[Issue 2025.72]

‘Safe in a Malachite Storm’, Devin Miller

Art © 2025 Carmen Moran

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I was trapped in the library when the storm of beetles came. The city was given no warning, though Kirin, the head librarian, grumbled to me later that he’d bet the storm-seers had known it was coming. Being forewarned might not have helped; storms came on so suddenly that it was common for people to find themselves trapped in odd places with strange people.

The small branch library was due to close soon. I, a thirty-ish stonemason of unmarked gender, was there to borrow the poetry of Ronofice Quick, my favorite poet of our city’s past. Assistant librarian Moro, a pint-sized, energetic woman I had seen forcibly eject rowdy library patrons, was recording my name on the book’s loan card, but I wasn’t paying attention. I was watching the only other library patron, a seventeen-year-old girl, as she packed up her books and notes. I had seen her in the library before, and something about her always discomfited me. She moved slowly, stiffly, seeming reluctant to stop studying, but she finished packing and moved towards the doors of the library. Then as always, my eyes slid away from the discomfort. Moro handed me my chosen book. The girl cried out, and I nearly dropped it.

I turned to look. Through the small panes of glass in the doors, I could see the glint of green, and I knew the malachite beetles had come.

Kirin, venerable head librarian, cheerfully offensive to those he found stupid or unkind, moved swiftly to bar the doors. It was too dangerous to go out in a storm of beetles. We could not go home now, could not contact family or friends to tell them where we were. I thought of Yalovin, my best friend and housemate. He would be at home, I thought, and safe, but it pained me to know he would worry about where I was.

There were only four of us in the library. Kirin, Moro, me, and the girl. When asked, she told us in barely more than a whisper that her name was Torice.

The library had few windows; it was cut of the thick stone of the city cliffs. We gathered around the doors to watch the malachite beetles swarm.

All of us had seen the beetles before, though Torice had been a small child when last they’d swarmed. We were still afraid, not knowing how long the storm would last. Moro, nervous energy fizzing under her skin, fretted about her wife and daughter. I worried, but I was also mesmerized by the storm’s beauty. The insects were thick in the air, moving so quickly it looked as though they didn’t move at all; each beetle took another’s place as they sprang through the air. Their wings were green, veined like the lace of a dying leaf.

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Kirin read from his favorite adventure novel, Moro from a 7th century comedy of manners (this was the only time her constant energy seemed to calm). Torice wouldn’t read aloud, but she listened, tapping her fingers against her collarbone. There was little to look at but the people around us, and I watched Torice as I listened to Moro read, puzzling over what about her tapped at my brain. Perhaps it was because I was also worrying about Yalovin that it struck me that she reminded me of him, although I couldn’t see what they had in common.

I read poetry, Ronofice Quick’s and my other favorites. Our voices drowned out the hum of the beetles, lending variation to that unchanging rhythm.

“I always wondered about you,” Moro told me on the second day of the storm. “Coming in with stone-dusted clothes and borrowing the most beautiful poetry.”

“You think stonemasons don’t read poetry?” I asked, challenging her partly because I thought a challenge might expend some of her constant energy.

“I’m a librarian,” she said. “I know better than to think that. I’m just glad of the opportunity to hear which poems you like best.”

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It was cold at night in the library. The malachite beetles’ storms were known to disturb the weather, their iridescent carapaces reflecting sunlight and cooling the ground. We slept wrapped in Kirin’s emergency blankets, close together on the floor of the librarians’ office.

On the second night, I woke to see Torice’s eyes open, catching some tiny sliver of light. When she saw my own eyes glimmer, she whispered, “I don’t want the storm to end.”

“No?” I asked softly.

“I like the library. It’s nice here.”

“It isn’t nice at home?”

Her eyes winked shut, but my sight had adjusted to the darkness, and I saw her lips move. “I like the people in the library.”

