The Cosmology of Moths

Highly Commended: FFF Flash Fiction Competition 29

The Cosmology of Moths is a short meditation of faith without religion, with elements of magical realism exploring family, absence, grief, and the mundane profundity of nature. It was highly commended (joint 2nd / 3rd) at Competition 29 for Free Flash Fiction, winning a monetary prize and publication. Find more details of the competition here.

The moths arrived the night I abandoned God.

First, just one pressed trembling against the pane. The desk lamp that called it reflected in the glass between us like its crown. Then another. Then dozens. My accidental congregation.

Our priest once said faith meant endurance. In truth, he was her priest: but I was hers, so he became ours. Once, I believed him, but now I knew he was wrong. Endurance was just a nice way to say waiting in pain.

Moths never wait. They just fling themselves towards radiance. If one found a bonfire, it would cheerily conclude incineration was a form of applause. For moths, Paradise is an accident of wattage.

When my mother died, her priest said she’d met glory. I said glory looked like loneliness to me.

Three nights I wrote nothing at that desk before I finally opened the window. Thousands swarmed me, paper wings suffocating me in frenzy. They bruised constellations on my lungs until they buried me. Then all was still.

They were gone by morning. When I staggered upright, I suddenly hunched over and violently retched, sputtering coughs of silver powder on the sheet upon the desk. When I was empty, I called the priest.

In the eulogy, I said I’d never believed in divine geometry before the moths. Their orbits torn from heaven circling bulbs. The clockwork of their quivers ticking steady until night. The symmetry of their bodies built by larvae born from death, the journey no-one taught them to make arcing into light.

Everyone clapped. People don’t risk it when it’s delivered from a pulpit.

Unseen, in the transept, I glimpsed a single moth meet votive and ignite in vivid light: a martyr. There, in its choosing between being and not-being, I saw–perhaps, just briefly–my mother’s smile.