The moth that left its flame

An allegorical fairy tale

Were there a moth sheltered under the fold of a tree, it might have grown old in the mottled light, always murky, never knowing there was another kind of light besides the lantern’s languid glow. It might have lived its whole life licking rain off rough bark, believing the dark was simply the shape of things unseen. It would know the groan of the tree’s old bones in the wind; it would know the taste of nocturnal rain before it fell, but it might have never felt the weight of open sky or seen its shadow stretch long and thin.

And so it was for the moth of our story.

The lantern hung suspended, a pot-bellied dying star breathing light, her light a decaying yellow, her blotches like the sockets of decaying teeth the moth ran its tongue over and over and over. Around the lantern, our nameless moth’s family spiraled, the way water spirals into a drain. And our moth spiraled too, towards a gravity it never needed to name.

The moth’s family revered the lantern, their dim and dappled sun, antennas tracing the hazy purple that lined the moist cracks and crevices. Along the cracks of the lantern grew a brown velvety fuzz that reminded the moth of his mother’s legs. A soft dust would envelop her, scintillating in the lantern’s heat as she would land in the lantern’s lacerations. She carried the weight on her wings, brown and gold and soft, the weight of belonging. Every night the mother would buzz about the lantern, praying to God, praying for a permanent and firm radiance. Her prayers were akin to soft drumming rain, a constant murmur, a background to everything. And the nights would go on with the moths playing family in the dusty, honeyed haze.

The tree was full of life, insects erratically prancing about, chirping little bundles of exploding glee. The moth would play on the creaking old branch in the wind when the lantern would go out. But he had a secret he told no one. On the highest branch he was forbidden to climb, there was a crack in the canopy, and through that crack, if he angled his head just so, a beam of something pale and distant would fall across his eye. It hurt him beautifully. It was not gold.

His mother started buzzing faster as the lantern’s flickers grew longer, her wings a thin, frantic blur. The cicadas came out earlier than anyone expected. Beetles pranced under the tree’s lowest leaf. As the summer nights grew long, so did the mother’s prayers. She prayed until her voice cracked. She prayed until the brown velvet fuzz on her legs grew thick as wool. The moth’s friends talked of fireflies when the lantern would go out; he had never seen one. They spoke of finer lanterns, brighter lamps, fluorescent torches, and scented candles that shone brighter than a cat’s eye in the dark. The moth wondered if it would be easier to see the fireflies now that the lantern started going out more often.

His mother prayed as she groomed him after his escapades, scraping his scales off with her legs. He would sit very still while she worked, caught between the comfort of her attention and the sting of her scraping, watching the scales drift down through the lantern light, a stream of gilded death. One night he tried the dew only to discover it tasted grey. In the mirror of the lantern as he returned home later — or was it early morning? It was difficult to tell with the lantern’s faltering, fluttering light—he saw his scales glittering around islands of bare membrane on his thorax. It must be from her grooming, he thought.

One evening, exploring a hidden crevice of the tree where the lantern’s light barely reached, the moth found a constellation of brown freckles adorning the bark. They were the same velvet, the same warm brown as the fuzz that lined the lantern’s cracks. He licked the pulsating freckles. The taste was home, sweet, and familiar. He drank deeper. He pulled back. His tongue burned; home and rot were now inseparable, a single taste he could not untaste, coating the inside of him.

The moth returned to the lantern. It was blazing, suddenly, with an oppressively flooding fullness it had not shown in many nights, its gold so deep, so full of promise. His mother was praying. The brown velvet he had once pressed his face into as a child had spread across her thorax now, a harsh, decadent gold so bright it looked like fever. Her legs were thick with it. Her voice was thin. And still she scraped.

There you are, she buzzed. I was wondering where you went. You’re growing distant. You’re not thinking about the light.

The moth said nothing.

Her scraping slowed. When she spoke again, her voice was not harsh. It was quiet and full of a grief he had never heard before. I scrape you because I am afraid, she said.

The moth looked at her.

Why do you neglect our light?, she asked.

I want a light that is constant, said the moth.

There is no constant light, she said. Constant means death. Light is a living thing. It breathes. It hungers. You think somewhere out there, beyond the tree, there is a light that does not ask? A light that burns for nothing, asks for nothing, gives and gives and never takes, gives and gives and never burns out?

I don’t know, said the moth.

This is the cost of belonging, she said.

Then maybe I do not want to belong, he said.

His mother stared and stared, her antennae twitching ever so slightly in the static air.

If the lantern goes out completely, she said, I will not know who I am without its burn.

