Comments by Phoenix Haupt

It depends on where you live, but I don't think anywhere where it gets cold enough to see your breath in the winter would have fireflies out. I've only ever seen them during summer/fall where I live.

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 23:31:39 -0400

If anything, I feel like it'd more likely to see fireflies when it got warmer, not less. Is the narrator misremembering something, or might you need to do some more research? If you have personal experience seeing them in winter, you can ignore this.

It's a great note of characterization that the narrator seems to think the fireflies are personally spiting her.

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 23:29:41 -0400

To me, this seems like a clear case of anthropomorphism. The fireflies not being around has little to do with "fighting back" and everything to do with the changing climate.

Suggested Revision

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 23:27:12 -0400

She didn’t have a white coat, though, so it was not to be.

Suggested Revision

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 23:26:55 -0400

She’d imagined herself a scientist then, with a lab full of subjects and the test tubes she saw on TV.

Again, the narrator is eager to declare the truth of the world based only on her own experiences.

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 23:26:30 -0400

I don't think I can say science is ethical to animals, certainly not, but it's definitely better than it used to be. Thomas Edison once publicly electrocuted an elephant to demonstrate his electric current, and I don't think anyone could get away with that today.

Suggested Revision

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 23:22:32 -0400

“We’re no better than the psychopaths, are we?”

Suggested Revision

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 23:22:14 -0400

The textbook may not have shown the final stage of the boiled frog, but she’d known the frog had died nonetheless.

I'm marveling at the narrator's capacity to declare everything gone when she's barely even looked outside.

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 23:21:09 -0400

While she's looking over her own backyard, this statement echoes a broader "climate despair" that isn't true overall, which I find really interesting. She seems almost eager to declare the world doomed, because at least then she wouldn't have to step out of her comfort zone.

Does she have it on a timer or something? Would it not just simply stop if she did?

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 23:16:58 -0400

I'm curious as to why a sprinkler might quiet down but not stop, especially when there's no one there to control it, and personally I find it distracting because I don't know why it would do that.

Seconded.

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 23:14:42 -0400

It seems like a good amount of time passed from the beginning of the story here, but there's little in the way of action or indication that time has passed.

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 23:14:17 -0400

The trees here are an interesting note of characterization—at one point, she clearly wanted to make things better about the world, but she gave up at some point.

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 23:13:15 -0400

Seconded.

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 23:12:26 -0400

Suggested Revision

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 23:11:13 -0400

She looked up, hoping to spot the Big Dipper, unable to make out but a handful of stars flickering in and out faintly.

Suggested Revision

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 23:10:44 -0400

“The earth is dying too.” She breathed, and imagined the huff of air that would've been visible if it had been cold enough.

"Cooked" is a great word to use here—I like how it implies a state of being dead that's "useful" to humanity.

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 23:09:44 -0400

No one did eat the frog, I'm assuming, but dead is more neutral when it comes to connotation and cooked is different—things are cooked to be eaten, generally. I like that she's fixated on that state of being.

Suggested Revision

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 23:02:21 -0400

She recalled a page from her science textbook with a sequence of images revealing a slimy green frog being boiled alive, just the process though, it never showed the frog when it was actually dead, or maybe cooked was a better word.

The phrase "nostalgic peace" is an interesting choice here.

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 22:53:28 -0400

It's neither good nor bad, in my opinion, but I do find it later contrasts with the image of a budding scientist gleefully ripping apart insects.

Structurally kind of strange, as the sentence runs on for a while, and "while dew began to gather on the blades of grass" loses me as an image.

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 22:51:40 -0400

Normally, dew gathering on grass is something beyond human observation—you go to bed, and then when you wake up, the grass has dew on it. I'm not sure what to visually imagine while reading it, personally, so it distances me from the story.

Whether you intended it or not, the use of the backyard as a setting is really interesting!

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 22:48:51 -0400

The narrator's backyard serves as an "acceptable" form of nature, one that is still largely shaped by cultivation for human use.

The artificial comparison of the moon to an LED is really clever, given the narrator has been wrapped up in the digital world until just recently.

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 22:46:26 -0400