The Stephen Dixon Award for Short Fiction recognizes an emerging fiction writer who is experimenting with form and expanding the boundaries of storytelling. Our first runner-up is Maz Do with “When the Moths Came” published in issue 72 of McSweeney’s Quarterly.
August when the moths came. The air: murky, damp, shimmering. Everything clung to everything. Everything tasted of everything else. The streets smelled of piss, a dirty finger pressed to the back of your throat. They smelled of rot, which flared and inflamed the nostrils. And we were alone, even though we were together. Us and the moths.
The moths nested in the double-paned windows that overlooked an old teak tree. There they nursed their larvae, milky, swaddled by light and time. In those long, fading days, the hours stretched like taffy.
Dusk lasted a year. Within that year the moths ate through their sticky cocoons and emerged into ours. On bookshelves and tables, beneath the couch. Nestled next to light sockets, against the rim of the ceiling fan, between the couch cushions. Dark, small bodies you might mistake for shadows, stains, discolorations. I would brush my finger under the coffee table and four would burst out from beneath, flutter, and fade.
My husband was upset. It had taken us months to find the home.
We must have visited a thousand places, all of them dim, insignificant; I can’t recall the shape of a single one. Funny how you can see a place, be present for hours, and yet time passes easily through the sieve of one’s mind. Certain details cling while many others are forgotten. What I do remember is that the search drove us crazy—we each felt we were the exceedingly reasonable, gracious, and compromising one, while the other was irrational and regressive. Was it too much to ask for light? For space? For quiet? Apparently so.
Then the house off Glen. We walked in, and just like that, we knew. We stood at the threshold of the doorframe and signed the documents, cobbled our savings together and put down the deposit. We were afraid of seeming too desperate, but we knew we had everything to lose, that there was nothing to do but pull out all the cards and give ourselves over to hope. The day the landlord confirmed we’d been approved, we mouthed the address like an incantation, prayed it wouldn’t be taken from us.
The first week passed in a dream. I felt light; gravity operated differently in that home. Whenever I walked through the door I felt a sense of relief, no longer leaden but floating in a pond warmed by the summer sun, my limbs light and buoyed. I remember colors, the green and yellow shadows of the tree’s leaves patterned on my skin. I woke up every morning to birds and the low hum of life. Night fell, things went blue.
During this time I had terrible insomnia and would often jolt awake at three or four a.m. for no reason whatsoever. In that house, though, I didn’t mind—I walked barefoot out onto the porch and sat there, took in the brisk air, drank cold cups of tea, and watched the sun slowly mount the horizon. My husband, meanwhile, lay fast asleep in our bed. I took comfort in knowing at least one of us rested well.
The house was so large that we often lost each other inside it. I busied myself caring for the space and swept through each room, corner by corner, scouring the surfaces for dust and debris. I wiped down the wood, the linoleum, the plaster, acquainted myself with every doorknob and the integrity of each beam. I wanted to break down the house into its elemental parts so I could see its body fully and inhabit it the way it inhabited me, my mind.
I did all this work without a word to my husband. I was confident he hadn’t noticed a thing. It was one of the reasons I loved him. When I’d said “I do,” I’d meant it. When he told me to quit my job, I agreed: I was done with that life; it had nothing to offer me anymore; I was ready to make a home.
I remember the day I met him. He was built well, like a house himself. He stood big, tall, and sturdy, and under the sun he shone bright, like a trophy.
I could tell he was hesitant to approach me but that he wanted to fuck me. I’d had this instinct for as long as I can remember: the knowledge of how desire smells, sounds, all its applications. Perhaps because of that I understood, too, that I’d never felt true desire myself, though I learned the certain satisfaction that comes from being the object of admiration, as I was on that warm spring day.
Though I knew I would marry him, I did the dance, I played my role. He was persistent, he came by the bus station Thursday nights and offered to walk me home. I was coy and refused him six times in a row. On the seventh I let him walk me halfway and told him, on the corner of Pine, that that was as far as I’d allow him to come. I could feel his eyes on me as I walked away, and I felt satisfied.
