Bedtime Stories: “Emilia, Who Was Not Like Other Girls”

 

Emilia was not like other girls. On a dare she once ingested a firefly, having been told she would gain its power by a bitter boy who had a crush but found his affections unreciprocated. Within the week her toenails began to pulsate like electric milk beneath the bed sheet at night and sometimes very early in the morning. It being winter, she found it easy enough to hide the contagion of the glow — which had begun to spread like neon wildfire from heel to clavicle — from her parents and students at school with layered clothing, scarves and hoodies, and by generally avoiding the lightless places of the world. In time she learned that it was the darkness itself that triggered her affliction to expose itself. Crying herself to sleep in a well-lit room became her ritual, and she began to believe she would die alone with the knowledge of her embarrassing secret deficiency, until the night the bitter boy never came home, having slipped and tumbled into a cave. The neighborhood search party came up short except for when a naked, glow-in-the-dark scrawny girl ascended the hill carrying him in his arms, alive and safe.