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It was my firefly jar.

I breathed in, about to say something, but my sister silenced me again. Grandma opened her eyes, still saying over and over the name of the One Up There. My sister and I kept still. The rosary beads continued to chink together and against my grandmother’s fingernails. We tiptoed back to the door, accompanied by the hum of her prayer. Just before we left the room, Grandma said, “Close the door on your way out.” My sister did so. In the hall I looked toward the main room. My parents were still talking in low voices by the sink. My sister gave me a slap on the backside and pointed to the bathroom.

When we were in, she squatted down, pushing the door with her back to close it. She rested the jar on one knee.

“What’s this?” she asked.

I looked at the jar.

“What the hell is this?” she repeated. “And what was it doing in the baby’s crib?”

I bent to put the cactus on the floor. Then I tried to take the jar. My sister snatched it away from me, holding it high above her head.

“Why did you put this in the baby’s crib?”

I didn’t respond.

“Do you want me to call Dad and tell him? So
he
can ask you why you did it?” She turned her face so that her mouth was nearer the door, still staring at me. She gave me a few more seconds before shouting, “Da—!”

I covered her mouth with both hands, touching the orthopedic material of her mask. She stuck out her tongue and I felt a moist slug between my fingers. It made me take my hands away.

“What is this?” she asked again. “Tell me. It’ll be our little secret. You know this is dangerous for such a tiny baby, right?” She shook the jar. The pencil knocked against the container’s transparent walls.

“Careful,” I said. “You’ll hurt them.”

My sister studied the jar. “I asked whether you know how dangerous this is for a baby as tiny as that one is.”

I hung my head, ashamed. I hadn’t thought of that.

“Don’t get like that now,” my sister said. “Look at me. You’ve put the baby’s life in danger.”

My lips wrinkled up.

“Don’t cry. As long as no one finds out, it doesn’t matter. And if you behave yourself, nobody has to find out. It’ll be our little secret.”

“I won’t do it again,” I said.

She laughed, then pushed the jar against my chest and let go of it without warning. I managed to catch it before it fell onto the floor. My sister opened the bathroom door and disappeared. One of the fireflies flashed green. The other responded right after it.

I felt the back of my hand burning. Perhaps I’d held it under the sun too long. I discovered a red mark on my white skin. So white that I thought maybe Dad was right.

Maybe I was a ghost.

I climbed onto my chair at dinnertime.

“Is this all we’re having?” I asked.

I combed the mashed potato with my fork and rummaged through the heap of peas. A couple of them fell onto the floor. I waited, shoulders hunched, for Dad to tell me off.

“Eat,” he said.

I didn’t argue.

“Eat this as well,” he then ordered. He pointed with his knife at the potato skins that he’d set aside on his plate.

“We’ve never eaten mashed potato like this.”

Mom’s nose whistled.

“Well, it’s much tastier this way,” she said.

She searched for some scraps of skin in her potato and put them in her mouth. She chewed with a smile that made her cheek wrinkle in an irregular way. My grandmother ate her skins, too. To my right, my brother was gobbling the yellowish substance. Some pieces slipped through the gap in his bottom lip and returned to his plate all chewed up. Just like flies when they vomit their saliva to regurgitate the solids they feed on, transforming them into a liquid substance, which they then suck up with their horn-shaped mouth.

I ate everything on my plate, but I was still hungry.

“There’s no more?” I asked. I heard Dad rest his cutlery on his plate. In quick succession, my grandmother’s hand moved from her forehead to her stomach to each side of her chest and to her mouth.

“Sure there’s more,” Mom replied. She reached for the seventh plate, positioned as always between my grandmother and my sister. When Grandma heard her, she grabbed Mom’s hand.

“Not yet,” she said.

Mom looked at me and bit her bottom lip.

“Please,” Grandma whispered. “Not yet.”

Mom left the plate where it was with a sigh. Dad offered me his. He held it with his arm stretched out, the plate in the air in the middle of the table.

“That won’t solve anything,” my mother said.

“It solves the boy’s hunger.”

“Only tonight,” she added. “What will we do tomorrow?”

