Sam Simas is a queer fiction writer. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Copper Nickel, F(r)iction, Breakwater Review, Waccamaw, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Flint Hills Review, and other literary magazines. He lives in Providence with his partner.
After Daniel died, Carlos came to the roadside every day and looked through the grass. It was there—down on Atlantic—that a double-wide trailer had caught itself on an oak tree as it dragged a mobile-home inland. And it was there that the children who, looking from their bus windows, had seen thousands of moths gathered in the sky after the accident. He had trouble understanding what happened, but he knew his habit attracted as much of a crowd as the moths, which stuck around despite the rain and the bats and the children who arrived carrying bottles of sugar water and flashlights and butterfly nets. He knew the children wanted to run circles around a forlorn man, half-mocking him, filling their nets with moths. He knew they laughed as he searched the dried roadside grass for his partner’s remains, which, he was convinced, he could find there: in the grass, near the crooked fire hydrant, where Daniel had been standing before the house cracked against the tree, before Daniel turned into a cloud of moths and vanished into the air.
Don’t damage the wings, Carlos yelled to the children as they ran in circles around him.
Any one of them could be Danilo.
The newspapers that described the incident called Carlos’s partner Daniel, but Carlos called him Danilo. In fact, he called everything else by the name he thought best suited it, which was a habit he had learned from his grandmother. When he was young, she’d taught him a secret: that every thing in this world had a real name, and that its name sounded different to each person that heard it—that saying the real name would call whatever the spirit of the thing was to you. So, Daniel was Danilo.
An enormous clay-colored moth landed on Carlos’s hand. Its wings were marbled like a shorn cliff—all sienna and orange, its large muscular body a furry diamond that shuffled from the knuckle of his thumb up to his nail. He gestured with his other hand for the children to gather around him.
This one must be him, he said. Darapsa choerilus. Azalea sphinx. Danilo.
The air was full of moths, and he could not get the children to believe him. They stamped their feet, held their empty nets high in the air, impatient to fill them. Instead, they swarmed as if he were the sun, and the children bounced around him, colliding with his thin legs, swatting each other with the nets, whacking moths to the ground. Carlos stood at the center of their swarm.
Stop. Please, stop, he said. Any one of them could be Danilo.
But the children laughed and swarmed and swatted and stamped, and Carlos raised his chin to the sun, hoping it would lighten his body, hoping it would make him weightless so that he could fly to wherever Daniel had gone. But the children swarmed and he was still there.
. . .
On their last day together, Daniel said that the front door was unlucky, so Carlos hoisted him through the window. Once inside, they sat on the living room floor where Carlos had arranged dozens of glass jars. Inside each one was a moth crawling around the glass where its legs could not maintain purchase. They were ready to be killed and pinned and framed and sold to tourists.
We’ll start with these, Carlos said to Daniel as he gestured to bright green luna moths that plied their wings like oars.
Carlos’s family had remained poor for decades by framing and selling moths to tourists. He didn’t see a way around it. And his grandmother had taught him, when she decided he was old enough to learn, about money and death and moths.
Daniel laid on his stomach and held a jar to the light. The purple lesion on his neck had grown larger. Carlos changed his focus to the moth inside the jar Daniel held.
Is the ribbon yours? Daniel asked.
What?
The black ribbon that’s tied around the house?
It was a story Carlos’s grandmother had told—about how people died.
There’s a ribbon tied around the house. That’s why I came in through the window, Daniel said.
It was my grandmother’s ribbon, Carlos said, playing along.
Daniel struggled to get off the floor, and when he did, he went to the front door, tried to pull it open, but it wouldn’t budge. Seeing him this way made Carlos remember the overripe tomato softness of his grandmother’s skin—how, when she died, she split open. Daniel gave up and went back to the floor.
What is this one called? Daniel asked.
Actias luna. A luna moth.
How do you know? How do you know the names of these things?
Carlos took a dead moth from a jar, inserted a pin into its body, and set it in a bed of cotton. He looked at Daniel and knew that he had come through the window because of superstition, and he grew angry at his grandmother for the stories she told. The day before she died, she complained about a black ribbon tied around her own house. Go outside, she had said to him, and tell me if it is lacy or solid. It bothered Carlos that, when he went outside, he could see it—the black ribbon was there—and when he came back inside, she laughed and refused to tell him the name of it. She’d unloaded her grocery bags filled with sugar, olives, canned tuna, and nail polish remover. Everyone learns what to call this, she said, and it is the only thing that is the same for everyone.