I learned he was a butcher and for this reason he often smelled of meat. His profession was the only thing I found distasteful; he came home smelling pungent, just a whiff of him tickled the back of my throat. Eventually, though, I relented. I let him into my bed, I opened my legs, and at night, between thrusts, I found myself considering all the other animals he’d turned inside out.
We got married the following winter and easily settled into conjugal life. We saved up, moved to the outskirts of the city, right at the end of the train line. We dreamed of one day leaving it all behind, moving to the suburbs, a neat little cul-de-sac. Cul-de-sac, a dream word, implying privacy, propriety. A long, wide street, nested with houses, at the end of which children play. Pot roast, bacon, butter melting slowly on the counter; white fence, blue sky, eternal green spring.
Later I learned of cul-de-sac, meaning “the bottom of a sack.” In its original translation, more anatomically oriented, “a passage with only one opening.” A place of termination, a place to finish. In other words, a dead end, stinking of obscenity.
I found the first moth on a Wednesday afternoon, perched on a freshly painted windowsill. It was brown, small, and feathered, a neat shape, like an arrow. I watched it climb the length of the window, drag its little legs through the white paint. I stood by, watching, and when it approached me, I trapped it under a glass. Inside, the curve of the glass magnified the moth’s coarse body. The moth circled the perimeter, and finding nowhere to go, climbed up its walls, exposing its underside, a mass of writhing legs.
I thought about what a miserable predicament the moth had found itself in. It could see the outside, sense reality, movement, and yet found the whole world utterly impenetrable. In a couple of hours, the oxygen beneath the glass would thin, and the moth would cling to these last droplets of life with newfound desperation. I wondered if it had the capacity to recollect the days when air was freely available, and if it thought of them with wonderment, even regret for what it had taken for granted. Then I was suddenly overcome by the cruelty of my position: better to end it now than to force the moth to endure the agonizing drip of time for the sake of my comfort.
I found a telephone book. I lifted the glass and smashed the moth decisively: once, twice, again, because it refused to die, and every time I thought I’d killed it, its legs would resume that repulsive twitching. Once it was dead, I scooped the moth up into a dustpan and flushed it down the toilet. Only then did I realize it had never occurred to me to set it free.
They came in through the windows, then invaded the corridors. Slowly, slowly, the moths inched their way farther into the house.
Though I’d been the first to spot them, I later had trouble noticing their presence. My husband, on the other hand, never missed a beat. “There’s one,” he’d say, pointing. “There’s another. See?” At night we’d be watching TV and one would flit across the screen, graze the static. Nearly invisible, wafer-thin: a cruel trick of the eye.
A week after I spotted the first moth, we began to count around ten a day, a few in the mornings, many more in the evenings. A nuisance, certainly, but not quite an infestation. It was difficult to explain to our friends and neighbors the severity of the problem. The moths didn’t make much noise, except for the occasional rustling. They were harmless, they did not invade our food, nor did we find them in our closet, burrowing through our clothes.
Every time we told our neighbors about the moths, they responded with sympathy and concern. We could tell, though, that these feelings were misdirected. “Moving is hard,” they chorused, their voices even and sanguine. “Marriage is stressful.” Soon we stopped mentioning them altogether.
Still, the question of where the moths had come from and why they’d chosen our home lingered in the air.
“It’s the season,” my husband muttered after two weeks of disturbance. We’d been too lenient with them, we’d killed them, but lazily, and we had not hunted them as much as we should have. This was not entirely our fault: they seemed to refuse death. I’d deliver a blow, maiming a wing, and even if one was torn or bent, the moths would manage to hobble along. They liked to play dead too; there was no definitive way to know if you’d won or if the moths were merely taking respite from the battle. So my husband went out and bought a dozen bags of mothballs to fill our closets, a dozen glue traps. We set them out and waited, under siege in our own home.
