Content note: mentions of suicide

June finds the dragonfly the summer after Miko dies.

Has died, June’s mother might say, shadow tremoring in the doorway to June’s room. Has been dead for months, Junebug. But not you. God, not you.

But time for June has crystallized to a slow, sticky trickle. She sleeps, badly. She warms the leftovers her mother leaves her in the fridge, counting bites until her stomach twists into a knot too tight to eat. She pulls old paperbacks from her bookshelf, tales of girls with wings and stars for friends, and stares at sentences for hours, uncomprehending. She curls her knees up to her chest, tugs her comforter over her head, and thanks a god she doesn’t believe in when the hours pass dreamlessly.

If it were up to June, she’d stay this way, a cluster of limbs calcified into amber, forever.

But her mother is relentless. One day, June wakes to sunlight spilling over her body, the window by her bed cracked open to let in a soft breeze. She smells honeysuckle and woodsmoke, freshly turned-over soil in the garden. Then a clean-laundry scent at the door.

“It’s the first nice day since the heat wave.” Floorboards creak beneath June’s mother’s slippered feet. “You could go for a walk.”

And something about her voice, small and hopeful as a raindrop, is enough for June, wordless, to give in.

Outside, July’s humidity swallows her whole. June crosses to the opposite sidewalk to avoid a neighbor walking her goldendoodle, takes a left turn instead of a right when laughter peals from a family’s backyard. When, at the far corner of the park, she approaches the wooded entrance to a greenway, her muscles unclench, like a hundred lights blinking shut at once.

The path winds for miles. June walks until the ache in her body swells loud enough she can’t hear her thoughts over her lungs heaving for breath. Around her, the late-afternoon air hums with heat—or maybe those are insects.

If June were an insect she could slough the skin from her bones, lay her husk in the long grasses to decompose. She’d be new, then, or at least lighter. She could disappear into these woods, their deep green, and become anything.

The buzzing in June’s ears is louder now, insistent. Her arms prickle with bug bites. She rubs at one on her shoulder, hard, sweeping her surroundings: The gabled rooftops hemming the tree line have grown sparse. Ahead, a tunnel cuts through a hill, all stone and sharp, clean angles. Through its darkness, June can hear, faintly, the noise of the interstate rumbling toward her. Beneath her thumb, the bite has swollen red and raw.

She ought to turn back. She’s just reached for her phone to navigate the way when a blue-green glint zips past her. June stills.

There, perched on a thin, birch-white branch, is a dragonfly.

It’s big, the length of her heart line, its eyes round and bright as marbles. If June’s mother were here, she would scream. But June finds it hard to be afraid when the dragonfly’s legs curl around the branch so slightly, when its wings shroud its body like a shawl.

She holds out a hand, trembling. The sky pools with light.

The dragonfly quivers. Then flutters, feather-light and shimmering, into her palm.

It’s the stillest creature June has ever held. Every part of the dragonfly’s body, from its sapphire tail to its gossamer wings to its wide, silvery eyes, scatters light. She doesn’t know how long she stands there, in the buffeting heart of the woods, watching its wings furl open and closed. She tries to time her own body to its rhythm, filling her lungs in the space of one wingbeat, emptying them the next.

June dreads the moment her bones will sink back into the world she knows, where insects bite and friends die and loved things never find their way back to you.

She won’t move. She can’t. She’ll root her feet into the earth until moss blooms on her neck and bark crawls up her shins.

That is, until the dragonfly swipes its forelegs across its eyes as if to blink, lifts its tail toward the last flecks of light filtering through the trees, and rises from her palm to land in a patch of clover a few feet away. June inches closer, extends a hand—only for the dragonfly to flit through her fingers to the honeycombed head of a wildflower, petals gilded in the sun. Then the top of a small shrub, balanced on the point of a perfectly ovate leaf.

Violet streaks the sky when they emerge from the head of the trail. By this time June’s mother will have begun to pace, a shrill lecture swirling in her head, one June will tune out.