I wonder if it will keep growing, Daniel said. Or maybe it is like everything else. Maybe it will give up and then shrink.
Carlos didn’t know if he was talking about the moths or the ribbon or the lesion. He looked at the carpet as if he had lost the words he wanted to say between the fibers.
. . .
Carlos played with cotton and pill bottles while his grandmother sat at the kitchen window, smoked cigarettes, and examined the weeds that were destroying the concrete yard. He was a boy. She told him that it was a slow destruction, the weeds, and that she liked to imagine how the terrain would look next season if the rain fell just right.
Water boiled on the stove. She stirred the pan with a wooden spoon and scooped up three noodles, which she then threw out the window into the yard. She turned to him, set the wooden spoon on the counter, sighed. He stopped playing with the pill bottles. He understood that she was about to speak, and it felt important to look at her.
You must make a habit of giving up a little bit of everything you have, she said, that way you never get used to having all of everything.
Water brimmed around the edges of her eyes, and he thought he could comfort her by taking what she said literally. He twisted the top off one of the bottles, removed a chunk of cotton and offered it to her. She let him lay it on her palm, then brought it to the fire still burning on the stove. When it ignited she dropped it onto the counter, and they watched it burn until there was nothing left except the smell of it and the black mark it left behind.
She started to say, Small sacrifices—but couldn’t finish the sentence.
When she died, Carlos visited her grave only once—on the day of her funeral.
On that day, he asked the people who cared for her to bring bouquets of cotton and cheap frames from the local craft store. And, once the casket was lowered, he ripped apart the cotton and flung it down there with her. He smashed the frames, broke apart the wood, and outlined her grave with a large, mismatched square. He left one piece of cotton on the ground above, one chunk of frame missing, so she would know that he had listened to her.
. . .
The night they found out that Daniel had a sickness that, they thought, only men like them could get, they drank too much gin and ran barefoot to the beach. It was close and the sidewalk was warm and Daniel could get there without losing his breath. Carlos watched Daniel run, saw him lift his arms like powdery wings while his bottom-heavy body caused him to limp, but he managed. His muscles had been disintegrating, transforming even then, and Carlos grew suspicious of all the ways his body might betray them.
They jumped onto the sand, threw seashells, and found each other again and again in the dark. They kissed each other’s hands, wrists, forearms, elbows. They parted each other’s hair and clothes to make a memory of the contact, to make something for Carlos to keep when the illness would eventually take Daniel. Maybe both of them—Carlos did not know.
Carlos walked too close to the water, which parted before his toes touched it. There had been a time when the water would have wet his toes like anyone else, but that was before he learned the real names for things and how, when you knew what to call something, you could suspend raindrops in mid-air, you could reattach fallen leaves to trees, you could take a dead bird, bring it back, and have it sing love songs. He blamed his grandmother for not teaching him the words to everything. It was impossible to him that they did not know the real name for this illness, so they could not stop it.
Carlos carved the letters of Danilo into the sand with his foot, and Daniel came back to him. They clung to each other, standing as the sand seemed to swallow them up, to make them nothing. Carlos did not care how it had happened—this illness—but he found himself repeating Danilo in his head as if, despite Daniel being between his arms, he was thousands of miles away.
I’m tired, Daniel said. But I don’t want to leave.
Carlos helped him home, laid Daniel onto the bed. Carlos stared at the ceiling, trying all the names he could think of. Daniel fell asleep, and his body rose off the mattress as if the sky were calling him. Carlos panicked. Danilo, Danilo, Danilo he said as he tied the bedsheet to Daniel’s ankles and cast himself around him like an anchor. He gave him all his attention, for he felt Daniel’s bones fluttering, trying to take flight even then, and was afraid of what his body might do if he was not paying attention.
. . .
He leaned on the counter, watched as his grandmother took a piece of cotton, soaked it with nail polish remover, and then rubbed the vermillion from her nails. Carlos ran his fingers over the glass jar, inside of which sat a luna moth, pistachio green, alive and very still.
When his grandmother was finished with the cotton, she held it out to him.
What? he said.
Take it. That’s how you kill them.
Carlos did not put his hand out to receive the acetone-soaked cotton.
It’s like going to sleep, she insisted. Drop in the cotton. Seal it up. It doesn’t take long.
Carlos opened his palm, and the cotton felt wet, too cold. He dropped it into the jar and sealed it. Soon, the moth laid its wings flat as a dollar bill.
Actias luna, she said. Good.
Although the alcohol had dried on his fingers, they felt slick and wet. The feeling of the cotton lingered. He felt guilty.