My husband decided to fell the teak tree. He’d done some rudimentary research online and had spoken with the neighbors about it; all the husbands agreed that the tree was the true source of the problem and that it had to go. It was common knowledge, he announced at breakfast—as though he were orating in front of a crowd of five hundred instead of me and our two bowls of porridge—that trees attracted pests. Not just moths but squirrels and birds, predatory insects, all of whom were hell-bent on devouring our home, worming their way through the wood and the brick. He painted a vivid portrait of the insects seething under the foundations of the house, biblically, heralding a day of imminent collapse. Of course, those creatures had every right to establish homes of their own—such were the laws of nature—but by that same tack, that right was also afforded to us. His voice trembled with pure, distilled emotion: it was our dictum to protect our home and family at any cost, by whatever means necessary.
My husband sat down. I could tell the speech had worn him out. I stroked his shoulder and comforted him. “Do what you need to do,” I said, just as a gray moth flicked up into the air and landed in my porridge. We watched it slowly drown in the honey and milk, gorging itself unto death. The very next week the tree came crashing down.
Between the felled tree and the traps, things settled back into normalcy. I was relieved, if not for my own sake than for my husband’s. At night I reached for him, but he refused me and turned cruelly away. So on the day we woke up and counted fewer moths than usual, he exalted in his victory and celebrated by ravaging me.
My husband tried to be gentle, but gentleness had never come naturally to him. His work necessitated hard, decisive motions, a lack of self-consciousness that allowed him, day in and day out, to cleave meat from bone. Like a bear, he threw me around; it seemed he was insatiable. He bit and thwacked clumsily, he was not delicate with my parts and could not distinguish one from the other. But I found his animal nature endearing and, I have to say, it was enough. The house, the life, enough.
We fucked in every room and marked them as our own; downstairs, in the kitchen, bent over the sink with his fingers in my mouth, on the divan in the living room, with my legs stuck up and my face pressed into the cushions. He had me on the porch, in the yard. Soon the house smelled entirely of love.
We were hungry. We didn’t realize how much we’d lacked. The days blurred, I felt dizzy from the indulgence. Afterward we walked around naked and careless, the house in complete disarray.
And yet they returned. I forget who saw them first and under what circumstances. Was it me, when I opened a bag of rice to find worms, translucent and writhing, mostly indistinguishable from the grains themselves? Or was it my husband, searching for his favorite sweater and finding it riddled with holes? Likely we had each seen some evidence and dismissed it, refused to acknowledge the scourge until the moths had become as persistent and undeniable as a rainstorm.
This time they made their way into our food, our clothes. They grew and multiplied and returned in numbers with a vengeance, even more than before. Now they lined the corridors like sentries in wait. We became paranoid at the slightest sound or movement. It seemed not a single surface remained undisturbed.
I tried to assuage my husband; I used soft words and intonations. I told him to be patient and have faith; come fall and deadly winter, they would die off on their own. It was all a matter of waiting, I said, one had good days and bad days and it was greedy to demand that the world perennially bend in one’s favor.
My husband decided to bring in a professional. This was a last resort, I knew—with him being the sort of man who liked to take care of things himself.
We greeted the man at the door and welcomed him inside. I didn’t even ask him to take his shoes off, though he tracked dirt across the carpet, which I had so painstakingly bleached not one week before. We meekly followed him around our house as he hemmed and hawed and made little notes on his clipboard. My husband showed him the traps filled with dead bodies and the windowpanes where the moths sleepily copulated in the afternoon light.
“There’s no explaining it,” he said at last. “They’re all different species, so it’s not as simple as your typical infestation. And they’re in the closets?”
I nodded.
“The food?”
“We had to throw out a bag of rice.”
“What else?”
“They’re everywhere,” my husband said helplessly.
“Everywhere,” the professional repeated.
He gave us a quote for the extermination, which exceeded our deposit for the house by three thousand dollars. Besides, he said, he was booked for the rest of the month; the earliest he could come was in early October. My husband led him to the door and waved goodbye.
