Mothman is Worried

These days, he can’t stop thinking about his sister, who looks just like him, except her eyes are yellow instead of red—she has been losing her edge, has traded her usual flight path over the city for a backyard roost and a peony garden and a flock of fluffy black sheep. The sheep love to follow her around, all she has to do is flap her wings a few times and they trot into the pen or down the hill or to the river, exactly where she wants them to go, but Mothman has seen The Odyssey (he slipped in after the previews started, watched from the back of the theater with a hood pulled over his feathered antenna, wings tucked in close), and he can’t shake that scream, the cyclops stabbed deep in his big, watery eye by strangers who sneaked into his home and stole his food. All the poor guy wanted was privacy, maybe a light lunch, and now his world is only darkness, all the light extinguished. For Mothman’s birthday, his sister bakes him a cake—tender vanilla sponge, mascarpone whipped cream, fresh berries from her own garden, free of pesticides and parasites. There’s no point in warning in people anymore, she tells him, no one listens anyway, they only blame us, wouldn’t you rather be soft? She cuts him a slice and slides it across the table, waits for him to answer, her yellow eyes glowing like flames.