Sleeping Beauties

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The moth makes Evie laugh. It lands on her bare forearm and she brushes her index finger lightly across the brown and gray waves that color its wings. “Hello, gorgeous,” she tells the moth. It lifts away. Upward, upward, and upward the moth goes, and is swallowed by a slice of the sun tangled amid the glossy green leaves twenty feet above Evie’s place among the roots on the ground.

A coppery red rope leaks from a black socket at the center of the trunk and twists between plates of bark. Evie doesn’t trust the snake, obviously. She’s had trouble with him before.

Her moth and ten thousand others surge from the treetop in a crackling, dun-colored cloud. The swarm rolls across the sky in the direction of the sickly second-growth pines on the other side of the meadow. She rises to follow. Stalks crunch under her steps and the waist-high grass scrapes her bare skin. As she approaches the sad, mostly logged-over wood, she detects the first chemical smells—ammonia, benzene, petroleum, so many others, ten thousand nicks on a single patch of flesh—and relinquishes the hope she had not realized she harbored.

Webs spill from her footprints and sparkle in the morning light.