by Brenna E. Lorenz
At first all I notice is that the dust seems heavy and twinkling in the morning sunbeams, more of it than usual and glittery like flakes of mica. I find a moth and think little of it. It is a small, dead, brown moth, its wings folded tightly over its back, the kind of bug you find in the light fixture when you change a light bulb. I throw the body into the garbage, and later in the day, when I find two more on the dining room table, their tiny legs in the air, I wonder what they’ve been eating.
Sometimes I find moths in my cornflakes. You can’t see them until the flakes are in the bowl and you pour the milk in; then the moths and the ants and the weevils float to the surface. I don’t mind an ant or two in my cornflakes, but weevils are bitter and moths are powdery. I look in my box of cornflakes, but I don’t see any moths in there.
I am not particularly bothered by moths. They don’t bite like ants, and they aren’t corrupt and stealthy like cockroaches, and you don’t ever hear about diseases being spread by moths.
I see several flying around in the sunbeams in the living room, and a great many lying dead on the carpet. I picture them or their larvae eating my clothing, my rug, my upholstery. I picture their eggs clustered under the seams in my shoes, or clinging in rows to the wiring behind the walls.
I take out the vacuum cleaner and go after the dead moths on the floor. The vacuum cuts a swath through the ashy bodies. I vacuum until the machine stops running; it stops abruptly with the dry, acrid odor of burning insect and when I open it up to change the bag, there is no bag, just smouldering moth bodies jammed in against the motor. The smoke billows out and I open the front door and throw the vacuum cleaner out and follow it, gasping. I breathe real air into my stinging lungs.
I don’t want to go back inside right away, so I go to the store to buy some insecticide. There are so many kinds and I want one that doesn’t have a smell and that is not poisonous to cats and one that is good specifically for moths and I find that I don’t really want to go back into my house, but my husband will be home soon and I want to have the moths gone by then.
The house smells like a damp, sordid old apartment that has been closed up for months and is heavily infested with cockroaches and termites. I spray the insecticide around the living room, but I am afraid of it, and I go outside to wait for the moist particles of poison to settle out of the air. My husband finds me there and I tell him about the moths.
“Did you call an exterminator?” he asks.
“No.”
“Well, hell, what were you thinking of? Call one now.”
We go back into the house and my husband makes a low sound of disgust and waves his hand in front of his nose to move the odor back and forth. He sits on the couch next to the phone and the cushion collapses and lets out a great puff of moth wings and scales. He shouts and jumps up. He stands while calling a number, then another. “Damn, they’re all closed for the day. We’ll have to call first thing in the morning.”
He carries his armchair out the door, grunting and coughing. He sets it in the driveway and beats on it with the rake handle. A cloud of brown glitter rises into the late afternoon air. Our dusty old neighbor comes over to watch, but not too close.
“I had those last year,” she says. “Make sure you keep them out of your bedroom.”
I run to the bedroom and am relieved to find the door shut. I look in carefully and I see no moths and the air seems fresh. I close the door again.
We have supper at Wendy’s to escape from the moths, but we are tainted; the burgers smell and taste like moth. A brown curl of dead leaf on the edge of my lettuce turns my stomach.
We get home and the cat runs up to be let in. I pick him up although he doesn’t like that, and I carry him struggling to the bedroom and toss him in quickly. I feed him in there. The moths are thick in the rest of the house, like volcanic ash covering the floor and furniture, the piano like a soft mound.
My husband is coughing and angry. “Why didn’t you call the exterminator?” he keeps asking.
“I didn’t think of that,” I keep saying. “Not for moths.”
In the morning the air is brown with the fluttering of moths. I look at the cat curled up beside me, his fur is bristly and the wrong color. His body is covered with moths. I brush at him to get them off, but the cat collapses into a puff of moth wings and moth dust. There is no cat inside. I turn to my husband. He is a man-shaped heap of moths; some of them squirm and flutter but most of them are dead.
I leap to my feet but they fall to moth dust as I move. My knees and thighs are crusty like weathered limestone or old bread; little is left. I pull myself to the window with my strong arms and smash the glass with the lamp; I get up and fling myself floating out into the air and then I crash on the lawn outside.
They find me there.