Creative Writing "Moths"

Oh, god, she could hear the voices again, buzzing and fluttering inside her head like blind, stupid moths, tapping against her skull relentlessly and noisily and she just needed to make them stop, just needed to grab them and bind them still because she couldn’t take this much longer. She couldn’t take this feeling of insecurity, this inability to trust which words were hers and which were the incessant little words of the moths, the horrible, deafening moths inside her mind.

She stared at the window, at the streaks of dripping dew that had settled on the smooth glass during the night. The sky was grey, stark and iron-hued, which told her that day would come soon, and it wouldn’t be a beautiful day - it would probably be overcast and foggy and oppressively monochromatic... No matter, though – beautiful days were mocking, like the gods were laughing, We know you can’t be happy, but we’ll show you what happiness looks like just to spite you.

Beautiful days were the ugliest days of them all.

The motel room was cold, but the heat closed in too quickly if she turned the whirring air conditioning system off so she kept it running and instead picked the large, forest green jacket up off the chair next to her and put it on. It belonged to Henry, so she was practically swimming in the fabric, but it comforted her more than anything else had the power to do.

She glanced over to the unmoving form of Henry on the bed, peaceful, wonderful. He was too good for her – he kept by her through everything, he loved her more than life itself and it was tearing her apart because she knew every fit, every one of her episodes broke his heart just a little more. He was a kind man – an honest man, a wonderful man, and she loved him more than life itself. She hated to see him hurting, just as he hated to see her hurting, but while there was nothing he could do to stop her pain, there was something she could do to stop his.

She stood up from her position in the chair beside the window. Her moths had given her an idea, and she admitted that it sounded perfect. To stop the constant emotional pain they caused in one another, she had decided that they could never see one another again.

He was a good man, a noble man, a perfect man, and she had to let him go.

Life was cruel to good men. It silenced them with poverty, demeaned them with homelessness, and rewarded them with nothing for all their offerings of everything.

It gave them broken, hopeless women to love, and it gave them millions of ways to shatter, until there was nothing left of them but a shell of what used to be.

She touched the hand he had resting outside the blanket. She kissed him on the cheek, brushed his hair from his tranquil face. Both were cold and still as ice.

A tear fell from her eyes, sliding down her nose in a parallel motion to those of the fat dewdrops sliding along the motel window, glistening in the jaundiced-yellow light of the streetlamps outside, and she silently, achingly moved to the night table beside the bed and removed the phone from its crook.

The flat sound of a dial tone acted like the ominous hum of a bug zapper, killing those moths inside her head and heralding in a sweet, clarified silence in her mind.

She dialed, each melodic beep in her ear like an echoing step toward salvation, toward peace.

A voice answered, calm and succinct, “Nine-One-One, what’s your emergency?”

“Hello,” she said, “I’m reporting a murder.”

She looked at the still and silent form of Henry, and she smoothed out the pillow that his head rested upon. Her fingers idly played with the empty pill bottle in her pocket, and she hoped above all else that death would grant that loving, thoughtful, amazing man all the prizes he deserved, all the prizes that life refused to bestow upon him.

In the back of her mind, a buzzing moth that refused to die told her that it would.