But here, in the hush of dusk, the dragonfly settles back into June’s palms. She brings it to her chest, where it throbs like a second heart, and, fingers clasped tight, takes one step forward, then another.

Before she knows it, she’s sprinting home.

At night, June dreams of dark swarms of buzzing bodies, of vanishing into a hurricane of little legs and wings and mouths. She thrashes awake, cold, to a chasm hollowing her gut. It hurts to breathe; to unsnarl her limbs from the heavy mass of her comforter; to trace the slivers of her rib bones until she feels solid.

She should switch on the light. The lamp on her nightstand is right there.

Then again. June cups her own cheek, wet with sweat or tears she doesn’t know. All blacked out, the cosmos of her room quiets. Moonlight limns the planetary bodies of her desk and dresser and bed. It is easier to imagine, in this strange half-space, Miko’s ghost slipping through the floorboards to press beside her.

To whisper to her: “The sky today, between the branches. There were all these bright pockets of blue.”

Or: “You would have hated it. The photo they printed in the paper. It was from right before you cut your hair. But she came to your funeral, your mom—so many people came. When they lowered your body into the ground her face was all red. Even your dad—well, he didn’t cry. He just sort of shook, like a leaf in the wind.”

Or, unfurling her limbs toward her window, reaching for cheekbones, clavicles, hips: “Come back. Please.”

When morning glows gold through the blinds, the vertebrae of Miko’s back melting into exoskeleton, the pulse of her throat into thorax—when all June has left is the dragonfly, nestled by her pillow: “Are you real?”

When Miko was alive, June remembers taking the long way home.

How on good days they’d trade stories and snacks and collect offerings in their pockets, round stones, speckled feathers, all these soft, sun-warmed things, as if to say look here, and here, and here.

They would play this game where one of them would say two words and the other would pick between them. Small or little? Crow or raven? Flower or blossom?

And Miko would say:

“Small, because it’s sadder. Easier to hold. Raven because it’s a color, too. And flower or blossom—you choose. I can never decide.”

On bad days they would huddle on the far bank of the pond behind Miko’s house, clouded gray with algae. Miko would stare hard at the water, and the quiet would swell around them like silt, like a steady accumulation of grit. Some days, sounds would follow Miko out the door. Loud voices, a wooden slam. Glass shards shattering to the floor.

June has memorized the velocity at which Miko’s face can close. Like a flower, or a blossom, or a fist.

The dragonfly follows June everywhere. To the kitchen to watch the microwave turntable spin, and to the bathroom down the hall, where June shoos it behind or in front of the shower curtain for privacy. It finds easy purchase on her shoulder, hidden behind tresses of hair. June learns to look for the tickle of its feet when it scurries along her wrists to play, or the shuttering of its wings when it flits beside her earrings, like blinds opening to let in the sun.

When the day darkens, the dragonfly soaks in the warm beam of June’s lamp, chirping, while June scours online encyclopedias and entomology blogs until the words blur. Multiple times she stirs with her laptop slumped sideways on her chest, or sinks asleep only when the sky twinges with light. The dragonfly, to its credit, can make it to midnight before fluttering to the top of June’s head, nestling in her hair. It beats its wings twice, gently, before stilling, as if to say good night.

One afternoon, when even the house lazes with late-summer heat, June’s mother corners June by the stairs and steers her into her home office. Three monitors brimming with code blink at June in accusation.

“Junebug. I’m worried about you.”

June says nothing. The dragonfly is napping, tucked at the nape of her neck. Asleep, its body cools, its pulse dimming until June can hardly sense it at all. A coil of barbed wire unspools in her stomach.

“June,” her mother says again. “It’s been weeks. You barely touch the Tupperware in the fridge, and you don’t sleep. Last night I woke to use the restroom at four in the morning and your bedroom light was still on.”

An email dings from one of the monitors. June’s mother doesn’t flinch.

