“Like Moths to a Flame” Dark Fiction by Cecilia Kennedy

When a deluxe RV blocks our driveway, and the pocket parks in the neighborhood sprout graffiti and trash, we decide to move.

“Our dream house is for sale,” Dillon tells me.

I know which one he’s talking about. It’s the one we built, two hours away, the one we sold for far less than what it was worth before we moved to this house, but now can afford to buy it back.

“We won’t want it now. We’ll hate it. You should never go back. You’ll only hate what the new owners have done to it.”

But Dillon’s convinced that whatever they’ve done, we can undo easily enough, and when some kids throw stones at our windows, I look for realtors.

Brown grass and bare patches bleached by the sun, do nothing to offer “curb appeal” to the house we once owned. The scorched, concrete driveway is cracked with dandelions poking through. Dillon’s face drops. All of the plants and roses he’d grown—the trees he took care of—are gone.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

He lowers his gaze, most likely thinking about all the work it’ll take to put the plants back in and to re-do the yard, which has been depleted of the mature trees that blocked the sun.

Inside the house, I’m shocked to see our bamboo floors carpeted over and gaudy old- timey wallpaper covering every inch of the walls. The kitchen cabinets were painted over as well, and I hate it here.

For months, we put everything back the way it was and plant gardens and open windows and cover the air with fresh lavender spray. We sleep tucked in between cotton sheets and thick duvet covers. Even the birds return. We see the flutter of cardinals’ wings.

While folding the blankets on the couch, I hear the thud of a package hitting the front door. When I go outside to retrieve the package, I see a brown box wrapped tightly in layers of packing tape. I tear through the layers and brown paper wrapping to find a painting and a note from my mother. It’s a painting I remember—one she hung in my bedroom when I was child. In the painting, two dancers in pink tuille and tights and leotards lace up the pink satin ribbons of their pointe shoes. In the background, dark walnut lacquer contrasts with a halo of golden light above their heads.

In the note, my mother reminds me that this painting was once hers, and she’d given it to me as a child, but I’d sold it in a garage sale. Later, it ended up in an antique store—and she bought it back. She had no use for it herself, so she gave it back to me.

It doesn’t really go with the rest of the house; I still don’t want it, but I hang it in a spare bedroom, figuring it will only still come back to me. But I don’t have to look at it if I don’t want to. That’s the compromise.

When Dillon and I tuck ourselves into bed that night, I picture everything in its place: the flowers outside, the bamboo floors, the freshly painted walls, the dancers in the spare bedroom—and I close my eyes to dream.

A faint fluttering sound and a ray of light awaken me in the bedroom. Dillon’s sleeping in, so I go downstairs, the fluttering growing louder as I go down the staircase. The sound is nearly deafening when I enter the living room, and when I turn right to go into the kitchen, my breath catches in my chest. The entire floor is covered with brown, powdery moths. I look for the open window, to see how they got in, but it’s closed. Everything, including the windows, was in its place when I went to bed the night before, and now, these disgusting moths have taken up the floor and are crawling onto the cabinets. My stomach lurches when I see one squeeze itself into the pantry, while others follow.

“Dillon!” I scream.

When he enters the kitchen, he rubs his eyes and stares.

“Do something,” I say, knowing full well I could do something myself. Dillon swats them with a broom, but they scatter, and I’m hoping they’re not multiplying. Eventually, we use the vacuum and toss them outside. The kitchen reeks of them: A sharp, musty odor with a lingering gamey smell I thought only belonged to dead mice.

“Do we get an exterminator?”

Dillon shakes his head no. This is just a fluke. I perfume the air with a stronger lavender smell and try to rest assured at night that everything is back in its place.

In the morning, it’s still dark, and I don’t want to disturb Dillon, so I make my way down the staircase in the growing morning light, but I’ll need to steady myself, so I don’t fall. I touch the railing and something soft brushes the back of my hand, and if I didn’t know any better, I’d swear I hear the fluttering, just like I did the day before.

When I get to the bottom of the staircase, I switch on the light, only to discover that the wall and floors are moving. Every inch covered in moths. Screaming, I run back up the stairs, swiping at my legs. It’s as if they’re crawling all over me, and I can’t shake the squirmy feeling that’s wormed its way onto my skin.

“The house is crawling with them!” I tell Dillon, but he thinks we can handle this ourselves, just like the bamboo and the flowers and the kitchen cabinets. But I’m exhausted and I smell them. I smell them everywhere.

“We’ll look for the source,” he promises. “We’ll set some traps. I’ll research it on the internet.”

In the evening, when only the scent of lavender lingers, just over the bitter moth smell, Dillon sets out cameras. I inspect the walls near the staircase and the floors of the living room and kitchen for any signs of damage. At first, I don’t see anything, but then, when I look closely, I find what appears to be tiny smudges. I look again, and I see empty spaces filled in by dirt and soil and pure air and night sky. Ever so faintly, the empty spaces take on the shape of moths’ wings. I rub my eyes and shake my head until everything looks whole again, and I tell myself the world is not disappearing.

Dillon’s placed cameras in every room, and the next morning, when the moths have covered the entire first floor and walls along the staircase, and when we’ve stepped on them and heard them crunch beneath our bedroom slippers, we retrieve the footage from the kitchen camera first. There’s nothing extraordinary to note. The kitchen is empty all night, but then, the moths suddenly appear, all at once, and we can’t see how they get there. We see the same thing happening in the footage we retrieve from every room in the house—except for the footage from the spare bedroom. In the grainy light of the film, we see the painting of the dancers open up, right above the torso of the tallest dancer. It opens wide, layers of lacquer unfolding. Moths pour out, for a good 30 minutes. They spill out from inside the painting, and I can’t imagine what makes it open like that—until the moths disappear, and the painting is left wide open, and from inside, what looks like two eyes begin to glow. My skin crawls.

“What did these people do to this house?” I ask.

“Clearly, it’s the painting.”

“But something’s making it happen—something that moved in here between the time we left and the time we returned.”

Dillon shakes his head. “No. It’s simple. We get rid of the painting.”

So we take the painting out back and bury it, and when I go back up the stairs, I notice a piece of the banister is missing, and floorboard as well.

“How do you explain this?” I ask.

Dillon can’t, which is why he doesn’t offer an explanation, just a promise to fix the banister and the floorboard in the morning.

Every morning, we clear out the moths, piles of them, pungent and powdery. They spread their dust everywhere, and little by little, the house disappears along the edges, rubbed out by the wings, until one day, we wake up on the foundation of our house—the walls and the floors gone—all of the furniture nearly transparent, as if the house and everything inside had never existed. The moths settle in our hair, on our arms— rub their wings and their powder all over, and when I look down, the spaces between my fingers and my toes span the length of the garden, wilting in the sun.

Cecilia Kennedy taught English and Spanish courses in Ohio before moving to Washington state and publishing short stories in various magazines and anthologies. The Places We Haunt is her first short story collection. You can find her DIY humor blog and other adventures/achievements here: (https://fixinleaksnleeksdiy.blog/). Twitter: @ckennedyhola