Little Moth

She only wanted to find her daughter....

The following story was written, inspired by this image prompt from John Watson - Horror Author

Mercy hummed as she walked in the dark. It was a warm night, alive with the sound of crickets and frogs. It was the perfect kind of night to hunt moths. The sun was barely down and already some were fluttering towards her, and the lantern.

In the beginning, when she first started hunting moths, they would come to a regular lantern. They didn’t come in droves, but one or two at a time. They liked the yellow flame well enough, but the light of it didn’t show her what she needed to see.

She didn’t bring any of those home with her. It wasn’t until she got the special lantern that she started collecting them.

The lantern came to her in a dream, the same way the truth came to her when Grace didn’t come home from picking blackberries that summer. People told her the most hurtful, horrible things after that. Some said she went past the tree line and got lost in the forest. Others said that someone wanted her more than Mercy did and stole her away. Some whispered that Grace just ran away to find another mother. The most hurtful of all was “God willed it to be. She’s at peace now.”

The first time she dreamed, there was an old woman sitting in a rocking chair, knitting a shawl. The rocking chair was in the middle of a field of flowers, and it was the dead of night. The old woman was humming a song as she knit. It was the lullaby Mercy hummed to Grace when she put her to bed at night.

When the old woman noticed her watching, she quit humming, but her knitting needles never quit moving.

“You’ve come about your child, haven’t you?” she asked, and Mercy only nodded.

“I figured you would, sooner or later. You want her back, don’t you?”

Mercy nodded again.

“Well, it won’t do you no good to listen to what everybody is telling you. You see, the Bramble Witch has taken her. She does that sometimes, takes children who pick too many of her berries. Don’t worry though, the Bramble Witch doesn’t eat the babies. No, she’s just turned your daughter into a moth, you see. She takes the greedy guts and makes them pollinate her flowers for her.”

The woman stopped talking and lifted her arms, spreading them wide open to reveal what she had been working on.

It was a simple brown shawl, with a few wavy lines, almost unnoticeable. Mercy could tell what it was meant to be. It was going to be shaped like wings when it was finished, and colored in the forgettable common shades of the small brown moths that battered themselves to death against the porch light every summer.

“Find the right moth, and you can have your daughter back.”

The night after the dream she took an old candle lantern and went out into the dusk looking for the right moth. The right one didn’t show up the first night. Nor did it the second. On the third night she dreamed of the old woman again.

It was the same rocking chair in the same field, but this time the woman had a lantern by her side as she hummed and knitted. It was unlike any lantern Mercy had ever seen before because its light was blue. She thought maybe it was framed in blue glass, but no, the flame inside the lantern itself was blue. Around the old woman, moths of all shapes and sizes darted and danced. Some were tiny brown moths. Some were the size of hummingbirds. One was blue, and one was pink and one was large and green.

“You didn’t find her, did you?” the old woman asked.

Mercy simply shook her head.

“I didn’t suspect you would. I never told you how to find the right ones. A normal flame is going to call a normal moth. For a magicked moth, you need a magic lantern. Take this with you, and all the little magicked moths will come. Your Grace is among them. But you must hurry….”

The old woman stopped talking and looked toward one of the moths fluttering around her. Mercy followed her gaze and saw the large green moth. As she watched it circling in the lantern’s blue glow, a bat swooped down from the sky and grabbed it up in its teeth before disappearing outside of the light again.

“The wide world is dangerous for little moths.”

When Mercy woke, there was a lantern sitting on the floor beside her bed. Beside the lantern was the shawl the woman had been working on since the first dream.

That night, at sundown, the lantern’s blue light lit itself. Mercy donned the shawl, took the light, and went out on the hunt again.

The old woman was right. The moths that came to the blue light were different than the ones that came to the candle. There were not as many of them as had flittered in the dream. She only saw one or two in a night. Most of the time they didn’t feel right. They were too heavy, or too grey, or too quiet, or too loud. Most of them were not right enough to possibly be her daughter.

Some nights, however, she would catch one that felt like maybe, this time, it might be her Grace. She’d put it in a jar and carry it home with her, and let it free in Grace’s room. In the end, none of them were her daughter. They didn’t recognize the bedroom, and they didn’t recognize Mercy and they didn’t turn into children at all.

They were all just moths.

But she kept them all anyway, safe in the bedroom. Because, like the old woman said, the world is dangerous for little moths, and they needed a mommy to keep them safe.

Time passed, her collection grew, but she never gave up.

Tonight she felt particularly hopeful. It was Grace’s birthday, and she had baked her daughter’s favorite cake and decorated it with just the right number of candles. That was how sure she was that he’d capture the right moth tonight.

She walked without purpose, holding the lantern high, letting the blue light lead her where it wanted to go. Sometimes she peered up for moths hiding in the treetops. Sometimes she crouched low, looking for moths that might be resting their wings under bridges or in the hollows of trees.

Tonight the moth that danced into her lantern’s light had indeed been hiding under a bridge. Smart little moth, she thought. It knew the sky was full of things that would eat it. But it didn’t realize that toads lived under bridges, and they liked the taste of little moths just as much as bats did.

She held out a hand, and the moth came to a rest on the tip of one finger. It was one of the small ones, plain and brown. Its wings matched the color and texture of the shawl the old woman had made her.

“Oh, Grace, it’s you!” she cried out. “My sweet little moth, you’ve come home to me at last!”

