That summer my family broke up I stayed on my aunt’s farm and slept in a bedroom with no curtains. Its wide window faced vast silage fields I couldn’t see; they were invisible in the anonymous darkness of the countryside. I kept a shadeless yellow light on when I couldn’t sleep, and read books my older cousin left there years before: Z for Zachariah and a novelisation of a plot from the soap opera Home and Away.
Out in the yard, a cat or fox would trigger the security light, a giant bulb, like from a football field. A panic of moths would drown it in minutes. Light would drip from them as they bounced in a swirl, like they were part of a bigger life form. A few would break away. Their little screaming faces tore up to my window, as their wings beat like they were trying to attract my attention. Inching my face nearer to the glass, I studied their silent mouths stretched open, and imagined their tiny voices pleading for me to let them in. There had been a lot over the past half year to teach me about pity.
One night I let a moth in, more by accident than to see what would happen. It flew straight for the bulb, circling it a few times. It bounced off, like it wanted to land, but couldn’t. The bulb gave an aggravated hum. The moth flew to the wall. I tried to lift it off with the cover of the book, but it flew to a poster of some boyband, Bros or Brother Beyond, my cousin had left behind, landing on one of their faces. Even if I did catch it, I would have to choose between setting it loose in the hall or try to sneak it out the window, where others were waiting for their chance to come in. I was learning to distrust my kinder assumptions. And knew that I couldn’t keep the moth in the room with me, where it would nestle in my hair and eat my clothes. I whacked the book hard against the moth, crushing it against the wall. The dead bag of dust floated lazily to the ground like it didn’t mind. And even though the others had seen me do it, they clung beating at the widow, queued up, preferring the unobtainable light and the whack of my book to the darkness outside.
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(Photo: Torsten Hofmann/ flickr.com/ CC BY-ND 2.0)
- The Company of Moths by Gerard McKeown - December 1, 2022