He woke up and went to stretch his arms, but he realised they were more like elongated appendages. Bit odd he thought. Big night though I suppose. Another thought crossed his mind - he could really go for a jumper just now. Like properly wanted to get his mandibles into one.
Hmmm… mandibles? This time yesterday he would have thought to himself ‘teeth’. And, to be fair, I don’t think this time yesterday he would be hankering to eat some clothing. But he was really interested in a really wooly jumper. Don’t know, something about the feeling in his mandibles he couldn’t get out of his head.
That word again, mandibles, with the added kicker: ‘his’. He rubbed his head to get his brain thinking. He looked down at the moth arms he just used and realised he couldn’t see hands. Had they been there before? They just sort of ended like stumpy stilettos. He swore he used to have fingers and everything. Actually these arms were much longer than they had been yesterday. It didn’t help that his elbows appeared to be bending entirely the wrong way. None of this was painful at least, but it was still a bit of a shock to the system.
“Bloody hell, I wasn’t expecting this” he thought to himself, remembering too late that it’s not actually possible to think “out loud” anyway. “No, that would be called ‘talking’.. unless I became adept at waggling my eyebrows” he continued to think but failed to wiggle any eyebrows.
That idea was definitely out of his reach now - moths don’t tend to have eyebrows. He couldn’t tell for sure until he managed to get himself in front of a mirror, but he felt fairly certain there was nothing eyebrow-y going on in front of his face just now.
Well actually, now he came to think about it, there was some rather impressive eyebrow like things extruding from the top of his head. He’d hesitate to describe them as really long eyebrows, partly because his mouth wasn’t equipped to speaking words at all, but mostly because he felt things through them that he’d never felt before. He sensed something in the air. Not a sound, but a sight?
Before long the penny dropped. He was a moth.
“Bloody hell” thought the moth.
The alarm on his iPhone 12 started to ring. He reached out instinctively to turn it to snooze for another 9 minutes but then came a cropper. He couldn’t do that any more, and the realisation was astounding. They didn’t really do that sort of thing, his arms. It’s a significant factor in why moths never invented their own iPhones.
He tried to bring to mind exactly what was going on. “Yesterday I went to bed a little tipsy. This morning, I am a moth”. The words escaped him. “This is… mental” he finally settled on.
And now he couldn’t turn off his bloody alarm. And it was just looping round endlessly. The sound resonated quite aggressively in his thorax. “I guess that must be where my ears are”. He actually quite impressed himself with that supposition. Obviously, instinctively, he knew that’s where he was hearing things, but it was quite a leap to go from listening to conversations through the side of your head to having ear-like things “down there”. To make that leap so quickly… this was the kind of quick thinking he wasn’t known for at the pub quiz he attended weekly. Well, used to attend. They didn’t much like it if you brought a mobile phone to The Curly Swan, let alone a moth as a teammate. Not sure that sort of thing would fly (pun intended - he at least still had those). But it felt like he was growing as a person, and for the first time in many years, he was open to change.
However, there was another thought he hadn’t entertained yet. He didn’t know for sure, but he was quite sure that moths, in general, didn’t last long. Like, he hadn’t read any moth textbooks; he had little prior knowledge of insect biology, so little in fact that he didn’t even know if it had a name? Insectology maybe? But, and who knows where he would have picked this up from (QI maybe?) he had an inkling that moths lasted for maybe a couple of days. Or a week? There certainly weren’t news stories he remembered of moths reaching their 40s and getting a card from the Queen or the moth equivalent. Do moths have a monarchy, or is that just butterflies?
He didn’t have time to think about that sort of thing to be honest. There was so much he didn’t know about himself. The immediate concern was the shock of waking up as a moth. That seemed quite pressing. It was his bed, to be fair, so there was something familiar to the situation, it’s just he wasn’t used to this degree of leg room given that the bed to body ratio was now exponentially bigger. Oh, and he had a completely different circulatory system, a moth brain, moth legs, moth arms, moth eyes, moth mouth. Did he have a moth dick? Whatever was going on down there, it didn’t bring him nearly as much pride as he remembered having, even with such humble equipment. This thought gave him a bit of impetus for doing something about his situation, determined to fix himself. Who could he talk to about sorting this out? Where was the British Consulate for this sort of thing?
