blisters.
    “Oh, yes.” She rested a hand on my face, warming my cheek. “I’m sure it’s fine. It’ll be better off out there than in your—” She didn’t finish the sentence.
    “If I wanted to, could I go look for it?” I asked. I thought about the door in the kitchen. About the useless movement of my hand, unable to turn the knob. If I’d tried to open a wall with a knob drawn on paper nothing different would’ve happened.
    “But then you wouldn’t see me anymore,” she responded. “Or your mother. Or Dad. Or the baby. Is that what you want?”
    I shook my head.
    “Well? Is that what you want?” she asked. She couldn’t see me.
    “No.”
    “No, of course it’s not.” She put her hand around my neck to pull me closer to her. Then pushed my face into some warm place between her chest and shoulder. I kissed the air. “Now get back to your room,” she whispered.
    “I’ve kept a piece of shell in case the chick comes back. So it knows where its house is.”
    My grandmother’s chest rose. “You’re such a nice boy,” she said. I nodded in the warm place where my face was, smelling the talcum powder. “Now go to bed,” she added. “Get some more sleep.”
    It was an incredible power that my grandmother gave me that night.
    On the way back to my bedroom, in the hall, a gentle draft came in through the window. I put my face between the bars, closed my eyes, and breathed in, letting that different smell that came from outside envelop me. It was different from anything there was in the basement. But a bitter note ruined the moment, because the outside had just become somewhere I couldn’t go even if I wanted to. The door in the kitchen was locked.
    I felt another waft of air on my face.
    And it brought with it the first firefly.
    It flew in front of my eyes.
    Then it settled on the surface that stretched from the window to the other wall, at the height of my neck. When it landed, it hid the wings that it’d used to slow its descent under its shell. Really, coleopterans’ shells are just another pair of wings, hardened to protect the ones they use to fly. The insect walked toward the bars over the gravel that had built up in the space. Toward me.
    And that was when it lit up.
    For a second, the body of the dark bug was illuminated with a magical green light that glowed from the end of its abdomen. Just like in my insect book, the one I kept at the foot of my bed. The first time I turned the pages of the book I was fascinated by the long legs of the mantises, the perfect camouflage of the stick insects, the colors of the butterflies. But it was the firefly’s glow that totally captivated me. An insect that makes light. Like the bulbs that hung bare from the ceiling in the basement. But living.
    There was another flash, identical to the one in the photograph in my book, which showed a firefly perching on a blade of grass. Now I held out a finger in front of it, on the gravel, blocking its path. The firefly climbed onto it, keeping its balance by fluttering its wings.
    I kept my eyes open so I wouldn’t miss the next flash. When it lit up again, I had to blink a few times to moisten them.
    I returned to my bedroom with my forefinger held out in front of my face, the firefly on the tip. My brother was snoring. I opened my drawer. First I put the piece of shell that I’d rescued from Grandma’s bed in the T-shirt nest.
    “In case you come back,” I said to the chick that wasn’t there.
    Then I found the big jar where I kept my colored pencils. I tipped them out into the drawer, then put the firefly inside the empty