Only lightning bugs smell like that.

I am searching for a visual metaphor to describe how many lightning bugs were in Union Square Park tonight.


I remembered this picture, of shells so numerous at first I thought they were sand. Until I looked close, under the nets of fishermen who cast when the sun rises in Gonaives, Haiti. Little shells in piles and piles. Hands and jars and bugs and shells.

And, in both places, mosquitoes to outnumber them all.