It briefly crossed his mind that he had always been a moth, and that he was merely hazy from a rather strange “used to be a human” dream, but the sound of the iPhone alarm trickled back into his abdomen. This wasn’t some Narnia time dilation thing, where a cruel 40 years growing up as a human turned out to be the momentary hallucination of a snoozing scaly-winged insect.
The iPhone alarm repeated again. He’d spent years just stroking the damned thing, hoping for affection. As useless as he felt now unable to work one, it felt very pathetic to have been as attached as he had been to it all those years. It turned men into voles. Not to disparage voles, of course, just they aren’t the most go-get-em animals in the kingdom.
A woman the other side of the bed started to stir.
“Are you going to get that or not? Sick of it”
Oh, her! Greta! His fiancee! He’d forgotten she would be there with him.
They hadn’t moved in that long so the excitement had only just started to dwindle. They’d met in a club in Malaga and actually hit it off; at that time it was all glamorous cocktail nights out, dancing until midnight and then onto the first club of the evening until unrelenting pants down passion. Once the angel of his life, she had gotten familiar enough to remove her warpaint before bed, enslugging herself with various creams and accoutrements before self-cocooning in blankets he did not know they owned. Women were strange creatures and yet he was still dangerously attracted to them. His eye (?) caught a glimpse of the lightbulb and something in him twitched.
Surely she’d realise soon?
He heard her scream. There it was, the recognition that her husband-to-be was a human no more. She’d probably be really sympathetic to his situation and maybe get him an Irn Bru in a little bottle cap he could slip his oversized tongue into or something. Maybe even make him a tiny bacon sarny and attempt felatio?
“Darren!! There’s a fucking dickhead thing in our bed!! Can you get rid of it pleeease!!”
She was scrambling to find a magazine to curl up into a suitably sized baton and pummel the life out the moth she’d just found in her bed. Shit. He flapped the wings that now came out of his back. Oh yeah, wings! He forgot! That was the main thing about a moth! No wonder he didn’t have hands, he could fucking fly! What used to be his shoulder blades fluttered impressively and he hovered onto a wall out of reach.
Well, towards a wall.. he hadn’t quite gotten used to flying yet, obviously. He was still a little hungover for one thing. But more importantly, this was his first time flying, without even a licence or lesson, and the concept of landing on a wall perpendicular to the ground, you know - at odds with every understanding of gravity he’d wrestled with as a normal human being - came at him suddenly. He smashed into the wall much harder than he anticipated. Dazed, he fell, but woke up in mid-air, and was able to spin and soar up and onto the lampshade. Much easier landing this way up, he thought. Less of a conceptual mind-fuck, present experience excluded. He sat for a while, bathing in the moronic light he hadn’t dusted since he moved in. He found it comforting, like the opposite of a headache.
He noticed another moth flittering about near the light, gave it a little nod of recognition when he flew past. Did it nod back? Bit rude not to surely. He certainly seemed to want to be friends.
It must have been a few hours that had passed since the rather rude cajoling from his own bed he’d received, He had every right to be there, not up here in the dust. It had been a few hours too since he’d had a rather rough introduction to the dynamics of a moth’s social life. It wasn’t for him.
Why had this happened now? There was something low-key annoying about the whole thing. It’s bad enough to get a cold and have to take a sickie, wasting a day here or there, but this? He was a moth! Couldn’t even turn Netflix on and get lost in a Bond marathon or something. Jesus, he couldn’t even rifle through the cupboards for a lost packet of crisps. He was fucked frankly. Condemned to a life without crisps, without lemsips, without TikTok, without podcasts, without supermarkets, without ubers, without… I mean God, just everything. And for what? He looked at his beautiful brown wings, intricately patterned like the eyes of a leopard. For the first time in his life, he was beautiful. An actual specimen of beauty. It gave him pause for thought. And then a pang for jumper.
