the quiet firefly is the firefly that does not signal for mates. it lights itself for its own sake, intermittently, and only in fields where no other firefly is calling. it prefers a hedge, a stand of dry grass beside a slow road, the inside of a closed greenhouse on a hot evening.
a colony's blinking is unsynchronised, almost stubbornly so. observers used to a coordinated swarm sometimes mistake the field for empty. it has, against expectation, been recorded by the same instruments that record silence.
related, in temperament if not anatomy, to the vigil and the solitude rooms; sometimes encountered with the lamp-fly, though they do not exchange light. an old fieldbook lists it under lacuna.
— sat with one in my hand for an hour. it glowed twice, both times for itself. — m.f.