Green shoved the thought away. He knew, like all sneaking prejudices, that it would linger like the smell of the rag moth, like the bloodstains on his shirt collar. A sinking realization hit him, obvious as a toothache, unseen as his pumping heart.
What else am I assuming?
What else have I internalized? What parts of me will need to slough away for me to become native to my new life? Will there beenough of me left to regrow something new in place of everything I prune away?
He didn’t know.
He wouldn’t know.
And that, like the hidden aspects of nature to which he had bound his life, would loom over him like a great unknown watcher following in his shadow.
Could he make friends with it?
“I can try,” he said to the rag moth.
Its dust swirled. Its eyes glinted in the lantern light.
How could something so superficially ugly feel so intrinsically beautiful?
How could his own reactions feel like a mystery on par with the impossible insect?
Green sighed.
He pulled out his phone, ran through an inventory of things it couldn’t do without cell service or wifi, and dropped it back into his pocket. No doomscrolling social media. No articles about losing belly fat or building deeper friendships. He was still a novice at being alone with his thoughts.
His boredom felt like wet socks.
There was a notebook lying on a low shelf next to a basket of octagonal seashells.
He grabbed it and sank down onto the cot Valentina had left in the corner. The cover was blank and unadorned. He thought it might be a violation to look inside and immediately forgave himself for doing it anyway. Drastic times. Drastic measures.
The writing was in Cyrillic? Russian?
Green growled in frustration. There would be no escape from his own mind.
Crossing his legs made the acorn dig into his outer thigh, so he uncrossed them again.
He flipped through the pages.
He stopped when he saw an entry in Roman characters.
French, he thought.
He kept flipping.
There was a diagram of a creature that looked like a bird made of sharp angles and a curved line beneath it suggested it was…what? In orbit above the Earth?
More Cyrillic.
On the last few pages, Green found a single entry in English.
It was a letter.
It read:
Dear Ivan,
A freshwater anemone the size of a cart horse nearly ate a good portion of my memory today. As far as I can tell, I escaped unscathed. My colleague was not so lucky. She has spent all evening trying to map out the chronology of her life in order to define the shape of her wound. The absence seems to lurk in her twenties, but she has become distrustful of her ability to place her recollections in their proper order.