He closed his eyes and yearned to wake up again as himself. Well, he was himself, so it worked. But his human body was still very moth like, and tiny, and well, nothing had changed.
He remembered reading a book at school about a man who woke up as a beetle. Didn’t realise it was non-fiction. It struck him that he should have paid more attention at school. Life as a moth triggered a lot of regrets as it happened. But this was most pressing just now, and his tiny moth brain struggled to juggle thoughts like his old self, so he tried to focus. What had happened in that book? How did that chump get out of it? How did he get into it? He had vague memories of maybe a genie? Or some sort of magic wearing off? And some admin? Maybe there was a form he could fill in. Did moths have job centers? Civic infrastructure? God he just needed someone to take him under their wing, help him navigate this nightmare a bit. Actually he could have used this in his past life as a career nobody. Could someone just get him a pint of sweater? He didn’t know if it was saliva, but he was the equivalent of salivating at the prospect.
At least he still remembered his past life. He was definitely a human trapped inside a moth. That was the scenario. He still had the resemblance of a history and memories he could rely on. He tried to think back to the night before. It had been quite a jolly affair he recalled. Met up with someone.
Uh oh. Was he being punished? He’d accidentally, and even in his own head the phrasing was subtly framing the encounter, fell into bed with someone he shouldn’t have. But fell a lot of times he recalled. If he’s honest, he could have not fallen into the bed some of those times, maybe used the time in between passionately kissing and jabbing away with his crotch to wrestle himself out of the bed and put his clothes back on but no, kept falling back in. Bit of a shame that. Slap on the wrist. Could he apologise and this all be over? He looked down at the iPhone next to his bed. Could he read still? It looked like there was a message. Think it’s from his nan?
He made an attempt to land on the phone and instigate the messaging app. It wanted a face ID first but frustratingly it didn’t recognise him. He jumped onto the imaginary keypad it presented him with. Thankfully it was a lot of jumping between the six and the nine, so the distance was quite manageable.
He opened the messenger app and started to type:
“Right but if a weird I’ve this butI’ve accidentally shaved your best mate and then I think I’ve been punished and turned into a mouth”
He tried fruitlessly to fix the typos but it was too much fine motor skills for all the leaping he had to do on an empty stomach. He fluttered above the send button and landed again. The message whooshed up to the stars and back via minuscule audio waveforms and into her phone screen.
His partner reads his messages and gets angry.
“WTF are u on about D? Where are u? Why are u shaving my friends??”
Trying to reply this way was torture, but he managed. Much more concise this time, and to the point.
“I’m a moth. I’ve been turned into a moth”
“what kind of excuse is this? This is ridiculous! Who is she?”
“No, help me!! Look at my phone!!”
She screamed and tried to whack at him again.
In his haste, he frantically turned to the camera app and attempted a quick selfie, but he didn’t even get to see the end result, let alone share it. He returned to the comfort of the lightbulb in the middle of the room.
Maybe she’ll call the police after a few days. Would actually be quite nice to be lost by someone. Wanted to be returned to someone who would cry because you’d not come home. She might get to do one of those press conferences imploring strangers to give over some details of what took place. She’d be interviewed on CrimeWatch if that was still running? But no… why would they be interested? The most he could expect is to be the featured entry in a list of weird unsolved disappearances on some shitty podcast in 10 years time. People probably wouldn’t even read podcasts by then.
He was nothing. Nothing at all, in the scheme of things. As it stood, he hadn’t left much of an imprint on anyone’s lives. He didn’t have kids; his job barely acknowledged his existence. His betrothed has twice today tried to kill him and most likely won’t find herself finding him attractive in his new guise. He’d never volunteered his ample free time to any charity, worthy or otherwise. Never really connected with anyone on a deep, fundamental level. It was all so empty.
Maybe he wasn’t the first man to turn into a moth. Was that book he remembered a manual? A warning about a life without weight becoming a condemned life in pursuit of weightlessness?
