The Moths
That Carry Names

The moths came in the first October after Liam died. Maree had expected the grief to feel like drowning — that was the word everyone used — but it was nothing like drowning. It was like being on dry land with the knowledge that you would never again see the ocean. Nothing pressing in. Just the wide, blank absence of something that should be there.

She was sitting on the back porch in Albury, the citronella candle burning because she'd lit it from habit and couldn't be bothered blowing it out, when the first moth settled on the back of her hand. Bogong moth — big, reddish-brown, fat with stored fat from its winter in the mountains. Liam had loved bogongs, with the particular enthusiasm he'd had for large insects, which had been total and indelicate and completely endearing in a nine-year-old. He'd once tried to keep one in a jar and been devastated when it flew away.

"They have to go to the mountains," she'd told him. "They need to be in the mountains with the rest of them."

"I just want it to stay," he'd said.

The moth on her hand opened its wings once, slowly, and closed them again.

"I know," said Maree, to the moth, to Liam, to no one.

By the end of the week there were fourteen of them. They didn't behave the way moths usually do — frenzied at the candle flame, panicked by light. These ones settled on the porch railing and waited, with enormous patience, as though they were expecting her to do something. She had stopped watching what she ate and started sleeping twelve hours a night, which her grief counsellor had said was normal for the second year, and she had taken to sitting outside at dusk with a cup of tea she didn't finish, just to be somewhere other than inside the house.

On the eighth night, the moths arranged themselves into a shape.

She didn't see it at first — it was like a constellation, obvious only once someone points it out. But then the shape resolved: a path, indicated by sixteen moths in a diagonal from the step to the back fence, and at the fence, two larger moths on the gatepost, one on each side, their wings spread wide like sentinels or signposts.

Maree opened the gate.

In the centre of the silver grass, a child sat cross-legged looking at something in his hands.

She wanted to run. She had wanted to run since the morning the hospital had rung, had been wanting to run ever since, except she had nowhere to go because the thing she was running from was inside. She had sat in grief counselling and talked about that — the impossibility of fleeing an interior wound — and the counsellor had nodded and said it was one of the hardest things about traumatic loss, and had given her some breathing exercises, which she'd done, because you do the things people give you when you have nothing else.

She did not run. She walked forward through the silver grass until she could see what he held.

It was a bogong moth. He had both hands cupped around it gently, and it sat in his palms with its wings open, completely still.

"It's staying this time," he said, without looking up.

"Hi, love," said Maree. Her voice came out steady. She was surprised by this, the way you are surprised by what the body can manage when it knows there is no time for collapse.

"Hi, Mum."

She sat down in the silver grass beside him. The moths made a slow wheel overhead. She did not ask where they were, or what this was, or whether she was dreaming, because these were questions for a different kind of moment. In this moment there was her son's shoulder against her arm and the warm night air and the extraordinary industry of the moths.

"Are you okay?" she asked.

"Yeah," he said. "It's different. But yeah."

"Good," she said. "That's good."

They sat for a while in the silver grass. She noticed she was breathing — really breathing, all the way down — for the first time in over a year. The moths moved in their great slow current and the oversized moon laid its light across everything, and Maree allowed herself to feel, for this one moth-attended hour, that loss was not the only true thing. That there was also this: the shoulder of her son against her arm, the ordinary miracle of existing in the same night air.

She rang her grief counsellor the next day and made a regular appointment, for the first time committing to a day and time and not cancelling it. She could not explain what had changed, exactly. She told her counsellor that she felt she had been given a second chapter she'd thought was finished, and she wanted to read it properly, with attention, the way Liam had attended to everything — the moths, the creek, the underside of leaves, the slow and serious business of being alive to the world.

The next October, the bogongs came through again on their way to the mountains. Maree left the porch light off and sat in the dark and let them settle where they liked.

She said his name quietly, once, and listened to the warm night receive it.