It was a sweltering hot summer night in the tiny town of Rockport, Maine. In a green, open forest, hidden crickets hummed a sweet harmony, and the stars in the sky danced along. The leaves of sycamore trees fluttered lightly in the breeze. The sound of a TV drifted out of a house that was situated in the middle of the clearing.
In this house, in a room adjacent to the room with the TV, there was a six-year-old girl named Autumn Lianan. This little girl, with strawberry red hair and inquisitive blue eyes, was sitting on a pile of blankets and staring out her bedroom window. She was supposed to be in bed – she had already received a warning from her mother – but she just couldn’t fall asleep. This was the night of the last day of school. The next day would mark the beginning of summer vacation, and Autumn was anticipating the fun she would find in the huge forest outside her door. Despite her name, summer was her favorite time of year; she loved playing in the soft green grass or climbing the branches of huge trees, and she especially loved catching fireflies. Their golden glow captured her attention whenever she found one.

Just at that moment, a lone firefly flitted past her window. Autumn shot to her feet and pressed her nose to the window, tracking the movement of the lightning bug. She wanted to catch it so badly it pressed a physical pain into her stomach. If she left the house right then, she could follow it – and she would be back so quickly her parents would never notice.

The furtive little girl slipped out of her room and crept down the stairs. She had done this quite a few times before, so she knew exactly where to place her feet so that the wooden steps wouldn’t creak. After peeking around the corner to check that her parents were consumed by the TV, she darted from shadow to shadow and made it to the front entrance. The six-year-old held her breath when the front door groaned loudly, but the family cat was the only one who noticed. Finally she slipped into the warm night air.

Autumn’s purple polka-dotted night gown swayed around her legs as she ran barefooted through the grass. Her heart quickened – where was that firefly? Suddenly its shimmering golden light darted into her vision. The six-year-old skipped up to it, giggling happily as it bounced around her head. She leapt into the air, trying to catch it, but it avoided her grasp. It flitted off into the night, and she quickly chased after it.


Her plan of only staying out for a minute evaporated into the air as quickly as the nighttime mist. She traveled farther and farther into the forest with the little firefly, not realizing that it was so dark now she could hardly see her own bare feet. The trees were now growing so closely together that she had to twist around trunks and duck beneath branches. Catching the firefly had become a game, and she wouldn’t be happy until she won.

Finally the glowing orb slowed, as if it realized she was getting tired. It bounced through the air, waiting for her to catch up. When she reached for it again, it shot upward, winding through the branches of a large tree.

Autumn wasn’t going to let it get away that easily. She had, after all, won the award for Best Tree-Climber in her first grade class. She spotted a low branch hanging from the tree; the little girl fearlessly grabbed it and swung up into the leaves. Luckily, the firefly had come to rest on a low branch, and she was close enough to reach it. She swiped a strand of copper hair behind her head, and pursed her lips in concentration. Autumn stretched up, up – her hand was nearly touching the firefly – but without any warning her foot suddenly slipped from the branch. Autumn yelped and tried to regain her balance by catching another limb of the tree, but her hand found only air. The little girl fell backwards and was suddenly tumbling down to earth.
She let out a high-pitched scream of terror as the darkness engulfed her. The little girl landed with a thud on something hard and sharp – a rock. The large grey boulder had been invisible in the night. It struck the back of her head, rendering her unconscious almost immediately. Mere seconds after her playful nighttime adventure, Autumn lay on the ground, looking nearly as if she had fallen asleep. Many minutes passed, but she didn’t awake. The firefly floated down from the tree and hovered above her, seemingly aware that she was hurt. Then its light faded away into the night sky.


“Mom, Dad, come quick! There’s a little girl on the ground over here, and she looks like she’s dead!”

A little brown-haired boy of about eight was calling frantically to his parents. The family of three was on vacation in Rockport and had decided to spend their morning hiking through the forest. Now this hike was suddenly interrupted by his cries, and his parents rushed to his side.

His mother had assumed he was exaggerating, but in an instant she let out a gasp of horror. A little girl with strawberry-red hair and a torn night gown was lying on the ground; her eyes were closed and dried blood was matted into her frowzy hair.

The little boy reached down to touch her, but the woman quickly stopped him. “Jayden, don’t touch her! If she’s got a head injury we don’t want to move her. It might make it worse.” Turning to her husband, she urged him in a panicked voice, “Call 911!”

By the time the paramedics had made their way into the forest the little girl was beginning to stir. She opened her light blue eyes and stared at the crowd around her with a confused expression.

“Hi, sweetheart,” the brown-haired woman greeted her in an appeasing tone as the paramedics tended to her. “You’ve had an accident, but you’re going to be fine. I think you fell out of this tree and hit your head on the rock. Do you remember that happening?”

Autumn shook her head, still looking confused.

“Well, that’s all right. What’s your name?”

The now-docile little girl seemed to ponder this question as if it was inscrutable. Finally she whispered, “A…Autumn.”

“Autumn, that’s a pretty name,” The woman responded. “How old are you?”

The six-year-old’s forehead wrinkled. “I… I don’t know.”

The woman’s eyes widened in concern. “Well, can you tell us where your family lives? I’m sure they’re very worried about you.”


The little red-haired girl seemed even more confused. “Aren’t… aren’t you my family?”

Jayden, who was kneeling beside his mother and watching the proceedings with an air of curiosity, gasped. “No, of course not! You can’t even remember who your family is?”

“I…I can’t remember anything!” The once daring and playful little girl now looked terrified. She looked up at the woman with a blaze of panic in her eyes. “Please, please don’t leave me here all by myself! Not… not… until I figure out…” she trailed off as if she didn’t know what to figure out, and then suddenly she burst into tears.

