HYPNOTICA

One night, in Buck season, we climbed

over the security gate and hurled

ourselves into the sea under the big,

red moon. Emerging alone, I stumbled on a 

luminescence, a greenish-yellow speck in the

black sand. It seemed to be the lantern of a 

firefly, except it wasn’t blinking, but glowing,

still and steady as a distant star. I knelt, 

plucked it out of the pitch, and held it at the 

tip of my finger, mesmerized. Fearing it 

would soon go out, I bellowed the names of 

my friends, and though my voice was hardly 

audible over the clamor of the waves, still 

they cantered over and marveled for a while 

(a firefly, they said, dying, or already dead) 

before returning to the sea. I knelt again and 

set it free into the churning water, where it 

was swallowed up at once. Later, headlights 

illuminated sand and sargassum; defeated, we 

followed the tracks of the patrol cars home.

Anna Schwartzman was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and was taken to New York when she was five, where she has been living ever since. She earned an MFA in fiction from Columbia University and is Managing Editor of Circumference, a non-profit Brooklyn-based literary magazine of poetry and prose in translation.