Fireflies

They came in a crumpled sheet of printed paper, that looked like a page from one of those supermarket junk mail catalogues. Patrick laid them down on top of the coffee table and then pulled out a chair so he could sit and observe them for a while. They looked smaller than what he expected and most of them were quite damaged and bruised. He took one of them by the stem to examine it up close. The brown cap had a sad appearance of a half-closed umbrella and the stem itself seemed to be fragile, so he handled it with care, making sure he didn't break it. When he brought the thing to his nose, a strong smell of feet hit him with a punch. He wondered how curious the pioneer caveman must have been, or desperate, to consider having this for lunch. Patrick held his breath as he popped it into his mouth, hoping it would give him a break from this emptiness.

Ten minutes later, he felt duped. He didn’t really know the guy he bought them from. For all he knew, he could’ve gotten them from the local food store. Am I really that naïve, Patrick thought. He took another glance at the bunch on the coffee table. They did look a bit dry to him. Maybe their potency decreased as they dried up. If they are the real deal at all. But what do I know, Patrick thought, turning them over one by one with his index finger, as if he hoped he'd find the answers to his questions imprinted on one of them. To hell with it, he muttered, took a fistful out of the paper and ate them all at once.

If this works, I better be comfy, Patrick thought, getting up to turn off the lights and then lying down. As time passed by, the shabby couch he was stretched on felt more and more cosy. Patrick’s thoughts did what they always do, wander off to thinking about work, to a TV show he was obsessed with, then to his friends and family, and then to something else, in no particular or sensible order. As the feelings of deep connection with his relatives, co-workers and fictional TV characters grew, Patrick realised the trip had started and instinctively he knew that the only option for him now was to surrender to this weightless sensation of being.

Zooming out of his body and into the universe, his conscience grew in size as it engulfed planet Earth and its inhabitants. Patrick’s soul loved all people, plants and animals, large as an elephant or small as a microscopic single cell, for their sparkling joys and deepest sorrows, unconditionally and eternally. His energy swirled around and passed through each of them, absorbing their pain as a sponge and coating them in viscous molasses of solidifying protection and care. He didn’t stop there. He expanded further into space and loved the Sun and the moon, and the planets and the Mars rovers and the asteroid belt and the Oort cloud and Alpha Centaury and all the other star systems and planets and civilisations. When he zoomed out far enough, he realised that what he saw lying below him was the entire universe. As this universe condensed and formed into a solid shape, Patrick ended up back where he started, in his living room, hovering above the shabby couch he was lying on, staring at himself. He was the universe, he realised, and that thought filled him with an overwhelming feeling of guilt. What a cruel man he was to this universe. Cruel and uncaring, poisoning it with cigarettes and alcohol, desecrating it with porn and junk food. Why, he wondered? Why was he so angry and jealous and abusive to himself and others, when it would be so easy to simply love? Oh, how things could've been different if only his words and actions came from a place of love, instead of fear and pain tormenting him from the inside.

A faint but strange sound severed him from these thoughts. Was that the sound of a baby crying he was hearing? Or could it be someone playing a creepy tune on some rusty door hinges, he couldn't tell.

Patrick tried to make further sense of the sound, but the harder he tried, the more distorted and spookier the sound became. He lifted his head in an effort to hear it better, but instead observed the sound turn into a splashing liquid and then swiftly vaporise into a mist. Then the sound condensed into droplets of rain, reflecting the lights of thousands of fireflies, flashing their strobing yellow beams across the room. But then it all became dark again.

Another sound that he heard, a hissing one, painted his mood dark. He sat up and tried to think of something cheerful but no such thought came to him. The control he had possessed to this point of the trip was slipping out of his hands and into other hands that had no sense of joy. He could feel a hand touch his leg. Patrick wouldn’t allow himself to be harmed by it, so he jumped off the couch, trying to break away, but the hand became many and kept multiplying, moving up his body, holding him in an ever tighter grip, crushing his chest and neck. Again, he heard the baby cry, but this time it sounded more real. He figured the baby was in danger and it needed his help, but struggled to take action. Finally he dropped to the floor, took a deep breath and dragged himself away from the couch and the hands that kept pulling him back. He used his weight and his elbows and knees to crush the ones that were under him, but to no avail as the hands kept multiplying. Wherever the hands touched him, it felt hot. Then he took off his shirt and gave it up, in hope the hands would leave him alone. They accepted this gift, released him and disappeared under the couch.

Patrick tried to get up on his feet, but every time he did, the hands would come back and pull him down. Patrick felt safer down on the floor and it was easier for him to breathe when he was down. He couldn’t hear the baby any more, but he knew that if the sound was real, it must’ve come from outside of his place. Probably some other apartment. Slowly he crawled towards the apartment door, not being able to avoid going over hundreds of hairy spiders wrestling each other on the carpet. When he felt the spiders climbing up his arms and falling off the ceiling onto his bare back, Patrick’s limbs turned into locomotive winches, pushing him towards the door faster and faster.