“Summer’s nearly over. I’ve let you be for months, but school starts back up in August. Your teachers won’t be as lenient. And you’re a junior now, and there’s—the fall dance. Right? And that literature class you wanted to take at the local college. Your SATs. I just don’t want—” It’s like a rope pulls June’s mother’s words back inside her. “June,” she says, the fibers of her voice tightening. “Please.”

Inside June, a sparking coil electrifies, snaps. She says, “It was Miko’s idea to take that class.”

And, the words spluttering like wildfire, “She would have hated fall formal but gone anyway, and she would have thrifted a suit and changed in our bathroom. I bought her a bowtie she’ll never get to wear. No one knew her when she was alive, and now everyone wants to forget her. But I won’t. Not until I die.”

June’s mother’s face blanches. Behind her, the code on another monitor compiles and compiles, drowning itself in itself.

Her lectures to June grow longer. She suggests books, another therapist, a drive to the farmer’s market with the little cartons of strawberries and tomatoes swollen like hearts. Most nights she waits outside June’s door until the slot of yellow beneath it blots out. June has taken to researching under the covers, cocooned in the dark.

Except one night, when June rouses for a glass of water and voices slip to her from beneath her mother’s bedroom door. “It’s killing her.” Static crackles dimly through the drywall. June can hear her mother’s footsteps padding back and forth across the carpet, pictures her holding her phone white-knuckled, a faceless silhouette on the other end of the line. “My daughter’s friend killed herself and at this rate she’s going to follow.”

Bile rises in June’s throat. Back in her bedroom, she ghosts her fingers over the dragonfly’s neatly segmented abdomen, its antennae slender as eyelashes. Her mother is wrong. She’s the happiest she’s been.

The next afternoon, while the dragonfly forages for insects in the backyard and the sun bakes her shoulders, she gathers small offerings to present it. A smooth twig to rest on. A jewel-toned beetle on a leaf.

She whispers to it, dawn or daylight? Meadow or field? River or stream?

The dragonfly is dying.

It’s nothing like June imagined it to be, dark and teethed and gasping for breath. Death, for the dragonfly, is a concave spine, a droop of the wings. It is the cobalt leaching from its body and the glimmer fading from its irises. It’s how the dragonfly won’t eat. The way it’s begun drifting toward June’s bedroom window every chance it gets.

One day June spots it lingering in a splotch of sunlight on the ledge. It peers sadly up at her. A dull blade wedges itself between June’s ribs.

She stays up later and later. She circles the backyard for hours, trapping midges and moths in honey-coated mason jars, piling pebbles and dandelions on the sill. She reads and reads. Nothing is enough. The one thing she can’t do is tell anyone. What would she say? I’ve been carrying around a dragonfly since Miko died. It feels almost like knowing her again.

August hangs overhead like smoke. A week before school starts, June muddles out of an overlong nap to discover the dragonfly nosediving toward the window. The second its wings nick glass, it hairpins away, then swoops again. June’s heart gnaws. She cleans her smallest jar of its sticky, uneaten residue, pokes holes in its thin metal lid with a pushpin, and lines the bottom with withered leaves and stems. Into it she coaxes the dragonfly, then bundles the jar in a tote bag she hugs to her chest.

Outside the clouds corral like lost limbs, suffocating each other. They lurk low to the ground as June nears the pond. She hasn’t ever been without Miko. But she remembers the way, the roundabout route they would weave through the trees. The long, feathered reeds they’d hide in, Miko’s house stony and silent in the distance.

The last time June saw Miko was like any other day. They walked back from school together the Friday before winter break. It was a half-day, practically pointless. It was cold enough to sleet but not to snow, which seemed pointless also. Maybe Miko was quieter than usual. June can’t remember. They reached Miko’s house first, even though it was farther away from the bus stop, like they always did because it gave them more time to chat, and because Miko didn’t like to walk alone. Miko didn’t want to go home that day—but she never did. Neither of them had found anything to fill the other’s hands with—but it was always harder in winter, when gray light fell over everything and their fingers nipped red from the wind.

