Patty pushes open the shop door and we see, in the short time we’ve been inside, that the moths have invaded the town, their fragile bodies flitting past the moon, parking lot littered with white wings. They swim in the air around us and cluster under streetlamps, trembling.
Just last week Patty has told me her real name, Rachel, which is a leaf floating on a stream, a white dress billowing, the answer to a question that she’s asked again and again in our late-night conversations, sprawled in our backyards, searching the stars: Who am I? And now she knows, she’s Rachel, her parents finally telling her story.
Patty/Rachel and I walk towards home; it is snowing moths, flurries of delicate wings brushing against our faces. We avoid stepping on their translucent skeletons. Heading home is like travelling through a memory, we are remembering what hasn’t yet happened.
I practice her new name- Rachel. The long ray– a stream of light. The final syllable, a chrysalis with her tucked inside. I say it out loud and it drapes over her shoulders like silky fabric.
All year things have been evolving. All year we have felt the change, distancing ourselves from the suburban homes and squat factories. Now they feel as insubstantial as maps flat on the dusty streets. Walking the halls of our high school, Patty seems to float, and even our clothes, leotards under our jeans, and ballet slippers, feel transitional. Dancers going through the subtle steps.
We keep walking. Passing cars, with moths streaming in their headlights, hum by. My friend Patty/Rachel is halfway gone, already elsewhere, I have followed her distracted gaze, dreamy looks. She is only borrowed now. I see her image reflecting in passing shop windows. Two of her. Patty. Rachel.
We turn into the small subdivision, moths opening and closing their wings on roofs, and windowsills, flower boxes, if there is a place to land, they have landed. Silent houses, families inside, only Patty/Rachel and me on the empty streets. This is the world we are leaving behind, only weeks until we pack up, off to our separate futures. She will send letters, signed Rachel, long having let go of her old name, old fears. Our time together a satin ribbon unspooling into the past.
Rachel pauses, mid street, and lifts her hands. A moth clings to her long hair, on the shoulder of her famous striped tee shirt. She spreads her arms wide and says, Everything is up. And it is true, there is only the blue/black sky, moths flickering like stars. It is like she is opening a door and stepping through into an infinite room just she can enter. The place she belongs. It is the first line of her future.
This is what I’ll remember. Years later, I’ll think of this dreamy night as our last real moments together, our last journey as friends through moths like snow, like stars, like poems. Rachel poised in the moonlight, wrapped in her new name, moths balanced on her open palms.
Published in Threshold 2026
Photo by Max Kleinen on Unsplash