Dog Star

Walking widdershins through the side yard to the back, drought-colored grass burning under my feet. The grass is scattered with leaves the same color. Everything has turned brittle in the heat. 

I pass my husband who is sorting through boxes on the porch. We say nothing, but I can feel his preoccupied silence. I wonder if he notices my receding figure as I walk away. In my mind's eye we are like planets, moving through conjunctions, oppositions, trines.

On the other side of the fence, even as I stop to consider it, the woman who lives next door is dying. I push back against this stark knowledge and find myself remembering the lighted doorbell of her house, how it always flickered faintly, like a pulse. 

The dry grass stabs at me, rustles in the dusty breeze. 

I think, to live is to pass from one space to another. I think, I would make an inventory of my pockets, if I had any. 

Far away in the blue distance, Sirius stirs and yawns, awaiting its heliacal rise. 

Image source: Canis Major

Work and Non-Work

With apologies to Broadcast, the Mothwing Collective has been busy with...work? Or is it non-work? In any case, we've been the nicest kind of busy. A few items from our rapidly expanding collection here for your perusal, composites of our individual work and pictures made on our search for the bright side of the eerie.

"Send a few clicks into the unknown, see what comes back."

The Opposite of Absence

It's high summer and the landscape is breathless. Even the cicadas have gone silent. We move in slow motion if we move at all; I feel like a photograph that's been captured mid-step.

The hallway light flickers, the dishwasher churns, a patch of sun creeps across the face of the kitchen clock. The kids tell me about the hum of the powerlines on the corner, but I find that I'm too old hear it now. 

In the bath, a stray yellow leaf clings to a hand towel on the rack, its parched edges furled like wings. There's a vibration in the air that feels like waiting. It's nebulous but heavy, the opposite of absence. 

In The Weird and The Eerie, Mark Fisher asked "who or what is the entity who has woven fate?" 

I listen to the soundless space where the hum used to be. I get the feeling I might know the answer. 

That Was The Story of My Life

I've long had the idea that we come into the world with some vague plan, a faintly drawn map with general directions marked and junctions to be met. I also have the idea that you can the take the wrong exit, or miss a turn-off and get hopelessly lost, stuck with no way back until conditions arise to get you to where you were meant to go. I know what it's like to be stuck, and I know what it's like to stumble, almost accidentally, back onto the path. 

There have been three times in my life that I've been aware of being lost, knowing there was some invisible turn I'd failed to make, leaving my existence to unspool uselessly like a film that had jumped its sprockets. The first two were distinct moments of knowing something had gone wrong, the third was a slower knowledge, a growing realization that all efforts to change my circumstance had come to naught. In each case, the sense of an unlived life haunted me, unseen but present like a prickle down my spine.

In other words, it was a lot like being under a hex, but knowing all the while that I'd somehow hexed myself. 

So it came to pass that, realizing the gravity of my situation, I decided I needed to be unhexed. At first this might seem a tall order, but it turned out to be as easy as waking in the night knowing it could be done. While I didn't have the map of my future, I did have the map of my past, so it was quite a simple matter - methodically, secretly, intentionally unwinding my life from the nodes of fate that had held me fast. (How I did it, I might tell you one day, but not yet, not yet.) As it happened, it felt natural, really; like laughter, a new memory that overtakes old sorrow, the chill of significance now pleasantly warm. No longer haunted, always half somewhere else, for those moments - the tiniest sliver of time - I had an idea of what it must be like to be normal.

Unravelling the warp and weft of my previous life, I see now how teenage dreams were only precognitions of this moment, the eerie chill merely signaling a memory that hadn't happened yet. Not without a certain melancholy do I watch the loose threads blow away, the comfortable discomfort of the familiar past. What is left behind is a path to the truly unknown, and beyond that, a future - whatever it might be - to be lived in the present tense at last. 

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