The Last Firefly Lantern

The conference had hit the wall around hour four of day two. I slipped out the side door of the ballroom during a break and just kept walking, past the pool, past the gift shop, until I saw the lanterns.

There was an open-sided pavilion down by the water, strung with paper lanterns in red and yellow. Staff were setting up for some kind of evening show. Mochi pounding, the schedule said. I figured nobody would notice one paralegal wandering in.

The air smelled like coconut and steamed rice. One lantern near the corner held something moving inside it, a small blinking light. A firefly, I guess. I stepped up onto the wooden floor to get a better look.

"You're not supposed to be here," a man said from behind a stack of folding chairs.

I turned around. He was tall, fortyish, wearing a staff polo and holding what looked like a chipped ceramic pot.

"Neither is the firefly, probably," I said. "Look, I'm not stealing anything. I needed a break from the conference. That's all."

He set the pot down on a folding table, careful, like it was made of eggshell. "Which conference? The accountants?"

"Legal. There's a seminar right now on filing protocols. I've been awake for twenty minutes of it total and I know how to file things already. It's my actual job." I shrugged. "So here I am, trespassing at a mochi event."

"It's not trespassing if the door is open."

"See? That's what I told myself."

He almost smiled. Then he picked the pot back up and turned it in the light, frowning at a crack that ran down one side. I couldn't help staring.

"Is that a theater thing?" I asked. "It looks like one of those pots from a stage makeup kit."

"Spirit gum pot," he said. "You know stage makeup?"

"My ex did community theater. I know more about spirit gum than any paralegal should."

That made him stop turning the pot. "Really."

"Really. Well. Ex, so, past tense." (Three years past tense, but nobody needs the full timeline in the first five minutes.) "What's wrong with it?"

"Cracked. The show tonight uses a mask, an ogre mask, and the hinge attaches with spirit gum. The pot leaked through the crack and now half the adhesive is set like concrete at the bottom." He held it up so I could see. "I'm trying to save what's left."

"Are you the makeup guy?"

"Nobody is the makeup guy. That's the problem. I'm the backup rotation schedule enforcer and the prop repair guy by default."

I laughed before I could stop myself. "Backup rotation schedule enforcer. That's a real title? You didn't just make that up to sound important?"

"It's on my badge." He actually dug the badge out of his pocket to show me. It did say that, right under his name, Jerome.

"I'm Gabriella, by the way," I said. "Okay, Jerome, backup rotation schedule enforcer. What does that even mean?"

"It means when the pavilion staff rotate shifts, I make the schedule for who fills in when someone calls out. If I don't do it, nobody pounds the mochi and the tourists get sad." He said it flat, like he'd explained it a hundred times. "It is the most boring job on this island. I moved here two years ago for it, which is the embarrassing part."

"Two years as the schedule guy."

"Someone has to enforce the rotation." He went back to poking at the hardened gum in the pot with a wooden skewer. "You'd be surprised how seriously some people take shift swaps."

"I take filing protocols seriously, so I can't judge. Or I could, but it'd be hypocritical." I sat down on the edge of the little stage. The floor was smooth and warm from the day. "My job is boring too. Documents, deadlines, redactions. I spent Tuesday verifying that a signature was a signature."

"Was it?"

"It was. Thrilling stuff."

He laughed, short and low, and kept working at the pot. There was something kind of nice about him not trying to fill the silence. I watched the staff outside carry benches and hang more lanterns. The sun was going down over the water and everything had that orange color that makes even a work trip look like a vacation ad.

"So is the mask going to make it?" I asked. "The ogre?"

"Probably. I can brace the crack with wire and use the gum that's still soft." He held it toward me again, prouder this time. "This is actually a decent pot. It came from a theater company that closed down in Surabaya. I bought three of them at auction."

"You went to an auction for spirit gum pots."

"I went to an auction and the spirit gum pots were there. There's a difference." He cleaned the skewer on a rag. "It matters to me that the props hold up. People came a long way for this show. The least I can do is make sure the ogre's face doesn't fall off mid-dance."

The earnestness of it got me. Most guys would have played it cool, made a joke, shrugged it off. This man was standing there defending a cracked pot like it had feelings.