She straightened the frame that would display the moth. She made a bed of fresh cotton, fluffed it with her finger, unsealed the jar, and tipped the moth onto it. But it fell wrong and Carlos heard the soft snap of the wing as it folded in half and became as useless as a single feather.
Damn, she said.
Carlos felt close to tears. He’d killed it for nothing.
When something breaks that you can’t repair with words, she said, there are other ways to fix it.
She took a black ribbon from the drawer, bandaged the wing, said some words that he did not understand, but that sounded as if she were asking for help, and when she removed the bandage, the wing was whole, and the moth twitched with life.
What did you say? he asked.
You’ll figure that out on your own.
She let it flutter around for a while before luring it back into the jar and handing him another cotton ball to place inside so that its next death would be as quiet as sleep.
. . .
Carlos finished arranging the Christmas lights on the floor of his living room. He look at the dozens of jars that he’d arranged in rows near them. To make this work, he’d caught hundreds of moths, with the help of the children, and put as many as he could fit without killing them into the jars. The insects lumbered around the glass, slipping over one another, twitching their antennae. He could not kill them. There were too many, and he did not intend to sell them.
He spread a bedsheet across the Christmas lights and was pleased to see that the outline looked like a man—that there was a thin body with defined arms and legs and a lumpy head. This, he thought, was the closest he had come to seeing Daniel after he disappeared. He prodded the lights, shaping the arms and the legs and the torso into Daniel’s shape before the sickness slimmed him, before he turned to moths.
He opened the jars, nudged the moths out, and corralled them as best he could within the boundaries of the outline. The bright light attracted them, kept them crawling over each other, kept them flightless.
Finally, he took a black ribbon and laid it across the figure.
Danilo, he said.
The moths twitched and jumbled. He thought he could hear them chewing the sheet. Carlos did not know what he was expecting.
He wished he knew the words his grandmother had used to bring that moth back. Of all the things she’d neglected to teach him, Carlos felt that to be the most important gap. Why had he not demanded to know? Would it have made a difference? He took a deep breath, conjured the feeling of Daniel’s name—a light tapping on his shoulders and a friction around his heart—and he tried again.
Danilo, he said. Please.
Outside, there was a loud crash, an engine whirring, screeching, then falling silent. Daniel’s outline went dark, but otherwise did not change. Carlos spread himself out on the floor next to it, holding the bulbs, pretending that he was anchoring Daniel to the bed. Moths found their way all over his face, his arms, between his shirt and his skin. It felt like someone was running their fingers over him, tickling. He could not believe the weight of it, of so many moths, so heavy he felt he could be crushed.
. . .
A month after his experiment failed, grief brought Carlos to the roadside. New houses were taken down that road without problem. The moths were mostly gone. The flesh of the tree’s shorn limb was still bright and tender. And he was still afraid to catch and kill and frame the insects that remained because he was convinced that one of them would be Daniel—that he might pin the wrong moth and not know the difference. So, despite his failed attempt, he searched the grass. By this time, the children trampled other fields.
He found an empty can of tuna and thought of the night his grandmother had gone through the front door, despite the black ribbon, and placed the cans on the pantry shelves, laid out a platter of olives and bread, and told him that they would eat well that night, that they would light a candle and see how many moths found their way to them.
Open the windows, she said. Call its name and let it come to you.
So he did and the moths came, hundreds of them, speckling the walls of the house while he and his grandmother ate olives in the darkness.
The next morning, she was gone, and the moths that were left behind clung to the walls like lesions.
He had not forgiven her. He still believed that he could not lose all of something—that he could bring back whatever he lost if he said the right words, made a small sacrifice.
The sun was too bright and a school bus stopped to let children off, causing a back up behind it. Carlos imagined how, on that day, before Daniel stepped in front of the trailer, causing it to swerve, causing the house to snag onto that oak tree, Daniel might have stood there with all of his weight on his right leg because the left was too painful to stand on. Daniel would have been there, near the bent fire hydrant, too close to the road, the insects swirling around him, drawn into the heat and the light of the sky, filling the air as thick as a downpour. He’d called them, and they came, and somehow Daniel became part of their flurry.
Carlos told himself that none of this could be true—that Daniel had truly turned into moths. There was the sound of feathering too near his ears to be coincidence. Then he felt the earth tremble, and all the moths, all that remained, took flight and hurried away in one large cloud of beating pigmented wings over the trees. And he could not call them back. There was no name for that kind of loss.
•