The apartment door was made of living bones and the human skull handle felt hot to the touch. Patrick couldn’t open it from below so he had to stand up first so he could turn the key. As he did that, he also turned around to see if the hands are still after him, only to see a silhouette of a huge bear behind him. Petrified, he stood motionless, thinking whether he had enough time to run out the door and lock it behind him. But would a locked door stop a bear? He doubted that. The bear was also standing still as it stared at Patrick. Patrick felt he was getting weak and didn't have the strength to stand there for much longer. Gently he made one step towards the bear and realised that he was mistaken after all. It wasn’t a bear that was there, it was a wolf. The fear lingered as he made another step and it revealed that what he was seeing was just a coat on a hanger. Patrick felt the relief as he concluded that the effect was already wearing off. He turned back to the door, opened it and stepped out of the apartment and into, what seemed to him, the inferno itself.

Fire blazed along the staircase walls and the heat it produced made the air flicker and the smoke rush to the upper floors of the building. Patrick wasn’t sure if what he was seeing was just another one of his hallucinations, or if the danger he put himself in was real. The fire and the smoke could easily be imagined, but the heat, can that be hallucinated too, he wondered. In any case, he knew that neither staying here nor going back into the apartment were options. Carefully he walked down the stairs making sure he stayed away from the flames and evading the burning pieces of plastic melting off the handrail above and falling down towards him. At this point he was aware that his reactions were significantly slower and that any mistake he made would probably be the end of him. His apartment was on the first floor, so getting down to the ground floor shouldn't be that hard, he thought. He chose to ignore anything that seemed unreal to him, such as faces of demons that stared at him through the flames, or witches that floated in and out of the black smoke. One step at a time, and he was almost at the exit, but then he heard the baby crying again. Was this real, or was he hallucinating again? Patrick was unsure. His gut feeling told him that the cry was just a hallucination. Probably just the sound of the fire combined with the sound of the wind, he thought. He made another step towards the exit, but when he heard the cry again, he turned around and stopped to listen. What if there really is a baby there, trapped inside one of the apartments, he feared. He couldn’t just leave without being sure. He decided to go back in and check.

With every step Patrick took up the stairs, the cry got louder. When he reached the third floor, the sound was gone. He looked around and realised the smoke was so thick here that he couldn’t see anything. There was no time to waste, Patrick though. "Cry, baby, cry", he shouted, and the baby’s cry broke through the smoke again. It seemed to Patrick he was close now. He kicked in the first apartment door and went around searching. The smoke followed him and soon he couldn’t see a thing again. When he realised nobody was there, he got out, went to the next door, kicked that one in and searched again. And there it was, a small little crib and something in it. What was it? It looked like a loaf of bread to him. He stretched out his arms and picked it up. This couldn't be a baby, he thought. He put his face against it to see if he could hear it breathing, but the noise coming from all sides made him unsure. Patrick examined the thing again but couldn’t see if it had a face. What he saw was all distorted, and looked like many things. But could it be a baby? It could be one, but it could also be a doll some kid left behind. Maybe he should just leave it there. It's probably nothing. Just another illusion. This is just bread. Or a toy. Certainly not a living, breathing human being. He put the 'baby' back in the crib.

But what if he was wrong? He decided not to take any chances. He took the 'baby' with him and to protect it from the smoke he wrapped it fully in a blanket. The smoke filled the room and Patrick saw that the flames had reached the third floor. There was no way up or down the stairs any more. This building had no fire escape, so the only remaining way out was through a window. Patrick knew he probably wouldn’t survive the jump, but if he managed to protect it somehow, the baby might. Unless it was a loaf of bread he was saving. That would make a funny headline, he thought. Patrick held the 'baby' tight against his chest as he paced through the smoke, following the fireflies to what he assumed was a window. The fire followed him rapidly so he didn't hesitate to open the window and climb it. The smoke rose up from the floors below and completely blocked his view. He couldn’t tell whether he was going to land in a bush, on grass or on concrete. Patrick was aware that there was no time to think as the flames were too close, and if he didn’t jump now, he would faint and drop the 'baby'. He held the wrap to his chest with both arms and decided to push himself away from the window, in a way that would get him to fall on his back, turning him into an airbag for, what he hoped was a baby, to land on. On three, Patrick said and just as he counted to two, an angel appeared, shining a bright light upon him.

The angel stretched his arm towards Patrick and said “Take my hand!” Patrick didn't let himself wait to lock arms with the angel. “Step onto the platform”, the fireman angel shouted. “Careful. I got you”.

Streams of water were shooting above their heads as a fireman, a man and a wrap descended to the ground. More people in uniforms came to Patrick’s aid.

“Let me take that” one of the medics said and took the wrap away.

“Is the baby real?” Patrick asked as the other medic was putting an oxygen mask on his face.

A couple of minutes later, the medic that took the baby returned.

“What’s your name?” the medic asked.

Patrick tried to speak, but the oxygen mask and the fatigue wouldn’t let him.

“She'll be fine. Good thinking with the blanket, it saved her life. You are a hero, mate.”

As he was being loaded into the ambulance, Patrick stared at the little droplets of rain reflecting the strobing yellow lights of fire trucks, flickering like thousands of fireflies.