Moth Mang

~ Sunday night ~

Fuckin’ moth.

Paul Burkett had just laid down for the seventh, and (he’d hoped) final time when he heard the tell-tale flapping of the goddamned moth from dinner. He remembered the laughter of his children as he flailed and swung about the room. He’d grabbed it, wrapped it in a guab of toilet paper, flushed it. He’d done these things. He remembered doing them. But now here’s the moth, his moth, the very same moth, which he knows because only his moth sounded like this moth. Flapping. What the fuck kind of insect flaps? Also, his moth had been big. The part of the moth between the wings was the size and length of a AA battery. The moth had trouble flying with any accuracy, because - Burkett assumed - It’s mutated thorax fucked with the thing’s spatial awareness and internal sonar.

Wife. At the bedroom door, standing up. Giving voice to a discontent separate from his own:

Fuckin’ moth. Again. You said you killed it.

I killed it.

But she was gone. Walking back to doing whatever. Singing his incompetence.

He got up. Stood up. The moth was on the wall, highlighted against wall-white. Burkett advanced and the thing did not fly away. Another step, and one more. Now, face-to-moth, Burkett considers the options, narrowing the options down to two, then taking a few moments more to think about how he was so clever in the narrowing. He begins an ill-concealed move back toward the Kleenex on his side table. The moth flies and hits the ceiling. The impacts are both audible. The ceiling a hollow “ponk”, and the bed a softer “Pat” sound. The moth is on his back, on Paul’s pillow, on Paul’s bed.

The beast seems stunned, so Paul charges in close, bringing a tissue-clump down on the giant winged thing. He scoops with tissue-protected fingers, mushing the foul thing in the paper, feeling the gristly fucker cracking and grinding in the tissue. He thinks, for a brief moment, of potential moral implications of cruel and unusual moth punishment. That’s when the moth interrupted him by flying away. It bounced off Paul’s face, crashed, and bounced again, this time off his low bureau, landing gracelessly in the laundry baskets his wife had placed side by side on the floor. The moth was in his whites. Paul found himself besieged then, by thoughts of greasy brown smears left behind by past moths - post crushing - on other things in his house. Fuckin’ moth.

He was struck then. Inspired. Visited by the muse of moth-murder. Spotting a gigantic 1970’s Webster’s Dictionary- also on the bureau - he grabbed it two handed, and spiked it into the laundry with a tentative…

Yahhah!…Ah. Ha…..

For a moment, silence. In the near distance, Paul heard the wife, squawking into her phone about his impotency at moth-destruction. He took a moment to curse her, and then another to forgive her, and one more to castigate himself in his own head for being too inward-looking. The Webster’s was heavier than he’d remembered without the blood lust.

The Moth was upon him before he could even stand straight. Assaulting him down onto his back, on the bed. He took a moment to consider that his head might be resting on the moth-smear from his previous attempt at capture. His brain sent a message to his neck, legs, head and abdomen: “Get up! Moth mud!”

The message never arrived though, because it was at the very instant that the freaky moth lit on the tip of Paul Burkett’s face and bit him.

Had he remained conscious, he would have most certainly remarked about it. Most likely it would have been quite awful, easily the most pain Mr. Burkett would ever endure. Instead, Paul passed out, probably from an unconscious decision not to endure it.

***

Yes yes yes! Carol I love you! Ok…Ok….Ok…Ok. Gotta go he’s coming. Yah maybe he caught it…

And then the wife burst into a cynical kind of laugh that made his heart hurt. Paul opened the fridge and stood gazing into it like a dog staring at wind chimes. At some point becoming aware of his wife’s stupid, cloying voice:

How’d you do it?

It?

The moth. You killed it?

Uh…

You didn’t. Oh well, dare to dream. Did you at least herd it out of our bedroom so it won’t crawl into my lungs as I’m sleeping?

Uh…Yes. I did do that.

Close the fridge.

And he did, but it didn’t cure the staring. Now he was just facing the closed fridge, breathing like a fat person in deep, moist gargles.

Hon?

Paul turned to her. The wife said:

What…?

And reached up at his face. Specifically his nose. She was grabbing at him…

You’ve got something…What the fu…

When she touched him, a bolt of spiky hot pain went roaring from the area on his nose. The room went spinning. Burkett leaned back on the closed fridge howling and tearing up from the adrenaline. He took an instant to make sure the reason for his tears was - in fact - only that and not fear, or pain. His wife brought him a mirror and held it up. The room went rotating and ranging away on him again and this time he couldn’t make a stand. He heard a loud report from somewhere behind him, and his last thought before waking up in a totally different circumstance was spot-on. He thought:

“That noise was my own head hitting my granite counter top”

~Monday Morning~

Geoff Rowdike was the only EMT left. Rhode Island was a small state and Wakefield was one of the smallest towns in it. Weekends - especially summer weekends like this one - most of the state’s first responders were backed up and stressed, forced to stack victims like diseased aircraft and waving them down to the tarmac, incident by unfortunate incident. If a caller sounded especially compromised, however, there was the occasional bending of the rules. Rowdike had been assisting in the separation of an elderly couple from a local nursing home. Geoff had been driving an ambo for almost six years, and before that he’d been an emt for another two years. All that time, not a month went by without some elderly housecat trying to cage some strange off one of his fellow sundowners. Most times they never got to the actual no-pants dance, settling - instead - for a wrinkled helping hand or maybe a gummy fellating. The ones who dreamed bigger were in for a cold-shower, the kind administered by a creeped out EMT in order to expedite genital separation. In his time, Rowdike had seen some very, very long showers. When the call came from 204 Division St. the overworked EMT bolted, screaming apologies and something about a man who’s face had come off.

Pulling up the driveway, Burkett saw an open garage with lights on, and a door along the back wall. He entered at double time to give the victims a good first impression. He found himself standing in a modest kitchen, well lit kitchen and called out:

Hello! Hello! Maam? Anybody hear me?

He felt a pinch on the back of his neck like a horsefly bite and threw a clumsy jab over his shoulder. He was shocked to find he’d actually hit something. Felt like butterfly, but when he opened his hand there was a giant moth in the palm, staring back at him, motionless. A voice from behind him gurgled the word:

Help…

And he turned.

Ambo driver and emt he was, and even all those years of experience couldn’t have prepared him for what his eyes found before him. A woman. He knew it was a woman because of her breasts. More correctly, her left breast. The other, right hand breast, was gone along with half the flesh on her abdomen and almost all the skin from her face. Whatever was burning the flesh away took the clothing as well. The remnants frayed ends were gooping and dipping into the gore-line marking off the progress of her receding body. Rowdike could see that line moving, making a wet-sounding march and hissing evil vapors. The stench from the thing was heavy and tangible like an impenetrable wall of odor. Rowdike gaped. Somewhere in the attic of his brain he was goading himself into some type of action, but his amazement and revulsion were too strong, and he stood rooted until the body fell to pieces before him in a hissing, steaming hump.

That’s when he noticed the other mess of a body, which - by now - in no way resembled the human form. Geoff was assuming it was only because the mess’s jeans were still mostly intact. Sergio Valente. Rowdike could see the cow on the pocket.

Geoff had turned heel when the world started to spin away from him, and he heard a great report from somewhere behind him. He had a last thought as he fell, that the sharp “whack!” had been his own head hitting the Burkett’s granite countertop.