We're sitting on the sofa that is out on the front porch. It's not exactly indoor/outdoor furniture, but tonight the sofa's bright orange velour is subdued in candlelight, and it doesn't matter that swept we away cobwebs this morning. We are watching the fireflies.

Benjamin keeps playing with my toes, widening and flexing the ball of my feet the way you do with babies. I'm looking at the front lawn sideways, one ear to the ceiling, my eyes cast off somewhere past his shoulder. The street is empty and dark.

"I forgot how quiet things are," I whispered, looking down and his furrowed brow as he continued to stare at my feet as if they were some complex sections of machinery, holding my toes like levers. "And how dark it really gets at night."

We just sat there for a while. I watched the lazy path of fireflies bend up and around the columns of the porch. After a while, Benjamin laid my feet back up on the arm of the sofa where they had been and rested his head against his shoulder, staring straight ahead, perhaps at the overgrown honeysuckle bush that framed the front steps.

I could have laid there forever.

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