I’m watching! I can’t not watch! One of them is on my cheek!
Mental Valentina scowled.
“You are not watching, you are reacting. You are making this about you. Stop it. Imagine your body out of that room and leave your senses behind. What are they doing? You know full well the answer isn’t ‘trying to panic one random man.’ ”
Green growled internally.
How is someone I’ve known for ten hours living inside my head?
Imaginary or not, she had a point. The caterpillars weren’t treating him differently from the furniture. Maybe he could be furniture.
It wasn’t easy. It wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t immediate, but he pushed his ego down deep inside and tried to see the caterpillars outside the context of what they might do to him. With an immense effort of will, he stopped being the direct object of every caterpillar’s sentence.
Okay. What are they doing?
They all looked to be the exact same size, a bulky six or seven inches. If there was variation among them, Green couldn’t see it. He shifted his gaze to the caterpillar inching up his left biceps. Its head was a dark mask of ovular eyes that appeared to meet in the center. Looking closely, Green could see a hint of ocher between the green of the body and the black of the head. Tiny translucent hairs ran the length of the animal and they pitched back and forth as the internal mechanism of locomotion contracted and expanded.
He was no entomologist, but he noticed what he could.
Focusing in on one caterpillar, thinking of it as a life-form and not a mishap, a creature who was shaped by the same natural pressures that shaped him, Green was once more surprised to find that he thought the animal was actually quite pretty. Special. That thought stood out like a chandelier in a cornfield. It made no sense.
He looked up, studying the room.
Broadening his view, he took in the space as an impression of shape and movement. The synchronized motion of the caterpillars meant that they could be perceived as a whole, a unified creature with a single purpose. Each individual organism followed the same pattern.
Inch.
Inch.
Inch.
Pause in an arc like a tiny bridge.
Inch.
Inch.
Inch.
Curve upward in an S like a snake threatening to strike.
Wave like a reed in the wind.
Repeat the cycle.
There was something else about the motion that Green could see when he took a wider view. The corpse of the rag moth formed a central point around which all the caterpillars were circling. The dead moth was the hub of a wheel, the eye of a hurricane. The moth’s body was gone. In its place was a pillar of churning dust with unusual cohesion. It turned in the air like a column of muddy river water.
As he watched, he realized that the smell of the rag moth had become a taste, acrid and dry. It was more than a taste. His mouth felt parched and filmed with a month of uninterrupted sleep.
The dust roiled.
The caterpillars circled.
Green chewed at his tongue and tried to spur his salivary glands to action.
The pillar of dust flickered like a guttering flame and, for just a moment, the dark silhouette of a living rag moth fluttered above the table. Wind from huge moth’s wings tousled Green’s hair and grit stung his eyes.
Then it was gone.
