I’ve always loved moths.
From the checkerboard of the Argent and Sable to the sunset vista of a Dark Bordered Beauty, I’ve loved them in their shades of brown, black and gold, their bodies open umbrellas, collecting condensation on the windowpane. As a child, when all the rest of the world was asleep, I’d move my bedside lamp to the windowsill and watch them appear like revellers to a midnight ball.
I gave them voices.
‘Let me in.’ said one.
‘I just want to be inside where it’s warm and cosy!’ piped up another.
And sometimes I did let them in – opening the sash just enough to allow them to slip through the gap. I’d watch them dance huddled around the lightbulb, sometimes singeing themselves in their effort to draw closer to the source. Their bodies collapsed from the heat then froze up and stiffened, only to be swept away by my bemused mother the next morning.
“Poor things.”
Did you know moths like light because they use UV to navigate? They’re guided by the moon and the stars. And sitting there in my polyester pyjamas I wasn’t a child. I was the moon-king, with these tiny insects my dominion.
My face even looked like a white planet, reflected against the black of the glass. Sometimes I was frightened of my own absolute power over them. Most of the time, I relished it.
So, years later, when a friend of a friend told me about his moth traps, I was intrigued.
We were in The Dog and Bull after a birthday dinner, and I’d been dully aware he did something to do with conservation and birds but had no idea of his secret other passion. Moths.
“It’s a box with an opening – a light mounted above it. They get attracted to the light and fall into the box and can’t get out again.”
“But what do you do with them?”
“Take a look in the morning and see what I’ve got,” he shrugged. “If I don’t have time to do it before I go to work, I’ll keep them inside until I get home.”
“Inside?” exclaimed a tipsy friend. “Like a menagerie?”
“Somewhere cool. It slows down their metabolism so they can go longer without food,” he explained – enjoying holding court over the table of stragglers.
“Phew.” Winked the tipsy friend, though she obviously didn’t care. She turned away, and I suppose partly out of guilt for her mockery, I pressed him more.
“Got any pictures?” I asked.
A week later, I was setting up the trap in the garden. Autumn was rolling in, a certain chill and unplaceable melancholy in the air.
My wife came out into the garden, having slipped on a pair of my shoes. She looked small and luminous in the afternoon gloom of an overcast day.
“I hope you don’t get too many.”
“I hope I get any.”
She shuddered.
“Hate them. Always have. Y’know, moths used to eat my clothes. That’s what I know them for. Always mine, never my brothers’.”
“They were attracted to how bright you were.”
Bright in the sense of her halo of blonde cropped hair – bright in the sense she was a doctor, and I had a work-at-home admin job that could be done with anyone with a half-dozen brain cells.
“I can’t come into work all moth-eaten. Don’t bring them inside, alright?”
“Oh, should I take your wedding dress out of the box then?”
She slapped me on gently on the wrist and shuffled inside. The garden was deathly quiet, and still. I hardly believed I’d get anything from my trap.
The next morning, I peered in with a flashlight and was giddy and surprised to see hundreds of them – hundreds upon hundreds – huddled into corners, sitting there still and patient and somehow sullen, all sizes and all shades, their papery wings poised for sudden flight.
Their million eyes were half-frightening, half-inviting.
An app on my phone identified them.
Scoliopteryx libatrix
Mormo maura
Opisthograptis luteolata
That last one was a vivid, lichen green with two pips on the outer-wings like slanted, sneering eyes.
I felt oddly afraid. Not by them, but by how much I longed to keep them. I felt the sudden urge to bring them inside, maybe put them in the house like that friend of a friend had suggested – so I could sort through them again later.
But… I couldn’t. I felt a sting of guilt at the memory of taunting them as a child, coaxing the lost things inside only to let them scorch themselves to death in their effort to reorientate.
I opened the box and set them free.
Only…they didn’t go – just sat patiently, waiting for something. I left the garden and, to be honest, forgot about them. I checked some emails because that’s my job. Checking and re-checking emails.
In the evening they were still there, though I’d turned the light off. They waited. And I felt curiously drawn to them.
It struck me once again that they might be happier inside.
