by Leila Einhorn
originally published in HORIZONS: Expeditions in Short Fiction (Twenty Bellows, 2024)
Everything started when the miller moths came. They came on the back of the wind from the High Plains. They came in dark, dire droves, hiding inside the grills of cars, so that murmurations of starlings dived at every stoplight for their tender bodies. They came to sip the nectar of the mountain flowers, guided by the elevating earth. They came as summer’s bounty for the bears. They came moondrunk through our door in the violet dusk when we watered the petunias that hung from the porch.
It was hard to be present those days, with Helen dying 3,000 miles away and no money for a plane ticket. In the evenings, I’d emerge from my office and disappear downstairs in front of the TV. I always kept the lights off so I wouldn’t have to see the plump figures that crawled along the stippled ceiling after the sun began to set. Silhouettes danced against my skin and the whites of my eyes, so that I peered out like a holy apparition through the dark.
I’d been sober for two years, but this was a new kind of obliteration. The more I lost myself inside someone else’s story, the less I had to think about my own.
A week into the moth migration, you came downstairs and asked why I refused to turn on the light. I could just make out the familiar shape of you moving towards the lamp.
“Don’t,” I whispered.
“This can’t be good for your eyes.”
“I don’t want to see the moths.”
Your hands found your hair. “Why?”
“They scare me.”
“They’re just moths,” you said. “They’re not going to hurt you.”
I closed my eyes. “I don’t care.”
Days, then weeks passed in this way until eventually you stopped coming down except to bring me food. Then, you stopped coming down altogether.
Meanwhile, summer bloomed in the foothills, girlish and obscene. The days became longer and longer, so it became harder and harder to hide from the light. Somedays I could manage to eat my lunch on the porch steps, beneath the basket of dying flowers, or I’d take a daytime trip to the movie theater, alone and insensate in the artificial night.
The moths would be gone soon, most of them dead from their journey, except for the lucky few who would unfurl their probiscises and gently enter the open throats of lilacs. Still, I stayed awake until dawn—my mind inside another time zone—and ignored the stench that had begun to claim the house. When I asked you what it was you told me that it was their dead bodies, rich in fat, decaying in the corners of our rooms.
Then, one night, you came and turned on the lights.
I clawed my hands before my eyes.
You tore away my fingers, and it was worse than I had let myself imagine. Thirty, forty bodies dancing towards the promise of the light.
You stood atop the couch and cupped a moth inside your palm. Kneeling before me, you opened your fingers just enough for me to see its eyes, pools of wet light. “Look.”
In the recesses of your hand, a dark beast batted wildly. I could almost feel it against your skin as if it was my own.
You took each moth outside and ushered it into the night, cooing as you went. “There you go, little critter. Good luck on your journey to the mountains.” One by one you did this, giving each one a name as you calmed it through your touch. “It’s okay Henry; hang in there Elise.”
A therapist once told me that we name things in order to tame them. And so it was.
After all the moths were gone, there was only me. I was so small then, small enough that you could hold me in your palm. But instead you left. I went upstairs and sat outside, bathing in the brilliance of the moon.