Home        Desk Drawer 

“Gypsy Moth”

  By Diane Cantwell

                    She wasn't used to living alone.

                    She had driven many miles and for several days to get where she was now, during the heat of summer in her old car. This car is older than I am, she had thought at one point, pulling into a Denny's for lunch in Eureka. It had been her first day on the road, a fairly novel notion still and not yet as tedious as it would become by the third day. And when she finally got there, got to Seattle, she was surprised and even a little proud that the old car made the journey without so much as overheating. It had sighed with relief and ticked contentedly in her aunt's driveway upon arrival in the new town. New town, she thought. City. Whatever.

                    The girl stayed with her aunt until she found a job and had saved enough money for a place of her own. Originally, she'd planned to share a house with someone, anyone, but when the single bedroom house caught her eye and she saw the sign that said $350 a month...well, she was sold. She didn't think she might miss having a room mate of some sort. She'd never thought that living alone could get tiresome.

                   Still, she loved the old house. Especially the front porch. The thing she liked best about the porch was its severe slant. Apparently, the earth had shifted so much since the house had first been built (sometime during WWII, she'd guessed) that it seemed to lean forward precariously, as if ready to pounce across the front yard and gobble up the sidewalk. On warm August evenings, she liked to sit on the porch in the plastic chair her aunt had bought for her and listen to music. Sometimes she would read, but mostly she would look at the branches of the tree that hung low over her house ( my house, she would think) and think. She did that in the living room quite often, also; she would look out the window for long periods of time and think about things. Nothing of great importance, just things.

                    In spite of the porch, she found herself lonely in the house. She saw a girl one day in front of the Thriftway with a box full of kittens, so she took two. So they can play with each other while I'm at work, she told the little girl. She didn't know what to name them, so she decided on Spot and Spike. I can always change them later if I think of something better, she would think.

                    Still, the kittens weren't too conversational in and of themselves. The girl talked with her aunt quite often and ate over at her house at least once a week. She began to think about things of a darker nature. She missed her friends in California. Why did I come, she would wonder, and then be surprised to realize that she didn't particularly want to go back. She liked her house and her kittens. She had hung up her posters and changed her license plates and gotten a Washington state driver's license. She had already started planning what sort of flowers to plant in her yard in the spring, and that was nine months away. No, she didn't want to leave. But she did begin to wonder why she moved so often. She realized that in California, she'd never stayed in an apartment for more than a year. Six months was the average amount of time before she felt restless and moved to a different apartment. She was only twenty-two and already had lived in four different places.

                    Her thoughts grew dark, quite against her will. Late at night, she would hear the kittens leaping about in the living room and imagine it was a burglar or even a maniacal killer. Rumors of an ax-murderer had been spreading about town. Could that be him, she would wonder late at night, out on my porch? My wonderful, slanting porch?

                    Eventually, these thoughts kept her awake so late that she started napping as soon as she got home from work in the afternoon. Within a month, she got used to the sounds her house was making (and the cats) and no longer imagined knife-wielding lunatics creeping about her living room. Instead, she just thought. She wondered what her friends in California were doing. Probably sleeping, she chided herself, squinting her eyes shut in an effort to make herself go to sleep. Of course, this only made matters worse. Worrying about not sleeping was finally what kept her up at night.

                    One night, she glanced at the clock on her bedside table. It read 12:15 a.m. She sighed, then sat up. If she wasn't going to sleep, she might as well do it sitting up. She got up and put on her robe, shivering. It was almost October, and getting quite cold these days.

                    The girl went to the living room window and pulled back the curtain. There was a full moon out, and it took her by surprise. In spite of the cold, she opened the front door and stepped out onto the porch. The moon shone full behind the tree, and dew glistened on the lawn. She hadn't seen anything quite like it before. Not in real life, anyway. Only in films, with the mist rising from the ground and the only sounds being night creatures in the bushes and trees. She thought of a girl she knew back home who had died the summer before. She wondered if she'd ever seen something so beautiful.   She hoped so.

                    Something fluttered against her cheek, and her heart leaped as she twitched to one side. A moth, that was all. She rather liked moths, and took comfort in its presence now. She liked watching as they fluttered ceaselessly, always moving around, flying towards the light. It flew up to her porch light and circled it tirelessly. Its wings left a golden powder on her face, a residue. She wiped it off instinctively, then watched as the moth continued to blindly fly towards the light. Will it ever fly away, she wondered, will it ever stop. She pulled her robe about herself tightly and couldn't help smiling, just a little and at nothing in particular.