First, I set them on the kitchen table. Then, it occurred to me that they might be more comfortable in the living room. I sat with them a while, watching them flutter within the confines of their box-nest but never leave it. Something still wasn’t right.
As night fell, and I watched them and their stillness, I often wondered if they were still alive, even. Then I’d nudge a rice-paper wing with my finger, and it would respond, a tiny body talking, quivering, if not a tiny mind.
I got so tired myself, watching them, that I unconsciously brought them into our bedroom when it was time for bed.
My wife came home about that time. She opened the bedroom door and I quickly pushed the box under the bedframe.
“How was your day?” I asked, nonchalant and a bit embarrassed by my childish project.
“Hellish. Days like this, I just wish I could turn my brain…off. You know?”
When I was sure she was asleep, I put the box in the closet, stowing it under a few of my wife’s longer dresses.
When my alarm went off, I almost instinctively went for the closet to check on them. I’d slept soundly. It was only when I noticed my wife still beside me in bed that it occurred to me.
She was staring blankly at the ceiling, the covers pulled up to her neck.
“Didn’t your shift start at 8?”
She turned to me with an uncertain slowness, staring as if she didn’t recognise me.
“My shift? Of course.”
Then she sprang up, and with an instinctiveness that must be muscle-deep, threw off her pyjamas and put on her workwear, which she’d slung over a chair.
I heard her feet on the stairs, the door open and close hurriedly. I watched from the window as she began to walk the wrong way towards the bus stop.
I tried calling her but there was no answer until about 1pm, at which point she texted:
DON’T KNOW WHAT HAPPENED THIS MORNING. WOKE UP LATE, CAUGHT A BUS OUT OF TOWN? SO MUCH TO CATCH UP ON.
I assured her that it would all be fine – she was a dream employee, after all. I mean, compared to me, she was a bona-fide genius. I stewed over this thought, self-pitying, for a while, before it dawned on me.
It was then that I thought to check on the friends I’d smuggled in the night before, cursing my stupidity at putting them where our clothes were – precisely where my wife didn’t want them.
When I opened the box, I was surprised to see only about half of them were still there. Where had the others gone? I dashed upstairs, shook out the coats and dresses that were hanging up, but there was no flutter of wings or small falling bodies.
I shrugged and got back to work.
My wife came home upset.
“I was so slow today. And sometimes, the answers just didn’t come. Saw a patient presenting with abdominal pain, constipation, fatigue – couldn’t even think what tests to run.”
I assured her but that had worried me.
“Maybe you’re tired – take the day off. Have a duvet day tomorrow.”
She shook her head and took a large gulp of wine.
“I hate staying in bed. There’s nothing for your mind to do.”
Her fingers quivered around the glass. She was afraid in a way I’d never seen before. Traumatic injuries, nefarious diseases, deformities - my wife all looked at them pragmatically. But her own illnesses were mysterious to her. From the inside, the shadows loomed large.
“But this morning…” I began, before quieting myself and simply holding her free hand.
I gazed at her – the breadwinner, the answer to the unasked question of my continuous failure and wanted her to take it easy. For her sake, but also, rather selfishly, so she didn’t burn out. We couldn’t pay the mortgage without her. My heart quickened. I couldn’t live without her. Being close to her.
But the next morning she insisted on staying in bed. She spoke falteringly and I thought without a doubt that she must be seriously ill. Mental exhaustion, maybe?
“Don’t be too hard on yourself.” I whispered, then had a thought. “Do you want to hear about what I did the other day?”
My fear of her reaction had given way to a desperation to spark any response from her at all - to get my wife moving and feeling and being herself.
I opened the closet, revealing the box with the moths in.
“Exactly the opposite of what you said. Luckily the clothes are spotless – I checked. No holes.”
She looked at me, then the box, then me again.
“What?”
“The moths.”
“The what?”
I picked up the box and lifted it onto the bed, but there was nothing inside to show her.
“I don’t understand. What do you want me to put in the box?”
“Nothing.”
My wife blinked, slowly, then coiled herself up in the duvet, wordless.
I didn’t really know what to say either. I was dumbfounded. Even in the throws of covid and norovirus she’d always maintained a certain spark – teasing me about how she was an invalid Victorian maiden, who couldn’t be exposed to sunlight or loud noises.