“Of course we won’t leave you here!” the woman reassured her. She gently stroked the little girl’s cheek in an effort to calm her, and swatted a yellow firefly away from her face.
Her husband sighed in frustration. “Honey,” he said in an austere voice, “our plane back to Pennsylvania leaves in three hours! If we miss that flight, I won’t be back in time for our client meeting at work! If I miss that meeting you can count on that raise disappearing, and we need that money. We just don’t have time to go door-to-door asking people if they’re missing a little girl!”

“Well, we can’t just leave her here!” His wife was adamant. “She can’t be more than five or six, and look at how scared she is! Think of Jayden. If he was hurt, we’d want whoever was with him to take care of him!”

The couple continued to argue. Autumn, whose tears were beginning to fade into an unhappy sniffling, stared up at them. The paramedics had meticulously cleaned and dressed the wound on her head and were now checking her over for other extraneous injuries. They were unable to find any, so they helped her to stand.

One turned to the woman. “Ma’am, we were able to clean up your little girl’s head; she has a long cut but it isn’t deep enough to require stitches. We also gave her a small dose of pain medication. Her confusion and memory loss may be symptoms of a concussion, so we’d like to take her to the hospital to perform an MRI. However, we don’t really need to take the ambulance; can you just follow us in your car?”

The man spoke before the woman. “Sir, we have a problem – she’s not our daughter. We just found her lying on the ground when we were hiking. We don’t live in the area, so we have no idea who her parents are. And with her memory gone, we can’t ask her to help contact her family. We can take her to the hospital if you’d like, but it would probably upset her if she doesn’t have her real parents with her. So I guess I don’t know what to do.” He looked to the paramedic as if he was hoping he’d have the answer.

This caught the paramedic by surprise. “She’s not yours? But then how did she get all the way out here by herself? There’s not a house around here for at least a half a mile!” He thought for a moment. “First we’ll definitely need to call the police. Depending on how long she’s been here, they may already be searching for her. If they are, then they can contact her family, and they can take her to the hospital.”


Autumn’s parents had unfortunately not yet contacted the police; however, they were frantically searching for their little girl. Her mother had gone to wake Autumn that morning, but upon entering the room she had found an empty bed. After checking all of her favorite hiding spots and the area around the house, she had called her husband, who had immediately rushed home from his early-morning job. Now the two were out frantically calling their daughter’s name.
After an hour they had come no closer to finding the red-haired six-year-old. They began to trek farther into the forest, knowing that she loved to play there. But the farther they went, the more terrified they became.

“How far could Autumn really go?” her mother fretted. “She’s only six!”

“But she’s got so much energy,” her father reasoned. “And you know how she loves to explore.” He suddenly stopped and stared at something in front of him. “Hey, is that a firefly? That’s unusual to see those out in the daytime.”

“It’s just a firefly! Focus!” his wife castigated him.

“But I have this weird feeling we should follow it…,” he replied, and when his wife huffed at him in annoyance, he said, “No, really! You know how Autumn loves fireflies. Don’t you think that if she found one, she would follow it? If we do, too, it might lead us to her!”

His wife had to admit that they were out of better ideas; they had absolutely no idea where their six-year-old might be. For that reason both adults began to follow the little light through the trees. They found it odd that the firefly seemed to be flying in a constant, straight path, as if it was in fact leading them somewhere. It also seemed to be in a hurry – they practically had to jog to keep up with it.

“This…. is…. ridiculous…!” Autumn’s mother panted after nearly fifteen minutes of following the golden orb. “Really, we have got to turn around and go back! There is no way Autumn could have made it this far! We’ve got to go home, and – and call the police, and the neighbors, and everyone! She could have been kidnapped for all we know!” She was now on the verge of tears. “We have got to do something useful to find our daughter!”

Before her husband could reply, they suddenly heard what sounded like a large group of voices up ahead; the actual people were hidden by the thick growth of trees. The firefly headed towards it, and so did Autumn’s parents. They picked up the sounds of an argument.

“The police station hasn’t received any calls regarding a missing little girl.”

“Well, what should we do then?”
“The priority is her health, we need to take her to the hospital.”
“But without her parents...”
“We’ll just have to hope her memory will come back and she can tell us who they are.”

Autumn’s parents pushed through the trees in their path and then abruptly walked into the clearing. For a moment everyone was so busy arguing about the problem of the lost little girl that no one noticed they were there. Then Autumn, who was now curled into the brown-haired woman’s arms, lifted her tear-stained and bandaged head. She caught sight of the two new people at the same time they caught sight of her, and her blue eyes lit up with a shock of happiness. Suddenly everything that she had forgotten came back as if it had never been gone. With yelps of “Mommy! Daddy!” she slid out of the woman’s arms and headed straight towards them. They both fell to her level and embraced her with open arms, and her mother began to cry in relief.

It wasn’t until this moment that everyone else in the forest realized what had happened. For a moment everyone stared at the reunited family with their mouths open, a look of shock in their eyes. Then a huge grin split across Jayden’s face, and his mother clapped her hands over her face. Her husband sighed in relief, and the paramedics began to clap. The firefly bounced around everyone’s heads, as if it knew that it had saved the day.

Autumn was back in her parents’ arms, where she belonged, and now all was well. Now that her parents were back, her bravery was too; she could face the hospital as fearlessly as her nighttime adventure. Afterwards, she would spend her summer vacation as happily as she anticipated – but she might avoid climbing trees.
The last thing Autumn saw as her mother carried her out of the forest was her new friend, the firefly, to whom she waved happily.