Michele Forbes - Ghost Moth

“We’re still happy.” Katherine has turned her face into the pillow.

“Are we? This was different.” George speaks slowly. “Then, we were only prepared to see the good in each other.”

Katherine moves her arm out from under the blankets and lets it fall outstretched above her head. It is a lick of white skin in the darkness and George reaches out to stroke it with his fin-gerstips. Her skin is soft and warm and yielding under his touch.

“But there you were. And you kept giving me such a beautiful smile, Katherine, that I was the happiest man in the world.” George reaches out his hand now to stroke Katherine’s hair. “I’m trying my best, Katherine, but. . it never seems enough. Please let it go, Katherine.”

Katherine feels as though she is shrinking in the darkness, pulling down into herself like a small creature sensing the approach of something ominous; her voice now comes from a faraway cave.

“That wasn’t the night you asked me to marry you, George. I don’t know what night you’re talking about.”

“Please let it go, Katherine. Please.” He is begging her now.

“You’re tired, George. Sleep. You need to sleep.”

“Do you love me, Katherine?” George says from the lightening dark.

Is he crying?

“Yes, George, I love you.”

And then on their honeymoon, the most anger George had ever felt. She was able to provide that for him. The most anger ever. An anger that had pushed him out of his words. He had had no language with which to describe it. He had had no name for it.

Katherine is holding something in her hand. It is a folded piece of paper. She opens it. It is a grocery list. Sliced pan, custard powder, two onions . . She looks at the piece of paper in her hand. It is folded again. She opens it again, but somehow the paper remains folded. Each time she opens the piece of paper, she finds it folded. She opens the piece of paper many times. Twenty, thirty times — she is losing count. She never sees the paper folding back in upon itself, but it is always folded when she looks at it. Then suddenly, it is open in her hand, although she has not tried to open it. She sees the words “ Si tu ne m’aimes pas, je t’aime! ” handwritten in blue ink and the imprints of her lips skirting the edges of the paper.

A swarm of orange-red insects.

One of the mouths trembles slightly and softly parts. A sweet sound issues from its white center. A breathy almost imperceptible “Aah,” but a definite note, not a sigh. It melts on the air. The mouth opens again and this time the breath lengthens and releases itself in a curved line of sound. This happens three, maybe four times before another mouth opens on the page, then another, and another, until all the mouths — hundreds of them now — are opening and closing, the sound building and building in intensity until it becomes a seraphic rhapsody. Katherine opens her own mouth just a little, mimicking the undulations of the paper mouths to sing along with them. But suddenly, the mouths shut with an abrupt snap! The song is now left hanging in the air, pulsing, but disembodied from its source. Violently then, the song rushes at high speed in through her half-open mouth like a tornado being sucked into her. It fills her up. She feels her limbs begin to vibrate uncontrollably as they swell and grow longer and wider. The cuffs of her blouse split as her arms and hands become huge; the buttons fly off the front of her blouse; her throat and shoulders rip through her collar. Her feet force themselves out through the ends of her shoes and socks. She is a swollen, fatted pupa prematurely rupturing through her larval skin. Floating now in water. Floating like a swollen carcass, her flesh weeping and skinless from the scald of the sea. There is something beside her in the water. Something huge, but she cannot see it. Something dark and wide. It is getting closer to her. Closer and closer. It rises up out of the sea. It is a huge head with a huge mouth and it is coming to swallow her. The terrifying lips open to take her.

Katherine gives a sharp gasp and sits bolt upright in the bed. The room is dark except for the spoon of light that bends in under the bedroom door from the landing. Stephen is crying. Katherine turns to George in the bed beside her. He is an imageless shape, a smooth, silent mound of sleep. Katherine tries to gather herself for a moment. She feels that her body is tingling all over, as though she has pins and needles that have caught fire. Glowing sparks of brittle, fizzing light through her. But though her limbs feel weightless, her head feels heavy. She gives a dry cough and then climbs out of bed to attend to Stephen. Stephen is already calling her name, his arms outstretched to her approaching shape.

“Mama.”

“Sssssh, darling, everything’s all right.”

His fretting makes his voice judder in his throat like a frightened bird, as though he is attempting to decipher where the large animals that have been chasing him have gone.

“It’s okay, my pet,” Katherine says, soothing him. “It’s only a dream.”

Katherine lifts him out of his cot. Once he is in her arms, his body sinks immediately into her chest, his head tucking into the curve of her shoulder. His weight speaks slumber once again. Katherine rocks him to and fro, kissing his head, caressing his soft, downy curls with her lips, breathing in his skin smell of daisies and milk.

“My beautiful boy,” she whispers, “my beautiful boy,” and she becomes a lullaby. After some minutes holding and swaying him, Katherine carefully tilts her body and, keeping her motion as smooth as possible, places Stephen back in his cot and covers him with his blanket. She reaches across to lift up her cotton underslip from the back of the chair, where she left it the night before as she undressed, and, rolling it into a loose, soft bundle, she squeezes it in under the blanket beside Stephen. The smell of mother for him to feed off.

As Katherine stands beside Stephen’s cot, she feels exhausted, the tingling in her body having given way to a thick grogginess in her limbs and in her back. Her head still pulses heavily. She leaves the bedroom quietly so as not to disturb George or Stephen and makes her way down the stairs to the kitchen. She walks to the counter beside the sink, the linoleum feeling chill against the soles of her feet, and fills the kettle with water. In the back room beside the kitchen, where the fibers of love and life are woven together, Katherine now stands and waits for the kettle to boil.

More than she can handle. That’s what it feels like. But it’s just that they’re both exhausted. Tiredness like a shock in her bones. And her dream has shaken her. At least the station did not call him back and he sleeps still. Katherine knows how deeply George will now wrestle with a sense of failure at not having rescued the child alive, at not having arrived at the fire more quickly, or taken the appropriate orders from his superiors. She knows how difficult it will be for him to accept the fact that there was nothing he could have done to save her. She knows how desperate he would have felt as he made his way back through the house, carrying the girl in his arms, and she knows deep down that, in a sense, he will always carry her.

The kettle begins to screech, and Katherine lifts it off the burner. She pours the hot water onto the tea leaves in the teapot, giving the hot water a quick stir with a spoon before putting on the lid. She still feels exhausted.

She hears a noise behind her. She turns around, to see Elsa standing at the kitchen door, a pale ghost of a child in her white nightdress, her hair disheveled.

“What are you doing up, Elsa?”

“I heard Stephen crying. What time is it, Mummy?”

“It’s early, or it’s late, Elsa, I don’t know. What does it matter, love? Go back to bed.”