The Firefly Dance

Bright lights flicker in the dark evenings of summer. Pinpoints of hope float against the black descent of night. The sweetest of small and innocent creatures find their way through the shadows. Fireflies seem to dance on sheer air, illuminating the space between heartbeats.Children give off a similar brave glow, despite the challenges of their young lives, and the lessons of childhood are often painful, the shedding of fragile wings in the gloam of an uncertain future. The stories in THE FIREFLY DANCE see that reality; the authors know that childhood is sweetly sad and sadly sweet, profound and deceptively easy to categorize, yet poignant to remember.Phyllis Schieber's Sonya, a child of Holocaust survivors, is confronted with the responsibilities of her legacy when she has a poignant encounter with a classmate, another child of survivors, and her mother, in a local shop in their 1970's New York neighborhood.Kathryn Magendie’s Petey deals wryly with her family’s move from the cool blue mountains of North Carolina to the hot flatlands of Texas.Augusta Trobaugh’s stoic Georgia boy leads us through his surreal encounter with a mysterious backwoods toddler who turns out to be anything but ordinary.Sarah Addison Allen’s indomitable Louise invites us inside her wistful yet wisely observant life in a small Appalachian town, after her father dies.These are not stories of sentimental childhood memories, of funny escapades and simple emotions. These are small jewels reflecting the essence of what it means to grow up dancing among the shadows of life, carrying a brave, small beacon because you know that even the brightest days always, always, end in darkness.