“What’s happening tomorrow?” I asked, chewing a piece of skin.

“Nothing,” whispered Mom very close to my face, trying to smile. Then she looked at Dad. “What will we do tomorrow?”

“I don’t know,” he answered. “I really don’t know.”

That night, Dad let me stay and watch a movie with them. I watched while I played with the two peas that had fallen from my plate.

9

Back in my room after the movie, I knelt in front of the cabinet at the foot of my bed. When I opened the drawer I found two more fireflies near the jar. When I unscrewed the lid to put them in, my brother appeared in the bedroom. He climbed onto the bunk, making everything shake. The lid fell onto the floor. After I recovered it and closed the jar, only three fireflies were inside.

One was missing.

I heard the heavy metal door to my parents’ bedroom close. My sister pulled the chain. I heard her footsteps traveling from the bathroom to her bedroom. My brother turned off the light in our room. The cistern’s dripping was clear in the sudden silence.

I remained still, looking into the darkness.

A spot of light hovered about the room. I left the jar in the drawer and the green glow flickered twice before landing near the door. I crawled toward the firefly, still glowing in the same place.

“Come here,” I whispered. But just before reaching it, the spot of light slid under the door. I opened it a crack. The firefly took off in the hall, heading in the direction of the living room. I came out of the bedroom on tiptoes, feeling the draft from the window on my legs. The two new visitors must’ve flown in through there.

I followed the trail of light in total silence. In the living room, the pilot lights on the TV and video shone, like two more fireflies trapped inside the appliances, dead. The living one flashed three times before perching on my father’s armchair. I leapt on it, forming an upside-down bowl with my hands. I thought I’d missed, until four green lines glowed between my fingers. I closed my right hand, trapping the insect inside. It tickled when it beat its wings.

That was when I heard a bang.

My heart thumped in my ears.

There was another bang.

And then another.

I broke into a sweat because I knew what it meant. “Please not for me. Please don’t have come for me,” I whispered into the darkness.

The first night I heard those noises I cried in my bed with my muscles so frozen with terror I couldn’t move. When I mentioned it at breakfast, Mom told me that I must’ve imagined it. That there were no monsters up above, or in the wardrobe, or under my bed. But Dad told me the truth.

“What you heard was the Cricket Man’s footsteps,” he explained.

“He’s an old man with giant black eyes whose knees bend the wrong way.” And he tried to dramatize what he was saying by walking in a squat around the dining area. “He also has two big antennae, so big they rub against the ceiling when he goes in a house.”

“Why does he go in houses?” I asked.

Dad turned a chair around and sat on it with his legs open, holding the backrest. “Because he hunts for children with his antennae.” He held both arms against his forehead and waved them. “With his antennae, and the light from an oil lamp, he searches underground for badly behaved children, to stick them in his sack.”

“And what does he do with them?” I wanted to know.

Dad moved his face so close to mine that he scratched me with his hair scar. “He eats them,” he said. “He starts with the feet, then the legs, and then the belly, until he reaches the head.” He made a chomping sound with his teeth. “And while he eats them, he rubs his back-to-front knees together to chirp like a cricket.”

Now, positioned by Dad’s armchair with the firefly beating its wings inside my hand, I felt a shiver as I remembered the chirping I’d heard just after he told me that story, the chirping of a real cricket.

There was another bang in the darkness.

The Cricket Man was coming for me. He wanted to stick me in his sack because I’d put the baby’s life in danger when I hid the firefly jar in the crib. And because I’d begun to ask myself what there was outside the basement.

I held my breath.

I looked up at the living room window. The bars killed off any idea of escape. I also looked at the door that had never been open. I had to make a big effort to move my body numbed with fear, but managed to cross the living room in the direction of the hall. I saw the half-open door to my bedroom. I wanted to run to my bed and disappear under the sheets, to feel the soft material inside my pillow between my fingers.

That was when the hinges creaked on my parents’ door.

I pressed myself against the wall, to one side of the threshold that led to the hall.

Then I heard it.