If June had known it was the last time she’d ever see her friend she’d have memorized every detail. She wouldn’t have to wonder if the sky that day was silver or ashen, if she’d hugged her goodbye, if she’d followed Miko into her house like a haunting and thrown plates at her parents or wrapped her in a tourniquet of blankets or kissed her, things would have turned out different. How could you know someone so well and not know them at all? How could you know someone and then one day, one ordinary, forgettable day, know only the memory of her, the sound of her name distorted through your mother’s shaking voice at the kitchen table, a colorless picture of her in the paper, how she used to write poems and carry little oranges and a digital camera around everywhere, how once she came over and strung your room in fairy lights you’ve since torn down, how the last time you heard her laugh, really laugh, wild and overbright as a supernova, it was when, like magic, a dragonfly grazed the tip of her thumb, landed for a moment before disappearing into the open mouth of the sky?

Yesterday, June read about the lifespan of a dragonfly. How they could live up to six months but would almost certainly die from hunger, or a predator’s jaws, in less than two weeks. How they spent most of their lives not as dragonflies, but as nymphs—pale, inelegant creatures still growing into themselves. How nymphs, ravenous for transformation, spent much of their youth hunting terrible things: tadpoles, mosquito larvae, small fish. Even themselves.

June draws out the jar from its swaddle of canvas. It takes her several seconds to locate the dragonfly, cowering beneath its bed of browning leaves. As the first beads of rain splatter against her skin, she grips the jar tight, like something that might escape.

Here is what June knows of Miko: the color of her laugh, a pale, clear blue. How her voice in the morning sounds like thread-thin legs skittering over water and her sentences taper off at the ends like wings. How the idea of her hangs in June’s mind like a silvery orb and June cannot bear to think of her as anything else. A dragonfly. A ghost. A wound spilling with light.

Here is what June does not know—what the world looked like from her eyes before she did it. If two choices flashed before her and she knew, with the sudden clarity of a piercing or a gunshot, which she would pick then, now, forever. If there exists another universe where dragonflies live forever and stories never end and light is as vicious as grief. If in that universe they know how to be okay again. If worlds like that ever bleed into this one.

Days skulk by. June lies in bed and listens to them detonate one by one into her popcorn ceiling. The sound drowns out everything. If any noise leaks from the jar she’s left shut by the window, June wouldn’t know.

School tomorrow. June supposes her mother will drag, fuss, threaten her out of bed. She will sentence her to the tattered booths of the bus and the pebbled plastic stools in the cafeteria and the desks with their etched curse words and gum-stuck underbellies, the boys who call her names and the girls who whisper them in hallways swollen like anthills, alone.

The light through the blinds changes from yellow to white to yellow again. June’s head pounds. Then the door. Her mother.

“Come in,” June says after a moment. It dawns on her if she were her mother, she might have long ago broken down her own door.

Before she learned to untangle rows of code, June’s mother was a ballerina. She still holds herself like one, treads lightly and sits on the edges of seats, even plush couches and snug armchairs, with her spine straight. Her nose wrinkles when she lets herself in, but she doesn’t comment on the grimy row of mason jars cluttering June’s desk, or how she can’t see the floor beneath the dunes of clothes weathering its landscape. She weaves a strange dance across the room, hopping over a crumpled sundress, sidestepping a stack of books, to reach June’s bed. In her hands is a bowl.

“I brought you leaves,” she says.

“What?”

June’s mother worries her thumb against the lip of the bowl. “You’re always in the backyard, digging up sticks and rocks, bringing green things into the house. I don’t know why, but it seems to help. I want to help, whatever it is.”

June doesn’t realize until her mother bends down to grasp the Kleenex box under her bed that she’s crying. Both of them are crying. Not torrents of tears but wells, shining depths dredged to the surface.

