Raw amethyst glimmered dim purple along the rocky shore. The eternal rhythm of the waves knocked gently at the ground, a steady heartbeat lulling her eyes to close. Sibu cherished the red glow of the sun’s heat on her skin.
The bonfire would begin soon. The stretching dark yawned in the distance. Sunset pinks and greens danced in the sky, lit with symbols from the day: clouds slung low, shaped into glyphs indicating love, travel, memory. They were scrawled on the horizon, a beautifully simple filigree, destined to dissolve into a diffuse and luminous haze. She loved to watch them smudge away, returning like smoke to the place where the stars lived.
There were no messages directed at her. She breathed a deep, satisfied sigh. Even though the expedition was technically work, the peace of the island and her love of the research made the experience feel more like a vacation. It was a week into her time there and she was already accustomed to how the days stretched before her in golden light, punctuated by meals where she would gather with the team and hear their stories of life on the island. The team members switched easily between Mi’kmaq and English, and Sibu happily picked up words she remembered from childhood. She could introduce herself, apologize, ask how people were doing: that was how she’d started. As time progressed, the words bloomed in her memory, bulbs brightening into petals that stretched open in colours that she couldn’t name.
The fireflies had danced early that year. Marie, one of the research members from the small island community off the coast of Kespukwitk, had noticed it first. Her discovery led to checking the birchbark, now thin enough for the quillwork. Everyone had been shocked at the vivid orange in the bark, shiny and pollen-bright. The patterns inside the bark, normally thin lines, had changed into something that looked like symbols. Not gomgwejui'gasultijig, the suckerfish writing of old Mi’kmaw hieroglyphs, but new words and language unknown to the region. To anyone, so far as they could tell, the strange logograms, small icons in combined and linked triangular shapes, had never been seen before.
“E’e, what a remarkable thing,” Sibu said, gingerly touching a gloved hand to the piece of birchbark. The wood was the orange of the stargazer lily, shimmering like cut fruit, glowing viscid like the jewel of her birthstone. The language was scrawled in sharp lines, unexpected shapes.
“Has anyone figured it out yet?” Sibu asked.
“Moqwe', not yet,” Marie replied.
Sibu placed the birchbark back into her hands.
“I doubt anyone will ever use it for quillwork, but if they did, I bet the markings would look beautiful,” Simon, the botanist, said.
“Simon, is it a disease?”
“Not that we can tell,” he replied, taking off his own gloves. “I definitely hope not. There aren’t any of the usual indicators. And nothing like it has been reported in any other tree.”
“Huh,” Sibu said, not knowing what else to say.
The jellyfish glowed, bioluminescent jewels in the water, as the sun ducked far below the horizon. Their bellies full of food and laughter, the research team reassembled at the bonfire. Sibu watched the embers arc and careen their orange and purple sunset colours, flames dancing in the night, forming shapes of stories that she didn’t bother to interpret.
Sibu wandered from the shore up to the road. She needed to visit the birch grove. As she walked, she listened to the deep night, the cricket sounds mixed with frog croaks and crackling grass under her feet. The world was teeming with invisible stories, demanding to be made visible, to be made known, to be spoken or sung or painted—
Or carved. Her pace quickened as she got closer. The fireflies blinked a rhythmic pattern among the branches. The eyes of the birch trees watched her with their sacred and unyielding gaze. Sibu sat on a tree stump, lit in the firefly flashes of orange and yellow light, beautiful flames that abandoned their candle wicks, swimming in the warm air of the Frog Croaking Moon. A drowsy feeling came over her as the owls hooted somewhere in the distance.
The fireflies walked over the bark before crawling into the birch’s eye. Sibu blinked with heavy eyelids as she watched it weep golden sap, a teardrop shed in witness. Then, with a start, Sibu watched the firefly burrow under the inner corner of the eye. Sibu bolted upright and walked to the tree. She saw it crawling under the thin bark. She gently pulled the bark away, revealing the creatures teeming beneath.
The firefly had burned the same glyphs on the bark.
•••
Their language of light became transformed into the language of tree, which then translated into the language of season and rhythm. For many, it became a new understanding of nature: insect language grew in popularity, generating songs and tattoos and poetry inspired by the possibilities of the small creatures. The fireflies of the island wrote their maps of migration into the trees, which, for their part, were unharmed by this new relationship.
Sibu found new work translating for the fireflies, and they followed her around after sunset, forming new constellations that brightened and changed in the deepening night. She sang to them in Mi’kmaw, her own language strengthening, and their light would blink, then fade, blink, then fade, echoing their strange collaborations up to the place where the stars lived.