"That's kind of sweet," I said. "In a very nerdy way."

"Nerdy is fair." He set the pot down and looked at me properly for the first time. "You came in here to hide from filing protocols and you found a man talking to a ceramic pot. Not the best entertainment on the island."

"It's the best entertainment I've had all day, and I sat through a panel discussion this morning, so the bar is low."

"Which is why the bar is in a different building than the seminars," he said. "Smart planning by the organizers."

That got a real laugh out of me. Somewhere in the middle of it, the lantern by the corner flickered, and I noticed the light inside had doubled. Two fireflies now. Then a third blinked on near the top, and all three of them were drifting around each other in the paper glow.

"Look at that," I said, and pointed.

Jerome came over and stood beside me, looking up. "Huh. Three."

"Is that unusual?"

"It's considered good luck here. There's a tradition. You make a wish on the third firefly and don't say it out loud." He said it easy, no big build up, the way you'd mention a parking rule. "You don't have to, obviously. It's just something the older staff do when the lanterns catch them."

"Three fireflies in one lantern. Okay, that's a little bit magical, even for a skeptic like me." I watched them blink. "Do you do it? Make the wish?"

"Sometimes." He was quiet a second. "Mostly I like watching them. The wishes tend to be the same thing over and over, if I'm honest with myself."

"Don't tell me. Money."

"Company. Different kinds of it." He glanced at me and then back at the lantern. "What about you? You don't have to say it. I'm just asking if you're the type."

I should have said no, I'm not the type, I'm a grown woman with a filing system for her receipts. Instead I looked at the three little lights and heard myself say, "I wish I felt less invisible."

Great. Out loud. To a stranger.

He didn't laugh and he didn't do the sympathetic head tilt that makes you want to crawl under a table. He just nodded, like it was a normal thing to say.

"That's a good one," he said. "Better than mine usually are."

"Thanks, I guess. It's not exactly a lottery win."

"No. But it's honest!" He picked up the pot again and looked at the crack, then at me. "For what it's worth, invisible is not the word I'd use."

"Don't say things like that just to be nice. I came here to get away from polite."

"I'm not being polite. I'm being accurate." He turned the pot over in his hands. "Polite would be telling you the mochi demonstration starts at seven and it's free with your conference badge. Accurate is that you walked in here past four locked doors to look at a lantern, which is not invisible behavior."

I didn't have an answer for that, so I looked back up at the fireflies. One of them landed on the inside of the paper and sat there glowing, like it was waiting for me to say something smarter.

"Okay," I said finally. "You want to tell me how the mochi thing actually works? Since I'm apparently staying for the show anyway."

He grinned and pulled a second folding chair over next to mine. "Sit down. It involves a very large wooden mallet and a man who has to stretch between every third pound, and I have opinions about his technique."

"Oh, I bet you do!"

He was halfway through his opinion about the mallet man's footwork when he reached over and put his hand on mine. Just his fingers, resting on the back of my hand where it sat on my knee.

"You know," he said, "you're far from invisible. From where I'm standing, anyway."

I looked down at his hand. Warm, a little rough, a smudge of adhesive glue near the thumb. I could feel my face going red, which at thirty-four still happens to me like clockwork.

"Okay, that got me," I admitted. "You noticed."

"Noticed what?"

"That I'm blushing. Go ahead, say it. It's very charming, I'm sure."

"I wasn't going to say anything." He grinned. "But since you brought it up, yes. Very charming."

"Oh, stop!" I turned my hand over under his, so our palms touched. That was on me. He hadn't moved his fingers past the back of my hand, and there he sat, letting me make the next choice, which I appreciated more than he probably knew.

"So this cracked pot," I said, because I needed something to talk about or I was going to do something stupid. "You really think a crack makes it better?"

"I think a crack makes it honest. It's been used. It held a show together in Surabaya for years and then it got auctioned off and now it's here, doing the same job. That's not damage. That's a history."

"You're saying I should embrace my cracks."

"I'm saying the pot works fine. The crack is where the light gets in, or whatever the quote is." He shrugged. "I don't do quotes. I do adhesive."

I laughed and squeezed his hand. "You're trouble, you know that? I came in here to sulk in private and now I'm holding hands with the schedule