He did it, snuck his way into a wardrobe. Thank god he’d been so cheap and gotten a basic wardrobe from Argos with one of those cut out handles, ideal in the current context. He surveyed the assembled clothes. Something in his head was just throbbing for clothes. Carefully, he thumbed his way through the available offerings, in his mind at least. Not this, he thought, that t-shirt was from our holiday in Thailand, it would be a waste. The next item failed to reach his approval, but because it stank - he felt it in his very core. In fact, and he hadn’t paid much attention at this point, but the piece itself resonated and glowed in colours he had not remembered seeing until now, all of which perversely made it as unappealing as waffles made from shit, covered in snot ice cream and drizzled with whatever else those greasy stains were under the armpits. He looked again and saw a thick synthetic looking thing… not that either, far too chewy. When he’d gotten it, he’d needed a semi-formal casual thing he could wear in the summer at a wedding of an ex as part of the general hanging out bit of the weekend. He had thought it looked smart enough while giving an air of nonchalance, but when he had come to wear it, his larger frame bulged in unfortunate places rendering the aesthetic unappealing. He couldn’t contemplate that sense of shame any more, nor any of the complexity that surrounded his retail forays. But leafing through his life like this, he reminisced about the aspirations he’d had, the looks and styles he’d attempted and inevitably failed to add into his repertoire. This life was gone for him. “Good riddance” he supposed. He imagined his fiancee having to go through these items and disposing of them after imagining she’d put them up on Vinted for a few weeks only to find no one wanted to buy a dead man’s clothes for anything less than postage. The thought was mournful, maybe not full on mourn but dialled down a bit - half-sadful? Whatever it was, it was only a minuscule equivalent to the human emotion - Moths don’t really have the volume in their hearts to capture that level of ego nor emotional variety.
What he did have was a carnal hunger, an undeniable yearning. He started to eye up the loopiest, wooliest jumper on offer. It was heaving at the back, but his knees vibrated excitedly.
He lifted his wings very gently, and settled himself onto the garment like a hawk resting on a bough. But as he landed, he realised the hunger in the pit of his stomach was not for food. He actually didn’t have mandibles at all. He didn’t even have a mouth. He could not eat. Instead, his insides rumbled and an egg passed from his thorax onto; at first it was a slightly painful development, but soon it was a small cascade that released egg after egg, emptied his fertilised innards all over the material under his touch; were his eyes capable of such a thing, they would have rolled back into his skull, which again he didn’t really have any more. The relief was immediate and intense and utterly life affirming. She was a moth, and she had done what she was born to do.
He snuck back onto his pillow, feeling wizened after the extravagances of the day (i.e. emptying eggs from himself all over some of his favourite clothes). Somehow, he managed to flip himself over so that his moth head was laying on the pillow. He felt relieved like he’d never felt before, and slept.
His little moth dreams were a delightful excursion through shapes and lights, like geometric fireworks twinkling around him. There was no thread to bring it all together, nothing to recollect the days actions, just pure experience as a reward for a successful life getting fertilised and unleashing said concoction somewhere suitable. Except the light. One giant light. He drifted towards it.
But this was it. It was to happen eventually he supposed. A shame that he hadn’t worked out how to get back to himself. But there was something inevitable about it all that brought him great relief. If he’d faced another forty years he’d have only wasted it not achieving the things he’d set out to do, and those things themselves felt very pointless, particularly in this unseen corner of the void we call the universe.
Do moths go to heaven? He’d been quite staunchly atheist before all this, but now he wasn’t so sure. Magic in the air and all that. But he didn’t really know how it all fit in. There was an ecosystem, a balance in nature - perhaps too there was a balance in the after-it-all. What would all the biologists do in heaven if all they enjoyed in life was studying insects (bugologists maybe? this wasn’t it either) - there would have to be insects for them to study. But then, could they be eaten again? Can you eat chicken up there? Where do the souls of dead angel chickens go when they die in heaven?
And that was the last thought he ever felt.
