Pieces of Stolen Light
The first machine I ever fixed was a radio that had no business coming back to life.
It sat in pieces on our kitchen table, cracked plastic casing split down the middle, antenna bent sideways like a broken finger. My mother had thrown it against the wall three nights earlier when the power cut out again and the static stopped being loud enough to drown out her crying.
I was nine years old.
Too young to know what I was doing.
Old enough to believe I could figure it out anyway.
The trailer was dark except for a flashlight balanced between my shoulder and jaw while I dug through the guts of the radio with a butter knife and a stolen screwdriver from Mr. Hargrove’s garage next door.
Outside, rain hammered against the roof hard enough to shake the thin walls. Water leaked through the kitchen window frame in slow, uneven drips, collecting in a rusted soup pot my mother had shoved beneath it months ago.
Nothing in the trailer was ever fully fixed.
Not the wiring.
Not the plumbing.
Not us.
“Carter?”
June’s voice came softly from beneath the table.
I looked down.
She was curled beneath it in a cocoon of blankets, her knees tucked to her chest. Six years old. Barefoot. Blonde hair tangled around her face.
The blackouts scared her.
Everything scared her back then.
“I’m fixing it,” I told her.
“You said that before.”
“I mean it this time.”
“You don’t know how.”
I looked back at the wires spread across the table.
Maybe I didn’t.
But machines made sense to me in ways people never had. Machines followed patterns. Inputs. Outputs. Logic. If something broke, there was a reason for it.
People broke for no reason at all.
“I know enough,” I muttered.
From down the hall came the muffled sound of my mother crying into her pillow. Or sleeping. Sometimes the sounds blurred together.
June crawled forward until her chin rested against my knee.
“Mom says you take things apart because you think you’re smarter than everyone.”
“Mom says weird stuff when she’s tired.”
“She’s always tired.”
That one sat heavy in the dark between us.
June picked at a loose thread on the blanket wrapped around her shoulders. Her fingernails were bitten down to nothing again. She only did that when she was anxious
“Do you think the power’s coming back tonight?” she whispered.
“Probably.”
“You’re lying.”
“Okay. Probably not.”
She sighed dramatically, making me smile despite myself.
“We’re gonna die in this trailer,” she announced. She said that all the time, and every time it made my chest hurt. I didn’t like it when she said things like that.
“We’re definitely not.”
“What if a bear eats us?”
“A bear isn’t climbing into a trailer during a thunderstorm.”
“What if it’s a really determined bear?”
I snorted softly.
“There are easier snacks than us.”
June grinned then, suddenly and bright enough to change the whole room for a second.
That was June.
She could turn misery into a joke before you even realised she’d been hurting.
I didn’t understand until years later that humor was her survival instinct.
I twisted two wires together and shoved the batteries back into place.
The radio crackled.
June gasped.
Static burst through the speaker before a man’s voice suddenly cut across the kitchen.
“...storm warning remains in effect…”
My chest tightened so hard it almost hurt.
The radio worked for maybe six seconds before dying again.
But June looked at me like I’d performed actual magic.
“You fixed it.”
“Almost.”
“You made it talk.”
I shrugged like it wasn’t a big deal, even though warmth spread through my chest so fast it scared me.
Because for six seconds, I’d changed something.
I’d taken a broken thing and forced it back into the world.
That feeling never really left me after that.
“You’re gonna build robots someday,” June said matter-of-factly.
I laughed. “Why robots?”
“Because normal inventors are boring.”
“That sounds scientifically accurate.”
“You’ll probably be rich too.”
“Definitely not.”
“You could buy me one of those giant trampolines.”
“A whole trampoline?” I teased lightly.
“With the net around it.”
“Wow. You’re dreaming big tonight.”
June smiled sleepily, then said quietly, “You wouldn’t leave me here if you got rich, right?”
The question made me pause with the radio wires in my hand. I frowned down at it in my hands.
“I wouldn’t.”
“You promise?”
“Yeah.”
“You super promise?”
I rolled my eyes. “What’s the difference?”
“A normal promise means maybe. A super promise means forever.”
There are moments in life that you don’t realize become permanent until years afterward.
That was one of them.
The storm outside softened into steady rain while June waited for my answer with complete faith written across her face.
Faith, like I was bigger than this town.
Bigger than poverty.
Bigger than all the things slowly crushing our mother from the inside out.
I didn’t deserve that kind of faith.
But I wanted to.
“Super promise,” I said quietly.
June smiled like she’d just been handed certainty itself.
Nobody should ever trust another person that completely.
The rain outside finally slowed enough for the silence to settle over the trailer properly, and June tugged on my sleeve.
“Can we go outside?”
“It’s midnight.”
“So?”
“So normal children are asleep.”
“Normal is boring,” June said, her eyes wide and begging.
A few minutes later, we stepped barefoot into wet grass, carrying an old mason jar between us.
The Oregon air smelled wet and cold and alive after the storm. The pine trees around our trailer moved softly in the wind while tiny flickers of gold blinked across the field.
Fireflies.
June forgot to be afraid the second she saw them.
She ran barefoot through the grass, laughing while I watched her in case she slipped.
“Catch some Carter,” she called back, a beaming smile on her face as she twirled, her hands up between the flickers of gold around her.
I smiled softly, watching her, then stalked forward to do what she asked.
I caught three fireflies and trapped them carefully inside the jar.
June held it between both hands like something sacred.
“They’re beautiful,” she whispered.
“They’re bugs.”
“No.” She frowned at me. “They’re tiny pieces of stolen light.”
The glow illuminated her face softly.
I remember thinking she looked fragile.
Like something the world would eventually break if I wasn’t careful enough.
“Do you think light remembers where it came from?” She asked quietly.
That question followed me my entire life.
I didn’t know it then.
Didn’t know that one sentence would become the foundation beneath every terrible thing I eventually built.
I looked at my little sister standing in the dark, holding dying light in her hands, and I told her the only thing I’d ever wanted to believe.
“I’ll figure it out.”
She smiled at me like I could save the world.
That was the problem.
June always believed me.
And I never learned how to survive failing her.