Sometimes things are there and then they aren’t. The way June knows before she takes the bowl from her mother’s hands and brings it to the lone jar on the windowsill that the dragonfly will be gone. Sometimes your life, all at once, metamorphoses into a half-form you don’t recognize and you can’t ever go back. Sometimes all you want is to live in a story, a dog-eared paperback, or between encyclopedic lines of facts, where the gravity of language topples sentences into logic, where if you never got to tell your friend how much love would worm into the black hole of her absence when she left you, you could redo it, you could care for a dragonfly and atone for it the rest of your life.

Sometimes things are there and then still there.

June’s mother, willowy trunk, tired eyes, collapsing onto June’s bed as sobs erupt through her, folding her arms around her like exoskeleton, like new skin.

“Where do you think we go when we die?”

This one day, by the pond, Miko wore an oversized flannel and lace-up boots with peeling soles and too many clinking silver rings to count. Last week she sheared off half her hair with kitchen scissors, locked in the upstairs bathroom while her father pounded on the door. There, their bodies slumped inches apart among a sea of cattails, June wanted to loop strands of it around her fingers like shafts of light and tug.

June nudged Miko with her elbow. They both laid flat on their backs, facing the sky. “What kind of question is that?”

Miko shifted in the grass. “A useless one, I guess.” June could hear the curl of her mouth, wry. “Like. My parents believe in heaven and hell and being a good enough person on earth to earn some gold-leafed afterlife. I don’t. But I like the idea of…I don’t know. Leaving my body behind. And maybe getting to exist somewhere, somehow, as something more true.”

They didn’t have the words, then, for their bodies and their wants. Sometimes, June would think later, it was only through the prism of the world they could really look at each other.

June followed Miko’s gaze upward, where she could almost see it, horses and cranes and whales with joints made of stardust, roaming just beyond their sight. “I know what you mean,” she said then. “I hope so.”

One day, walking back from the bus stop, June takes the long way home.

Autumn wreathes the sidewalks in leaves, dapples the entrance to the greenway in gold. From the playground in the park, a child howls with laughter as she surges down the slide, where her friend is waiting in the woodchips. June offers a small smile and keeps walking.

Now that the weather is cooler, there are more people on the trail, joggers with earbuds in and parents with strollers. But for the most part the path is the way June remembers it. Earthy and solid beneath her feet. She passes the spiraling scales of a pinecone high above her; a hollow log sloped toward a brook, chipmunks darting in and out; the tails of two clouds joining in the sky. June looks, catalogues in her mind a dozen beautiful things and leaves them as they are.

She wanders until she can hear it: the whoosh of cars in the distance, shivering through the opening of a tunnel. All the birch trees around her have lost their leaves. Once, one bore her a dragonfly. June threads her fingers through the ends of a low-hanging branch, curling them like legs. Then she turns toward the underpass and walks through.

The world on the other side underwhelms her. More trees, more trail. June has not reached the interstate just yet.

Then—there. June’s vision snares on a knife of light, shimmering in the distance. She runs. Her lungs flutter in short bursts. Into focus winnows a lake, its edges endless, gleaming teal, turquoise, aquamarine. It’s the color of summer skies. Of Miko’s laughter. Of the body of a dragonfly, scintillating like a star.

The first dragonflies were born from primordial seas, a hundred million years before the first dinosaurs. Months ago, June savored this fact in the twilit pocket of her room, running her fingers up and down along a ghostly creature’s translucent veins.

Now, June strips off her shoes, her socks. She wades in till her clothes float all around her, till her body ripples and fractures into something almost like itself.

She draws a breath and plunges under. The world compresses, cools, quiets. Her heart thrums in her bones, wingbeat after wingbeat.

Somewhere deep below, an unsung song calls out to her. Fly or soar? Miko whispers. Growing or grown?

Before June can answer, a familiar melody in her throat, her limbs kick back toward the light.

© 2026 Luna Hou