Summer swarmed around her. It wasn’t the joyous kind she was used to. This was violence. Northern summer came packing: hard slapping sun, punch-gut humidity, cruel stillness and unearthly bugs.
The bugs were the worst.
Her house abutted ancient rainforest. It had looked picturesque in photos online. She pitched better judgement to the wind, bought the place and moved here. It was just her, her broken heart, an intrusive neighbour and five hundred million creepy crawling bugs. What was she even doing here? Not working, for sure. There wasn’t much call for linguists in the deep north. Not much call for anything, except industrial strength insect repellent.
One evening, during yet another blackout, when she was quietly contemplating life choices as she sat wretchedly in a damp pool of loneliness, listening to the thudding of her neighbour’s generator, her life took a crazy turn. Right in front of her in the darkness of her lounge room, she saw sparks.
‘Am I having some sort of medical episode? A migraine?’
She focused. It was not sparking, but blinking. There were tiny white bulbs of light, drifting in lazy loops, hundreds of them.
‘Fireflies?’ she wondered. Since when were fireflies a thing in Australia? Apparently, they were a thing in her loungeroom. She watched, mesmerised. She blinked in time with them. It was soothing. Then puzzling. Her linguistic brain kicked off. She saw patterns. That’s what linguists do. They cannot help themselves. All languages are built on patterns of frequency and repetition.
There were linguists who had deciphered whole languages just by observing patterns. Not that she ever had. Her career had been limited to dull academia. She had worked in dusty backrooms of sandstone buildings with dusty records of dead languages alongside dead-hearted colleagues who promised everything but turned out to be emotionally stunted cheating mongrels—
She’d digressed. She refocused on the fireflies. Those few left were blinking less rapidly, as if they were the last party guests, groggy but determined to hang on. She reached for her phone and opened the timer app.
Her keen eyes followed one firefly as it drifted away from others. One blink and then another, one point two seconds later. Another blink pulsed at one point seven. The sequence repeated four times. A second firefly wandered into orbit with the first, blinking madly. She clocked the pulse at three per second at least. Next, in the most curious development, firefly one changed frequency; the same sequence but more rapid as it looped off. Firefly two was in hot pursuit, popping off its blinking socks. She could hardly keep up with the drama. But what did it mean: territorial aggression, a heated debate, a playful gambit?
The electricity flicked back on, the generator choked to death, the fireflies disappeared. She was left with the mystery.
Another mystery emerged, though nowhere near as thrilling. Her neighbour, a mouldy silver fox in fisherman’s pants and ripped singlet advertising Bali, known only to her as Kev, started up effusive good mornings and enthusiastic waving, day and night. He’d wave repeatedly until she acknowledged. He dropped over unannounced daily with dirt-crusted vegetables, bone broths or homemade bug-spray. All of it smelt like tropical despair.
She offered Kev little indulgence. But nothing could dissuade him. Ten o’clock on the dot, he’d arrive with his invisible invitation for a cup of tea and biscuits. She sometimes hid on her back deck, but he’d loop around and spot her. Kev was harmless, but a nuisance. His visits did break up the tedium. He was a font of tropical knowledge, a bloody know-all in fact. She found herself laughing at his pathetic jokes just a little. She even took up chamomile, lavender tea with a slice of ginger upon his advice to stave off mosquito bites.
‘Mozzies don’t just bite skin,’ he opined. ‘They bite whatever you’re giving off. Change that, you change everything.’ As factually incorrect as this little gem was, she drank the concoction with pleasure. A new calm seeped over her.
He gifted her fishermen’s pants. To her surprise, she wore them.
She turned off her lights at night to tempt the fireflies back in, recording their excitable blinks, searching always for patterns. One night, when she noticed two battling fireflies with random blinks, suddenly loop into orbit, and gently mirror each other, the meaning became clear to her. She was watching love signals, coquettish chase and assignation.
‘Of course!’ she said. ‘Love calling.’
Something caught her attention then. She turned towards Kev’s house. His front porch light was flickering. Was it a faulty bulb, a bad connection? She stared at it, sorting through a pattern now so familiar to her.
‘Oh,’ she whispered. She blushed. ‘Oh.’
She grabbed her torch and walked to him, slowly blinking all the way.
© Tropical Writers Inc 2026