Michele Forbes - Ghost Moth

“I love you, too.” Katherine’s medication brings her suddenly on a downward sweep. Her eyes close. She is hearing her father’s voice now. He is talking to her of summer, as though he is the sun that warms it. His voice is the light of summer. He is there on the horizon, lighting up the world.

And her beautiful children. Beautiful. Never did a word carry so much. The very essence of them. So many horizons now as Katherine moves on the swollen sea.

She sees them, her beautiful children. She sees them living their lives like emotional detectives, far away on the blue horizon, searching for and assimilating signs and symbols and using every shred of evidence to compile their own individual dossier of affection. They are tirelessly and privately obsessive in their foraging for clues, measuring, recording, interpreting the temperature, the gradient, the circumference, the unconditionality of their mother’s love for them. And, like points of light luring ghost moths in the dusk, they even set themselves as traps to try to capture her, to keep any bit or piece of her that might be hovering loose in the night air. All signs, no matter how trivial or inconsequential — the residue of a dream, the accidental hearing of her namesake in a supermarket, the catching of a familiar song on the radio — is given weight and importance beyond the norm. Love that is not lived but only constantly sought. Becoming something of and in itself. A narcotic that numbs them against the world that is, and fills them with the delicious and continuous surge of expectation as they surrender to the fantasy of her return. She sees them.

So many horizons now. There, over there is Maureen, taking on the mantle of responsibility, a paisley robe too big around her shoulders, protecting her siblings from what she does not yet know or understand. Surrogacy assumed of her whether she is ready for it or not. On her horizon, Maureen is watching a sports event on television, an opening ceremony, and her own children are teasing her for weeping at the underwater sequence where giant fabric fish swim in the charged, milky air of the arena as though they are speaking to her. Katherine sees this. And there on another horizon, there is Elizabeth, Elizabeth sitting listening to the radio, her hair cut short now, wearing a tartan blouse and black jeans. She is listening to the radio and wondering why so many times she does not offer her opinion on things she knows so much about. She has not been prepared for just how quiet sorrow has made her. Oh, and Elsa. Elsa is there, too. Elsa’s twin girls, gorgeous little things with golden hair, beside her at the dinner table and she is feeding them. But they are easily distracted, and react with bewildering panic at the sound of a door closing or a too-quiet kitchen. Their mother tongue is the language of checking, Are you there? Where are you now? as though they have inherited the expectancy of abandonment. And there is Stephen. Stephen. What a beautiful man he has become. Look at the dark wave in his hair just like his father’s. Look at his broad shoulders. He is alone, happily working on a remote island. Another blue horizon. Imagine. How extraordinary. But soon he will resent the visit of a group of students to his one-man anthropological station. While their company will enliven him, the sense of loss when they leave will be so unbearable, he will wish that they had never come.

And George. Where is George? What horizon is his? Is that him, tiring himself out from trying to make the world as real as possible? Holding his breath as though he lives in a state of constant fear? Is that George there, watching the goodness of his city crumble in front of him like dirty, dried earth falling through his fingers? Uttering his city’s place names in bewilderment. George, in an awful, endless winter, reassembling, in his sleep, the pieces of a body he has found, the remaking of a beautiful child? Trying to make sense of loss. But there is no sense to it, George.

The downward sweep takes her again, but this time there are no more horizons, as though the ocean covers everything. Now everything appears reduced and intensified. In the distance a dark, wide head appears. It moves towards her. The ocean begins to part and then disappears. The dark, wide head moves closer. Up out of the invisible sea. Closer and closer it comes. Katherine stares at it. Then she sees what it is. This dark wide head is the head of a woman. The eyes of the woman hold on her. The heft of her body now remarkably still, her bulk buoyed by the invisible sea. That big gray head. The woman now walks toward Katherine. She wears what looks like a Quaker’s bonnet covering her hair, the bonnet so simple, it is a black-and-white arc around her face, its black ribbon elegantly tied under her chin. The woman is standing looking at Katherine, her body slightly twisted away from her, her head turned toward her, a look of soft intent upon her face. A moment and then the woman taps her hip censorially with her left hand and then begins to slip her right hand under the belt of her long skirt. She pulls a little muslin pouch out from under her belt. She opens the pouch with a challenging look on her face. In the little pouch, a swell of yeast. The woman folds the muslin once again and returns it to the warm skin of her hip. She turns away from Katherine and walks out toward the infinite arid scrubland that now spreads out before her, which has arisen out of the sea. Then the woman stops after only a few paces. She stops and turns her head and the whole sequence starts over again. She is simplicity at its most eloquent.

But they have met before, she and this unnamed angel in the bonnet.

The association of his touch as he had brushed her hair away from the back of her neck to measure her and Katherine’s sighting of the framed photograph of Princess Elizabeth and the woman in the bonnet had somehow fixed itself somewhere in Katherine’s psyche. A moment regarded. He had measured her from her neck to the center of her back and her spine had taken it in, had registered it, just as in the same way, in the same moment, her eyes had taken in the woman’s face. Now, Katherine’s spine, as it disintegrates, begins to release what it has been holding on to, like the last fizz of a dying insect’s wing against a flame, like a last skin, and the woman returns to Katherine in her disease as though to offer her possibility. As though to offer Katherine the song lines of the wide, open plains, where, in the faint cracks of the baked, hardened landscape, love survives.

How do you stay awake to see the thing that eats you?

Now the woman is gone and everything is bleached white.

Where is George?

She finds him.

I can feel your hand in mine and mine in yours, George.

“George,” she says to him.

Elsa sits up on the edge of her bed. She sits as though she is on a wall watching the sea, or watching people playing in a park, or watching for a thrush to return to its nest with worms for its young. She sits in her long white cotton nightdress with the blue m embroidered on the cuff. Her arms hang by her side, the heels of her hands press lightly against the mattress, her legs swing loosely over its edge and her shoulders and her back slope casually downward. Her eyes slowly scan the darkened room. Is it early or is it late? She does not know. She sits quietly with the remnants of her recent dreams, allowing fragments of thoughts to drift, settle a moment, then wander again.

The blind of the bedroom window has been left up. Elsa slips out of bed to look outside. Tiny lights, headlights of cars in the distance, wind their way down the hills behind Stormont. Elsa is able to determine their curious paths as they dip into the half-black and out again. Broken pieces of light, they relentlessly follow the twists of road all the way down, blotted out only for a brief second, then satisfyingly reemerging to complete their journey. Night-weary. Black-swallowed. Home. These are the hills where the big white building sits. The big white building, which is full of angry men, all shouting for the playgrounds and swimming pools and cinemas to stay closed on a Sunday, all yelling for the curbs and streets to be painted red, white, and blue, all asking for the nonbelievers to be brought to retribution. But no big white building now. It is obliterated in Elsa’s picture window, where everything looks dark and shades of dark. All black, all safe. Elsa looks out at the night through the window of her bedroom, as one single piece of light moves down the hills behind Stormont, trickling down the indefinable black, disappears and, this time, does not reemerge.