The Future of Black by Gary Jackson

Author:Gary Jackson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blair
Published: 2021-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Natalie J. Graham

The Origin of Moths

We don’t remember what came before lavender. Most of us were asleep, resting in leafy cocoons. Something scratched loose our swaddles, scratched stripes into the blank till the lavender began. We woke to the starch sound of scratching and streams of lavender flooding cool over our eyes. Lavender sky where the blank had been. Lavender river coursing over glittering lavender rocks. Our blood, when it spilled, lavender as water. Lavender hills rising. We didn’t know to call it sweet. By the time we knew anything, we knew lavender. One day there was a turn.

First the mist, then the berries, then the lavender sound of birds shuddering in a bush. Gone. So much lavender disappearing, draining into the soil. We didn’t know names for the colors that came next. The brightest color we called, “howl.” Howl bleached the sky, uncoiled into the ocean. Howl water flickered with lavender foam. Then, all the lavender was gone. The flowers disappeared at night. At night we couldn’t even see our hands. We named the color of shadow, “blood.” It was confusing, but we didn’t care. Blood was everywhere. Every night the blood fell, blotting the world blind. It was not lavender, but at night we only had the one color to reckon with, it was a comfort to some.

Days and nights wavered unevenly, we pressed together, praying for the wind to turn to scratch, praying for sleep, for the mists of lavender to bloom again in the bloodish fields. We died together, age after age. Bones emerged from our dead. We stacked them in columns, and the clatter of bones filled the hollow between the hills.

We’d all but forgotten lavender. When She scratched Her way out of the bloody soil and racket of bones, our palms feathered open like howl leaves. Under Her glossy skin, we all saw the moth. A literal moth from an ordinary hill, gauze wings, bloody as night, bloody as underneath, opening and closing inside Her body. Its moth wings breathing under a rope of spine. She put Her hand flat between our breasts. She said, There is so much extra space inside the body for wings. Space to roll up coils of antennae and tuck them under flaps of ears.

We thought She was blessing us. Some could sleep again. Some saw lavender when they pressed their hands over their eyes. We wrapped each other in spiderwebs and moss. We coiled vines around the legs of our children. We hummed songs about water dragging bones out to the sea. She helped the last of us back into cocoons. Some of us became moths.

We slide our wings through grass. We have no mouths for sucking nectar. She is far away now. We see Her blinking lavender in the blank dusk like a star.

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