Luna + Moth

LUNA + MOTH

by Vina Nguyen

Content warnings: death, body horror, insects, child loss

I must wait. Hot milk flows from me, tears trapped from long ago. No one understands what I speak; I am not meant to be here, to do this. I come from an existence before language, when song and sound were one and only. From the moon in the Land of Life, I guarded every transition, the journey from one form to another. I was, eternally, Metamorphosis. But I came to own many names; among them, my most famous: Chang’e. All because of a mistake.

•••

On a crescent-moon night lasting three days, I began my mistake. The child, being this woman’s first, pushed through her softening pelvis—but only to a point. I knew the woman would leave the Land of Life within the hour. With her last breath, a tear fell from her onto the child. I thought of rain returning to the sea, and for the first time, I wondered about my mother as my heart split and the woman unbodied. Against my better judgement, I tried to halt her transformation, but it was too late. A rush of light took me into her. 

The child bloomed, a spring fern tendrilling to the sky, and as they withered, I moved through death into another woman. I never saw my first child again. For eons, this recurred. A never-ending dream, an orange blur of rooms noxious with iron vapors and the smell of amniotic sea, bloody orchids diffusing across layers of linen, and my cries as my tissues separated my children from me. 

•••

My famous name came from being a woman who stole an elixir of immortality from her husband, an archer. The night I slipped it from him, my longing waxed for the moon and my old existence, and I drank every drop. Amnesia swirled, and my body thinned to air as it returned close to the moon—perhaps I would be Metamorphosis again? But as the people made offerings to me every autumn and remembered me in their stories of Chang’e, I wept alone for a millennium. How long must these old wounds rip into fresh ones before I am healed? I had made a mistake, and I have learned.

•••

Another cycle began. But a crack now weakened my human form. After my existence as Chang’e, a taste of immortality had reawakened my essence. Peacock eyes began appearing on my skin—luminescent moss encircling an embryo dark as seawater. After each birth, a handful would flourish, peppering my body in gashes that bulged and breathed. When I picked at them, they fluttered like startled eyes with long lashes. My curious nature enticed, I scraped them off and ate them. The bits melted on my tongue, sweet and bitter as anise. The cuts healed into pale green flakes that soon layered my entire body in a soft fur that trailed fine dust through the air whenever I moved. With this change, sleep and wake melded into one. And I understood that I did not have a mother. 

Transformation is transient—a splinter of light glinting off glass, a figure slipping past a doorway, the knife diving—only the moments before and after are past and present. I, the sliver of time, have no source. Other existences create me through their own actions; I am simply a catalyst or an effect. Perhaps action is my origin. Yes, I will always be Mother, the origin of change, and yet, I will forever be motherless. 

The loss falls on me, a darkening across the womb, a loss even greater than the children that’ve died inside me. How can I feel a loss so heavy without knowing it in the first place? Are some wounds so powerful they make you hurt for that which you have never even known? Does the moon pull tides across the earth’s skin because it senses that, once, it too was earth, that it was never meant to be alone?

•••

Tonight’s full moon beckons a return. My home has suddenly chilled. My three children in this life have a healthy father, and I am glad for it. But a relentless spinal heat has been brewing over the past days, and it runs shivers down my limbs. Words and language fade into distant whispers. A strange thread oozes from me, thin and strong, glistening and tasting of sugar and wheat. The sticky strands are long; I follow one down from my temple to my knee. 

I leave my children and go naked to the field. The grass is high and black. I have not had an appetite in weeks, but I feast on moonlight. I stand facing it, arms spread. My world thickens to milk. A swarm of softness, like wings, tornadoes around me. I am cocooned. I see nothing, hear nothing, and feel everything as heat sears down my limbs, splits them into six, and my head ruptures through my face, stranger than before. My eyes splinter, as does my mind. I seek the light.

My back erupts and I scream. My body flattens against the pulsing tissue around me as I sweat and cry, but it is magnificent. It feels magnificent. The membrane coils up and I wait. The children and their father come looking for me in the field. But they can no longer see me as I am, so they leave. The air is liquid, every ripple a song I can hear. The full moon returns as I burst through the cocoon. It cracks like an egg. My body slides out, born new.

•••

In the night, they’re humming. Moth wings in a field of moon white. Flutters of skin, loose and dry, scabs of lung tissue covering my body in a symphony of breaths. Like this. 

Then, they lift. And I am transformed.