1 minute read
Mothlight
MOTHLIGHT BY ASHLEIGH NORTH
There she is. The girl standing in the garden in her white cotton bedgown, pale toes buried in the damp earth pushing up young grass shoots. Digging her toes into the flower beds, exercising destructive power with glee. Even daisies have flesh and she watches another fall at her feet, pressing it against the soil until it bleeds green onto her skin. She delights in the fragility of beautiful things, and she dances as she thinks of all pretty things having skin that can be broken, nerves that can be pressed, like the way she presses her thumbs into the ripe orchard plums. With a careless flick of her wrist she can send the fruits flying, watch them bounce and bruise, wait for them to sit and soften in the morning sun until the ants and the flies settle into their skin and they are wasted. Un-savoured. They are not plucked from the trees by the fruit-picking boys, they are not consumed by the men that pay them. With one flick of her slim wrist she can condemn them to rot in the earth.
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The girl in the garden smiles gently, she blinks in the moonlight. Her doll face beams. She chooses one of the fruits on the tree, the smallest, driest one. “You are mine now,” she says. She holds it in her hands, she holds it above the others, the ones she’s given to the earth. And she consumes it whole. She feels the small fruit roll down her throat, feels every inch it travels as it scrapes her inside. She wonders about its seed, deep in her belly; can she feel it there? Will it grow inside, will her body nurture as nature intends, will she swell and grow like the tree in the orchard, heavy with fruit?
Her eyes flutter closed. She stands in the garden, bunching her cotton gown around her stomach. A moth lands on her plum tree, bulbous, too heavy with eggs to fly. In the silence, she hears its wings rest closed. She wants to metamorphosize with the moon. She wants to run free in the silver light. She wants to squeeze her small fists around the moth and feel it shudder and die in her hot palms.
INNER PIECE BY PIPIER WELLER