She didn’t put this one in a glass jar, but carried it on her finger until her arm got tired. It was awful heavy for such a little moth. She put it on her shoulder then, near her ear. She could hear it flutter its little wings with excitement as she talked.

“I’ve made you a strawberry cake, just like you like the best.” she said. “It has eight candles on it, for your birthday. Did you know it was your birthday today? It is, and you’re eight years old. You’ll have to wait until you’re a little girl again, of course. Moths can’t have cake.”

The little brown moth made a sad noise at that. She felt bad for disappointing her daughter. But surely the old woman would come tonight and tell her what she had to do to turn her little moth back into a little girl. Then they would eat cake together for breakfast. Breakfast, lunch and dinner if she wanted it.

She forgot that she’d been keeping all of the other little moths in Grace’s room, until they got home. She paused outside of the door for a moment and tried to explain.

“Oh, Grace, dear, I forgot to tell you. I’ve been looking for you for a while now. Ever since the Bramble Witch turned you into a moth. I brought home a few little moths that I thought were you, but none of them ever were. I couldn’t put them back out in the world though. There are things out there that would kill and eat them!

“You’re back now, though. Tomorrow, I’m sure you’ll be a little girl again, and we can find somewhere else to keep my collection.”

She opened the door, unable to keep her smile of pride from off of her face as her collection was exposed.

It was a little rough around the edges. At first she hadn’t known how to properly keep the little moths. The first few lay curled up and dry in dusty corners. But she got better, learned as she went.

She learned how to spread their little wings out and pin them in place. The little moths didn’t like it much, but she explained to them how it was better for them, and how it was safer for them. They fought it for a little while, but all of them eventually stopped their struggles and accepted it.

It was harder than most people would think, holding moths still to put the pins in their wings. Sometimes she had to pin their thorax first, just to keep them in place. They could be surprisingly heavy for such delicate little bugs. With their wings spread they also took up a lot more room than one would expect.

They were so beautiful, and came in so many colors. There was a little brown one, like Grace. There was a bright blue one, with a smokey black thorax. Her favorite one was a large pink one with button patterns on its spread wings. Even the delicate fuzz on that one’s head was pink.

She thought soon she might have to find another room to start pinning her collection to. Well, of course she would. Grace was home now and would need her room back.

Mercy had forgotten about Grace for a moment while she admired her collection, and was alarmed to find that the little moth had flittered off her shoulder. She wasn’t dashing in excitement back into her own room though, she was going the wrong way, toward a window Mercy had left cracked for some fresh air. She was running away!

Maybe people were right when she first disappeared. Maybe she ran away to find a new mommy. But she came back to the blue light so she must want to be here now.

Mercy ran after the frantic little moth, snatching at her with one hand. She felt her fingers pinch for a moment across its tiny antenna, but she let go. The antennas were so delicate and could be torn off too easly.

Realizing she wasn’t going to be able to catch Grace before she slipped out of the window crack, the did the only thing she could. She swatted at the little both, as gently as she could, and batted her away from the opening.

Despite the swat being gentle, the bug flew across the room landing with a splat in the icing on top of Grace’s cake.

“Bad little moth,” Mercy scolded. “I told you you couldn’t have any cake until you were a little girl again. And why were you running away from me anyway?”

She lifted the moth up to her face and looked closely at it. She could see it now, in the light of her house. She was wrong again. This little moth wasn’t Grace after all.

But she had been so sure.

“Oh well,” she said. “At least I’ve rescued another little moth from the Bramble Witch’s curse. You’ll be safe here. You’ll be with friends.”

The little moth struggled as Mercy carried her into the room and shut the door behind her. The walls were full here now. Standing in the blue lantern light she looked around the room and pondered where to place the new little moth.

“The bed I guess,” she said. “Grace won’t mind sharing.”

The little moth flapped its wings hard against Mercy, but soft wings didn’t hurt at all. It squeaked at her. “Mommy. No, Mommy. What are you doing Mommy?” but Mercy didn’t answer. The little thing had just tried to escape, and was only calling her mommy now so she might take it out of the collection room and give it another chance to fly back into the night.

This one was going to be a problem, she realized, trying to hold it flat on the bed while it thrashed its small, soft body around. I’m going to have to pin this one in the middle.

She reached under the sleeve of her moth-wing shawl and pulled out a handful of her special moth pins. The tiny moth under her gave one more “Eeep,” of distress, but relaxed once a pin had been solidly pushed into its thorax, holding it down to the bed. It didn’t fight any more after that but peacefully let her spread its small wings, and use more of the pins to stretch them out so they would dry wide and beautiful.

Now that the moth was pinned, Mercy sat with it for a while, gently brushing her fingers across its fuzz, but already pondering where the lantern might lead her the next night, until the blue light of the lantern snuffed itself at the first rays of dawn.

With the yellow light of the sun fingering its way through the slitted curtains of her collection room, Mercy could see the little moth very well indeed. She had brown hair, long and greasy like it hadn’t been washed in some time. Her face was pale grey, except for where a bruise, oddly the size and shape of a hand, had started spreading on one of her cheeks. Her eyes, large, black, terrified, stared into nothing.

Grace. The little moth was Grace after all. Her grace come back to her finally but….no. Don’t be silly. It was just another lost little moth.

Getting up, she took the lantern and walked out of the door, humming Grace’s favorite lullaby.

Grace was out there, somewhere.

She’d find her tonight. For sure.