THE LIGHT BUG

‘Mama, you need to help me kill it!’, came the cry from the other side of my bedroom door. It was late and I needed to get to sleep. Tomorrow was going to be an early morning for me.

‘Go to bed’, I replied.

‘But Mama, please’, my son pleaded. ‘You need to kill that bug. That light bug you saw today.’

‘Sage, I’m not going to kill a bug. Go to sleep.’

‘Please Mama!’, cried my son.

Somehow I had a feeling that I would not be getting any sleep until I addressed the issue of the light bug. When we reached his room, I turned on the light and noticed the small black bug on the ceiling.

‘That bug will not hurt you. Just leave the door open and he will get out’, I told my son.

He was not convinced. I told him I would leave the hallway light on so the bug would get attracted to the light outside his room. For some reason I thought he meant the bug was attracted to the light until I realised there was no light in his room.

‘How do you even see the bug’, I wondered.

‘I see it light up’, he replied.

It was then that it dawned on me that by ‘light bug’ he meant a firefly. He was afraid of the light randomly appearing on the ceiling and I realised that would quite possibly bother me as well. I then turned around and plugged in the night light that lay on the floor. That seemed to appease him as he pulled the duvet over his body and went to sleep.