MothMouth

The night was thick enough to drink. My room grew slick with heat—the lamp, the curtains, the slow oil of my breath. It smelled of sweetness gone bad. A bowl of fruit furred over on the sill, green curling into blue. I liked how quietly it changed, how it made decay look tender.

I heard it then—the smallest sound, supple and strange, as though the night were remembering its body. The sound swelled and bloated, pushing against the pliant cage of my ribs until it was all I could hear.

I went to the window, and she emerged—a great moth, winged with burning. Pressed against the glass, all pulse and hunger and cruel beauty. She showed me her face, twice painted in amber, heavy with an ache that mirrored my own. The latch gave easily, and the night spilled her into my hands. She entered, silt-slow, as though she had always known her way to me.

She lingered above, a thought half-swallowed. Then she chose. Not the lamp as I had expected, but the milk white hollow of my throat. She landed where the skin is thinnest, where blood hums its wet hymn. Her landing was no heavier than breath, yet it shook something open. I was a hollow thing being filled. My mouth slicked and ripened, tongue fevered with want. I don’t know how long she stayed there. I was everywhere and nowhere at once. When she finally fled, the skin where she had been was reddened, shining faintly—as though kissed, or marked for return.

After that night, time lost its spine. Days and nights blurred, softening to a pulp, each one spent panting at my windowsill beneath the lamb wet moon. I would rise and bend myself backward over the sill until the world turned sopping violet and the blood sang in my face. It was then that she would come, testing my body in deliberate landings. She declared my limbs and bones masts, snapping apart in her wake. I began to morph to fit her shape—the way still water becomes ocean when it is interrupted by something heavy, collapsing into it.

When my body was no longer enough to entice her, I began to lure her in by putting sugar in my palm. She came for it each night, folding herself down to feed. Her tongue was a filament, glossed and thread-thin, tracing slow circles into my hand until the sugar hissed and the flesh beneath it blistered. My skin blubbered and burrowed inward until it carved a small red mouth in my hand.

One night, she came to me while I slept. I woke to her shadow draped over my chest, the air thick with her noise—the tremor of feeding, the gnawing patience of her hunger. She crept to my face, and the burn in my palm flared in answer. She was breathing. Not the hum of wings, but breath—slow and animal, like mine. She crawled up my body. Her eyes, leech-wet, burned with a fever that was not insect. Her pulse echoed through my chest, and I could not distinguish it from my own. She lingered there, draped over me, a weight both fragile and impossibly heavy. Her limbs were still delicate, threadlike, but they began to curve and lengthen, the fine angles of her wings softening, almost human in the way they bent.
She rose to meet my gaze, and I kissed her. Her mothmouth met mine—soft, strange, opening wider than seemed possible. It was not gentle, not innocent. The dark split around us. I felt her pulse through my lips, hot and fragile, her tongue a trembling thread that flickered against mine—testing the edges of language. The world spun, white and winged, and I was inside of it. Her breath seeped through my teeth, filled my lungs until I could no longer tell whose body was breathing. My skin loosened around me; I thought I could feel the soft peel of it, like something preparing to molt. I felt her moving through me—slow, radiant, impossible. Not a body, but a fever uncoiling. Her wings brushed my face, and I thought they might cut me open, but instead they sank, folding the night inside my skin.
Morning came like a slow spill of milk. The sky was soft and pulsing, as though something inside it still beat its wings. Light clung to the walls, wet and trembling, a residue of flight. I thought, for a moment, that she was still here—that the air itself had remembered her shape. I stayed there, quivering, the taste of her still alive behind my teeth.

I moved, and pain answered. My palm burned. When I lifted it, the skin was eaten clean through. The wound was almost beautiful—an open circle rimmed in raw pink, light leaking through it like prayer through teeth. I held it to the window, watched the sun pool inside the hole, a small, trembling eye.

Then I found the others. The tender cavities along my arms, the neat bites at my shoulder, the hollow pressed into the base of my throat. I touched them one by one, and each gave back a different warmth, as if morning were feeding from me in turn.

She would not return. She had finished her wanting, flown wherever the light goes when it leaves the body. I thought I might grieve her. But grief requires distance, and she was still here, stitched into me, trembling beneath the skin. I could feel her rise with my pulse, as if blood itself had learned to speak her.

I was no longer just myself. My skin was full of openings, and the day poured through them freely. The sky bent closer, gentle as a mouth. The night had once drunk from me; now the day did the same. I could not tell where I ended and the wanting began. I understood then: she had made me porous so the world could enter. I had this—the sun in my wounds, the milk of the sky above me, the proof that I had been remade by her hunger. Proof that I had been loved. My body, full of holes, let the light through.