"I wonder," said Noa, watching one last firefly blink out as the morning sun climbed the fence, "where do the fireflies go by day?" Her lantern-jar sat empty on the porch step, its lid still open from last night's watching. She had counted eleven little lights before bed, and now there was not a single glow anywhere.
"That's a fine thing to wonder," said Grandpa, sipping his tea. "You could go and look."
So Noa carried the empty jar into the wide green yard. "I wonder if they sleep in the tall grass," she said, and crouched low where the blades bent soft and cool. She found a spider stringing dewdrops and a beetle rolling by, but no fireflies. Her shoulders drooped a little. The jar still felt too light in her hands.
"I wonder if they hide under the leaves," she tried next, tiptoeing to the old lilac bush. She lifted one leaf, then another, gentle as turning pages. Underneath, a sleepy ladybug and a bead of rain — but no small lanterns waiting for dark.
She stood very still and thought. Where would a light-maker want to rest? Somewhere shady. Somewhere hidden. Somewhere cool, the way a bedroom is cool with the curtains drawn.
"I wonder," Noa whispered, "about the woodpile." It sat in the deepest shade at the yard's edge, logs stacked like a little stair. She peered into a gap between two logs, holding her breath.
And there they were. Not glowing now — just plain brown beetles with folded wings, tucked in the dark cracks, resting. One, two, three... more than she could count, all patient and quiet, waiting for the night to need them again.
Noa let her breath out slow. She did not reach in. She only looked, the way you look at something you finally found. "So that's where you go," she said softly. "You're just waiting for evening, same as me."
She ran back to Grandpa with the empty jar swinging. "They sleep in the woodpile! In the cool dark, all day long!"
Grandpa smiled. "Then you found what you went looking for."
That night, Noa sat on the porch step as the sky went from peach to plum to deep soft blue. And out of the woodpile, one by one, the little lights woke and lifted — blink, and blink, and blink — floating up into the dark like sparks that had forgotten to fall.
She did not fill the jar. She just watched them rise, knowing now where each one came from. Her eyes grew heavy and warm. "Goodnight, little lanterns," she murmured. "Rest well in your woodpile."
Grandpa carried her in when the counting slowed. And as Noa drifted off, the last thing she wondered, soft and unhurried, was whether the fireflies were wondering too — where the boy with the empty jar went, by night.