I did too. It was frustrating to be trapped with no choice in the company, and tempers frayed, chewed thin by nerves. But I liked how Kirin could be such an optimist and a realist at the same time. I liked Moro’s enthusiasm for things she enjoyed, her willingness to show it.

I hadn’t been able to decipher enough of Torice’s personality to be confident I liked her. But knowing she liked me changed the way I looked at her small form on the dark library floor.

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The hum of the beetles’ flight was loud, the usual hubbub of the city silent. Few were foolish or desperate enough to go out. The beetles were so thick in the air it was impossible to see the way through them. There were stories of people trying and becoming disoriented mere feet from their doors. And the sound of the beetles could overwhelm anyone.

“My father died because of malachite beetles,” Kirin said on the third evening, as we huddled around the wood stove in the office making a thin bean soup.

“He went out in a storm?” I asked, shocked.

“No, no. But they used to say that eating the powder of crushed malachite beetles would make you a storm-seer.”

“Did it work?” Torice asked, grey eyes bright in her too-thin face.

Kirin shrugged. “I don’t know. It killed him in weeks, long before another storm came.”

After storms, the beetles were swept up and stored for use in medicines. I hadn’t known they could kill as well as heal.

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We heard the quieting of the storm before we saw it. Moro rushed to the doors to look out, when I paused at the end of a poem and we heard the stillness in the absence of my voice. We followed her, Torice last. The beetles were dying, falling out of the air as if the hooves of a goat had ripped the moss from a stone. The ground was covered with them, ankle-deep in brilliant green beetle bodies.

We opened the doors. Other people from the homes and businesses on the library’s street began to trickle outside, then to pour. It was like a party, people wading through the drifts of insects to hug each other.

Amid the happy chaos, I saw Torice bend to pick up a handful of beetles.

I caught her arm before she could slip them into her pocket. “What are you doing?”

“I—I think they’re pretty. I wanted to save some.”

“Torice. What, you want to try what Kirin’s dad did? Be a storm-seer?”

She didn’t look at me. “No. But I think my parents might like to be storm-seers.”

I had seen her quiet, tight-lipped, tapping fingers, afraid to read aloud. I had seen her in the library every day, studying longer than a diligent student needed to. I had heard her whisper, “I like the people in the library.” But I hadn’t put it together, and now the strands in my mind braided tight and I knew why she reminded me of Yalovin: at seventeen he, too, had been unsafe at home. I remembered all too clearly the profound thinness of him when his father had denied him meals, fed him on harsh words instead of care. His nervousness then was like Torice’s now. He had had me to help him get free. Torice, it seemed, had no such friend.

I met Moro’s eyes. She had heard Torice’s words too, and I saw that she’d added the clues together as I had. She came close, asked softly, “You need a place to go?” She didn’t wait for an answer before calling Kirin over, and we stood together under a beetle-free sky, we four mostly-strangers who had weathered a storm together.

Torice had shut her eyes, but she hadn’t opened her fist. Kirin hadn’t heard what she’d said, and he looked confused, but he was patient enough to help without knowing what was wrong. “Come back inside the library,” Kirin said. “We don’t close for another six hours.”

“Let go of the beetles,” I said. “We’ll help you find a place to go when the library closes for the night.”

She hesitated, lip tucked into her teeth, thinking. Then she looked me full in the face and said, “Nobody helped me before the storm. Nobody noticed. How can you expect me to believe anything is different now?”

She was right. People didn’t notice, or if they did too often they looked away. I had looked away myself, and could not forget it, and could find no answer for her.

“Storms don’t change anything, it’s true,” Kirin said. I thought of how many storms he must have seen in his long life. “Except with the people you met during the storm. We can’t un-know each other. We don’t forget what it was like to take care of each other. And then another storm comes.”

He was right, too. Torice was not safe with the people tied to her by blood, but she could be safe with the people tied to her by storm. I held out my hand to her.

Slowly she unclenched her fist and let the beetles fall.

© 2025 Devin Miller

[Issue 2025.72]

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