Moth Lake

MOTH LAKE

by Erin MacNair

Tapping at your window under a moon-hid blackened night, beckoning you into the quiet cradle of the forest, the Luna moth's pale green tendrils sway just out of reach, skirting exploded cattails sprung from a fetid ditch. You follow, transfixed, this smear of dancing light propelling you onward, your bare feet catching on brambles and sticks, body yielding to somnambulist desires.

We won't know this part of the story. We only know you are gone, one of the vanished. Your bed sheets lie rumpled, the duvet thrown hastily to the floor, your window yawning wide as the night air spools into the empty bedroom. Aromas of hickory and sweetgum perfume the corners, the heady scents haunting our thoughts but just out of memory’s reach, yet their presence as real as the hordes of well-wishers or drama-chasers (or the just plain unemployed) yelling your name as they thrash at the underbrush, scouring the dappled maple forest, the walnut grove, for any clues to your whereabouts. Hellllooooooo, the voices cry. 

No one leaves any notes – suicide, ransom or otherwise.    

A vanishing occurs sometime between midnight and six a.m. from a rickety lakeside dock. It’s the perfect night for a naked dip. With a practised step-step-dive you slide your body under the dark water, its cool caress a thrilling reminder of each millimetre of skin; every pore, hair, and scar slapped into consciousness. As your body temperature cools and you lose the boundaries between what is lake and what is you, there is a soul – it could be a soul – gliding just above the edges of the water. Its wings beat in a rhythmic wave as it aims for the far side of the bank near the tallest trees. You think you can make it, if you backstroke most of the way, if you keep the ghostly body within your peripheral vision, only stopping for a moment to touch the flame between your legs, the only part of you which suddenly burns white-hot.

One of you, parked behind the brick washrooms near the athletic field in a brown 1990 GMC Vandura with illegally mirrored rear-door windows, abandons a victim. The dim flicker of the plastic outdoor light bounces off your balding pate as you pull free a careworn balaclava. Her struggles against the biting plastic restraints are no longer of any interest, her pleas banal. As if the months of planning and waiting and plotting in the parking lot of Loblaws are now immaterial, you open the creaking door and breathe deeply, emerging to follow a fluttering male, its twirling body like a fallen slice of moon. A larger lure flares your hair-choked nostrils as you're caught in an invisible rip-tide of need. There is some new darkness out there, and you need to hold it close or crush it with two hands. Or both.

We won't know the reason one of you took the GO Train from Toronto, transferring via the new Ontario Northwoods bus line to Muskoka, following a pull so intense it obscured all reason, the lure of seductive pheromones tightening the crotch of your jeans uncomfortably with every bump in the road. We will assume, after we view the clip of CCTV footage, your eyes moonward, body stumbling in a trance, that you were wasted. It was after the big game and everyone at the bar was drinking and nobody saw you leave, your wallet later found on the trail leading to Moth Lake.

We will simply think you have fled your jobs, your families, your multitudes of responsibilities. Cars will be found abandoned en route after evening runs to get milk jugs, or midnight snacks, or that extra-special joint from a friend's friend with the farm just off Highway 141. A rowboat or two will drift into the lake's sentinel weeds, oars slack, stuck in the mud.

We won't check any lunar calendars as we scour the earth for answers, blind to the obvious moon and winking stars. The reports of those gone missing in the late summer heat will be filed and stamped and there will be much weeping, the loss unfathomable, for why would you just up and leave everything you've ever known? We assume you've been thrown off course by the relentlessness of the big city, how it never sleeps, how it emits a forever hum and disorienting light and a woo-oowhoo-oo of ambulances at all hours, all the time, that woo.

We cannot understand your desire––all consuming––chased with an intense panic that you might die at any moment before experiencing the waking dream: the pair of tremulous feathery antennae beating upon your body, the vibration––a wild frequency; a summons to a beautiful field of cosmos or to the wettest, most virile fuck you'll ever have the pleasure to participate in. 

Certainly, we won't know that you will all meet each other in a copse in the middle of the forest, having followed your obedient abductors, lazily beating their wings, task completed. The moon will tear through the clouds as you each step forward. It is a trap, you can see that clearly, but she is the Luna Queen and the sweet release will be worth everything. Your lover spreads her colossal wings before you, her body a feverish shimmer of luminescence, a stunning display of blue, the electricity of her desire as searing as the voltage from any high wattage pest-eliminator, crisping your bodies in an instant and rendering your torsos a heated mass of goo. 

See how you like it, she whispers, and you do. In that final blazing moment, you like it very much.

The rest of us will continue on our way, listening to the authorities and their wild conjectures on the news, not at all reassuring, thinking about how we could be next, it's just so random, as the vengeful lover dines on your delicious heat, your glassy-eyed indifference.