HUNGRY MOTHS

I know Truth is somewhere near. I can smell her perfume on the shirt I wore last night. Smudges of lipstick on the glasses we used. I’m sure there’d still be a taste of her in the bead of wine at the bottom of the glass over there on the window ledge.

We must have been leaning out. I remember drunken songs in snatches—stuff that doesn’t make sense anymore. I think we threw some books outside as well, to watch them flutter down on their broken wings. Just a few books that I wasn’t going to read, but my memory is a bit hazy. I’m distressed to see that my bookshelves are all empty. I had been intending on keeping some of them for the rest of my life.

The roar of traffic is loud through the open window and whatever remains of them outside must have been shredded to the smallest fragments of paper. I’m not sure even a word would have survived on that relentless road. Millions upon millions of cars pass, day and night outside—ceaseless now that the gates of the underworld are open again.

There’s the dress she was wearing, still draped over a light stand, so she can’t have gone far. Holes through the fabric of her gown (a shade of red she described as the colour a closed eye sees looking up at summer skies during high noon), puncture marks like a machine gun has swept across it.

I should have told her how hungry my moths are this far away from the sun.