After the exterminator left, I began to have dreams. For the most part they were unmemorable, but they left me with a heaviness that, upon waking, I felt an urgent need to expel. Sex seemed the only antidote, so as soon as I began to stir, I groped for my husband. Now he was compliant, he did not refuse me like before, though I had to do everything myself. Still, in these bluish states, I managed to reach the true climax of my pleasure.
Then one night I had a vision. I woke and saw a moth crawling delicately down the plane of my body, dark against my nakedness. This time it was a giant silk moth, half the size of my palm, with unblinking eyes rimmed in purple painted on the backs of its wings. I shifted and the creature hesitated, it didn’t move but remained soft on my stomach. There I felt it quivering, skimming the surface of my skin with its hair of a tongue. I remembered that I’d read how moths ate organic material, the excess of life: sweat, keratin, calcium. I thought I should kill it, that not even its great beauty should save it from the inevitable.
Then it began to descend. Slowly, slowly picking its way across my skin. A thousand thoughts ran through my mind in the time it took to walk the length between my stomach and that forbidden delta, the space that had inspired in me gratification, grief, and terror alike. I watched it and it watched me, not with its true eyes, but with those leering ones on its wings.
Down, down, down it crawled. I felt its tender delicacy. Every move it made reverberated throughout the length of my body. I became paralyzed by curiosity, pleasure, fear. Not once did I try to stop it, not even when the gap closed by an inch, then a breathless millimeter. I threw my head back, better to feel the sensation.
My husband woke with a start. Without hesitation he sat up, reached out, and smashed it in his palm. The shock of the impact made me convulse; I screamed and ran to the bathroom. In the room’s cold, stark light, I was soon overwhelmed with disgust. I saw myself in the mirror, the moth a black smear on my crotch, and began to vomit into the sink. Distantly I heard my husband pounding on the door, yelling, entreating. He sounded like an animal, I couldn’t make out a single word. I didn’t even remember locking the door; don’t remember the rest. The following morning I woke in my own bed, naked and afraid of both remembering and forgetting. Next to me there was an empty hollow where the sheets had gone cold.
My husband left.
“I’m going to stay with my brother,” he said one day at breakfast. He said this defiantly, and then he lowered his voice. “Would you like to come with me?”
I dipped my spoon into my porridge. I dipped it in and pulled it out again.
He reached for my wrist and held it fast. He was trying to look me in the eyes. But I couldn’t help it, I resisted him. “You don’t have to decide right away,” he said at last and relinquished my wrist.
I helped him pack up his things. I stood in the bedroom and folded his good sweaters and his waxed aprons, placed his cologne with his comb and his razor. He had one box of books, another of his favorite cleavers. The items smelled faintly of him and his work. We had hardly even moved in yet, so the job was easy, altogether too simple—it hardly took an hour total.
“You let me know if you change your mind,” he said, withdrawing his gaze. I remembered, not so long ago, how those eyes had raked my naked body, their clinical sobriety at discovering points of entry. “Goodbye,” I said, placing the last box in the trunk. He looked at me, bewildered, opened his mouth, but seemed to think better of it. He put on a pair of dark glasses and got into the car. I stood in the driveway and watched his car turn the corner.
Inside the house, it was earthy and cool. I heard friendly rustlings from the corner; now silence unsettled me. I removed the traps and buried the dead, walked past the windows and opened each one. I examined every inch of the halls, the well-worn spaces, and those that had gone overlooked. I approached the unmarked door and descended into the dark heart of the house. Silence, an enveloping quiet, my pupils dilated, adjusting. When it came into focus, I saw the mother nest, their teeming masses, enough to blot out the sun. There at last I searched for shadows and did not mistake them for enemies, let the moths fall into my hands, my hair, let them feed. Free, they furrowed and shed, chewed through, deposited throughout, spun their cocoons in the eaves, and made life in the darkness. As for me, my house, my body, I ceded: gave myself over wholly, all of it, at last.