When I was writing my young-adult short-story collection, Killing Miss Kitty and Other Sins, I couldn’t quite decide whether I was writing memoir or fiction. Sometimes what I wrote was authentically memoir, but the longer, more shaped pieces tended toward fiction. Because I had to decide to go one way or the other, I chose to present the longer short stories as fiction and to take the authentically memoir pieces out for another collection.

I have several other projects I need to complete before I can return to the memoir pieces to decide exactly what to do with them, but in the meantime, I thought it would be fun to share them. So I’m putting them in here, one at a time.

9. Will and Me

Summer nights. Cicadas buzzing in the trees. Will and me, running barefoot across the grass after fireflies, hording their fairy lights in glass jars. (Those days no one seemed to worry about kids running around in the dark carrying breakable glass jars.) Fireflies darting all about us, signaling with their Morse code. Our parents watching from the kitchen steps.

The next morning when I woke, how disappointed I’d be to see that what I had gathered was only a collection of bugs. Seen in the light of day crawling up the inside of the jar, they made me shiver. If they had looked like that at night, I never would have held them in my hands, brought them upstairs to my room.