I let her be, telling her to shout for me if she needed anything.
Usually she’d have a stream of requests – tea, books, some company – but by mid-afternoon I still hadn’t heard a peep from her. I cautiously opened the bedroom door and found her sobbing, softly.
“What’s wrong, darling? What’s wrong?”
I kissed her cheek.
“I… I tried to call for you, but I… I forgot your name.”
I figured she needed more rest – more sleep, more time in our bedroom and less running around after other ill people.
For two days she remained in the room. Once she wet the bed, but I didn’t make a fuss about it. She was too sick to be embarrassed.
At my request, someone from work came round but she didn’t recognise them – insisted I didn’t open the door. When I did, they were shocked at the state of her. I don’t know why I didn’t think to put something on her but I was stressed and tired and… Well it didn’t seem as pressing as finding out what was wrong.
I was also a little afraid of her. On the outside she was my wife - a little dishevelled, admittedly - but on the inside there lay a stranger. A stranger encroaching on my space, creeping through the home my wife and I had made with one another. Picking up our belongings as if she no longer recognised them, too dull and unseeing to fear what might be happening to her anymore.
In any case, the colleague seemed more shocked and embarrassed than I was. She pushed the chocolates and flowers at me hurriedly and asked what precisely was going on.
“And she’s been getting worse,” I added, relating how she’d forgotten the word for ‘water’ the other day and could only indicate that she wanted a drink by offering me a slick of her own drool.
“Oh my god.”
She shuddered. Then thought better of it - put a hand on mine.
I shut the hallway door a little so my wife couldn’t see us talking. No matter – she’d wandered off somewhere. She wandered a great deal.
“I’ve been trying to look at diseases… Y’know, regressive ones. Mental deterioration.”
“But she was fine a few days ago. Doing her work as normal. Those kinds of things take months. Years. Listen, if she’s really behaving so utterly out-of-character and doesn’t know who you are, you need to call an ambulance. She might have a head injury, or-,”
I must have left the door unlocked, because just outside the window, I could see my wife was standing barefoot and bare breasted in the driveway. I leapt to my feet and hurried her inside.
The ambulance arrived and I locked up and we all left together, my heart pulsing in my throat.
I wished the neurologist hadn’t said it like that.
“A tragic, tragic mystery.”
She reminded me of my wife. My wife before, that is. She had an arch, curious look that clever women have, like they’re looking right through you, trying to access a deeper truth beyond.
It was like looking at a spectre of her.
She was trying not to show me how shaken she was, but a quivering little finger gave her away as she slid the image across the desk.
A cross-section of my wife’s skull – a scan of her brain, more precisely. And it was filled with holes.
After the shock and bewilderment came the realisation, and the fear. A cloak of cold, unmistakeable terror sat on my chest and tugged at my spine. What had I done?
They tried to get in and perform surgery – work out what disease was doing this to her. But that would have to wait for the autopsy.
Within hours of our arrival, it was over. Her motor skills failed, her organs could no longer understand their own function. I wish I could have said goodbye to my wife, but by that time, she had gone deaf and blind.
I held her close, hoping she could feel my warmth, at least. All the time I felt cold as ice. Guilty, distracted, petrified.
And now I’m sitting alone in the house, writing this. I didn’t turn on any lights - just slumped onto the sofa and grabbed my laptop to write this to you now. This was my first port of call. I feel too ashamed, too shocked, too lost in the darkness to reach out to anyone right now. Too terror-stricken to put this into words to someone who knows me and could hold me accountable for what I did to the light of my life.
They sent me home in a taxi, with assurances that the cause of death would be found as soon as possible. A new and strange genetic defect was the neurologist’s cautious but confident assessment.
But that’s stupid. I know exactly what happened. And I know what I’m going to do now.
Practically, I can’t afford the mortgage. Personally, I can’t bear to live without her.
I’ve set up the moth trap again. Tomorrow morning, when it’s full, I’ll bring the box into the bedroom. I won’t leave that room until I can’t remember who I am, or who Lucy was, or that I got what I deserved.