The moth looked at his mother—thick-fuzzed legs, fever-bright thorax, wings worn thin from praying—and did not know if it was a warning or a confession. Perhaps it was both. Perhaps those were the same thing. That night the moth also prayed.

In the name of the One whose light is the true light, and to whom belongs my seeking and finding, You were here before I knew you. You were the sweetness hidden in what I called home. Thank you for the dark that teaches me to see. I thank you for the silence where my mother’s prayers do not reach. They were sincere, her prayers—I thank You for her love, even when it scraped too hard. I thank You for the velvet fuzz that bound her, even as I ask You to dissolve mine. I thank You for the teacher who wore the face of sickness.

I am pleased with the lost scales. And with my mother’s failing body. And with the going out of the lantern. I am pleased because all of it has brought me here, to the threshold where You are the only light that does not burn, does not take, and does not dim. Let my annihilation be not in the lantern’s heat but completely in Your Radiance. Make me a witness to the Constant.

I am still afraid. I am afraid that if the lantern goes out completely I will not know who I am without its burn. I am afraid that what I call seeking is only leaving. But I have already left. I left the moment I tasted the freckles on the bark and found them sweet. My prostration is not to the lantern.

Nothing happened. The lantern flickered on, off, on, off, a heartbeat he no longer shared. The tree creaked in the wind, and the moth felt the creaking pass through his thorax like a hook pulling nothing. The air around the lantern was warm and familiar and wrong. He did not know where to go. He knew only that he required a direction, and the lantern was no longer it.

A shadow slowly began growing around him. It descended from the same crack through which that pale beam had once fallen across his eye and hurt him beautifully. The shadow thickened and took shape, and a hand came reaching down through the leaves: enormous, deliberate, its fingers curling inward to form a hollow space around him. He was not held by the One to whom he had prayed. It was a lesser hand, a sent hand, a hand that served. But it was vast all the same, and it was for him.

Let me go, said the moth. Let me go and I will return. Let me go and I will say the lantern is enough. I will say my mother was right. I will stop wanting what I want. I will stop wanting. Just let me go. Let me —

He stopped. He did not know why he stopped struggling. He did not know if it was trust or exhaustion or something else entirely. He only knew that he was tired of praying against himself and that the warmth enclosing him was a hand that asked nothing. It did not tighten. It did not loosen. It held him the way the tree held the bark, the way the dark held the fireflies he had never seen. This warmth was simply present. It was the warmth of something that had been sent.

I am still afraid, he said. His voice was small. The hand did not answer.

I am afraid I was wrong. I am afraid the lantern is all there is. I am afraid the sweetness on the bark was only sweetness and not a sign. I am afraid I am just a moth who wanted more and called that wanting God. I am just a moth with a bare membrane and borrowed bravery and no way of knowing anything at all.

The hand opened. He fell into a darkness so encompassing he thought for a moment the hand had never existed and he had been falling his whole life. This was not the darkness of the lantern’s off-hours. This was not the steely quiet of his father’s vigil. This was the dark beneath the dark, the dark behind the dark. A dark full, fuller than any light, fuller than any flame, fuller than any lantern burning at full oil with no thought of dawn. He could not see. He could not hear. He could not feel his wings. But the dark had a presence. It was alive and entirely unbothered by him, and it tasted cold, and the cold was the cold of something that did not need him to be anything at all. He was not sure he still had wings. He was not sure he had ever had wings. He was not sure he was.

And then he was.

Slowly, something began to return. He felt the ache of membrane stretched too long and unused, the raw tingle of air touching something that had been hidden. He flexed, and his wing answered. He was still a moth. He was a moth, and he was falling upward.

He tumbled out of something soft into the illuminated horizon. And as he braced for the air, a brown flash across the sparkling sky, he saw not a lantern, nor a flame, nor a candle, nor a firefly, but the moon, gazing down from the sky, like something that had been waiting for him since before he was born. Its light was silver and soft and did not flicker. It did not ask for his scales. It did not ask for his prayers. It did not ask. It was constant. It was constant.

The moth felt it: the weight of the open sky, a silver pressure parted by his wings. He looked down, and there on the grass below, cast long and thin and utterly his own, was his shadow. The moon gave him his shape and asked for nothing.

Far below, through the tree’s canopy, a small yellow light still flickered on, off, on, off. He could not see her, but he knew she was there, praying still, voice worn thin as a moth’s wing. He did not turn back. But he carried her with him as a grief he was learning to hold in the silver air. She had given him the most honest thing she had. And he had left anyway. And the moon did not punish him for it.

He flew.