A knee clicking. The back-to-front knee of the Cricket Man. I imagined his antennae vibrating, searching for my scent, scraping the ceiling. His giant black eyes capturing what little light there was in the basement to make my silhouette multiply in lots of hexagonal cells.

More clicking. Nearer this time.

With my head pressed against the wall, I made out his silhouette in the hall, to one side of my field of vision.

I heard the patter of his feet on the floor. Until I realized it was the sound of my teeth chattering. I bit my bottom lip to stop them.

The Cricket Man opened the door to my grandmother’s room. I knew then that he hadn’t come for me. He wanted to take the baby. The stony feeling that locked my joints prevented me from moving.

When the door closed, I couldn’t contain the hot liquid that now dripped down my legs.

After a space of time that I was unable to measure, the silhouette emerged from the room. I imagined my nephew in the sack, his face scratched by the Cricket Man’s hairy legs.

The baby cried.

But the crying came from inside the bedroom. The little boy was safe.

The hinges on my parents’ door creaked again, making my body finally react. I emerged from behind the wall and ran to the bunk bed. I threw myself onto the mattress, sheets up to my forehead, firefly still in my fist.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I didn’t mean to hurt the baby. Please don’t have come for me.”

The sweat that covered my body went cold. I could sense someone looking at me inside the room. I could hear breathing. When I heard the first guffaw I closed my eyes. And then I recognized the laughter. That guttural sound. My brother’s heehaw got louder.

“You’re scared,” he said. He made another donkey noise.

“Shut up, or he’ll find us.”

“Who?” he asked, still laughing.

“The man who comes sometimes,” I whispered.

My brother went quiet.

“Did Dad tell you about him?” he said after a few seconds.

“Yeah,” I answered into the darkness. “Ages ago.”

“Age—” He swallowed. “Ages ago?”

My brother fell silent again.

“Didn’t you know?” I asked. “The Cricket Man hunts children who live underground, if they misbehave.”

My brother laughed again.

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “He told me, yeah.”

He exploded into guttural laughter while I tried to shush him.

“Shut up,” I said. “Shut up, or he’ll find me.”

My brother laughed until he choked. Then he started coughing. The springs on his bunk squeaked with every cough.

Then the bedroom door opened.

The Cricket Man had found me.

The light came on. I covered my face with the sheet.

“What’s wrong?” Mom asked from the door.

I sighed with relief, and took a breath before answering. “I’m scared.”

“Not you, your brother.” He was still laughing and coughing. “Will you be quiet?” my mother ordered.

She approached the bed. I poked my head out from the sheet. I could see Mom’s body up to her chest. The rest was above my brother’s bunk. He wasn’t laughing much anymore. He was coughing in a frantic way that was making him choke.

“Stop!” my mother shouted. I heard her slap my brother’s back a few times.

“You have to stop!” she persisted. “Your brother mustn’t be kept awake.”

The coughing fit gradually subsided.

“What brought this on?” my mother asked him. Receiving no answer, she turned to me. “How long have you been awake? What have you heard?”

I hesitated. The key hung from her neck like a pendulum. “I saw the Cricket Man,” I said.

“Have you been out of your room?”

The firefly I’d gone to rescue was still fluttering in my closed hand.

“No,” I lied.

“Then where did you see him? In this bedroom?”

I shook my head.

“Of course you didn’t,” she said, “because he doesn’t exist. You know that.”

“He does exist!” my brother shouted from above.

My mother cuffed him.

“Be quiet,” she told him. “He doesn’t exist.”

Mom pinched her stretched T-shirt between her legs and sat on the side of my bed. She put a hand on my tummy.

“That man doesn’t exist,” she repeated. “No one’s going to take you away. This is your home and you’re safe here. Now I’m going to bring you a glass of milk, you’re going to drink it, and you’re going to sleep. Understood?”

I nodded, unconvinced.

Mom left the room. Above me, my brother said, “He does exist.”

I remained silent, remembering the silhouette I’d seen in the hall. The two clicks of his back-to-front knees. Then I heard a cricket’s chirp. Like I had just after Dad revealed the Cricket Man’s existence to me. A real chirp, like the one I’d heard in documentaries. Like when night fell in the movies.