The Constant Moth

My father was a man of few words and fewer jokes, so when he told me this at the dinner table, I listened. It was a story he’d kept for years, and he only told it once, in a voice that quavered slightly, as if even he didn’t believe it.

He was a freelance photographer, and one autumn he was hired to shoot the yearbook for a small technical college on the outskirts of nowhere. The campus was a maze of glass and steel, built around an old brick building that had been a hospital in the early 1900s. The shoot was scheduled for late October, and he arrived before dawn, as he always did, to scout the lighting. The air was cold and still, and the fog clung to the ground like a second skin.

He set up his equipment in the main gymnasium, which had been converted from a chapel. The walls were covered in faded murals of angels and saints, their eyes chipped and staring blankly. He had to shoot in the gym, the library, and the old dormitory wing, but the gym was his starting point. He finished setting up his lights and cameras by six-thirty, and since the first students weren’t due until seven, he sat on a folding chair by the gym’s side door, waiting.

Through the door’s small window, he could see the campus’s back parking lot, then a narrow strip of dead grass, and beyond that, an old cemetery, practically swallowed by the fog. A single streetlight on the far side of the cemetery cast a sickly orange glow through the mist. My father watched the light, half-asleep, when something moved.

It was a shape, a silhouette, hunched over, moving back and forth with an odd, jerky motion. It was too far to make out any features, but it was human, or at least human-like. It walked rapidly across the graveyard, back and forth, as if it were searching for something on the ground. My father rubbed his eyes, thinking it was a trick of the light. But the shape kept moving, tireless, never stopping its frantic, back-and-forth pacing.

He wanted to go closer, to see what it was, but he felt a knot in his stomach, a primal unease. Instead, he watched, frozen, as the figure continued its pattern. It was like a moth, drawn to the lamp, but trapped in an invisible box, unable to escape. The fog swirled around it, sometimes obscuring it completely, but it always reappeared, still moving.

At seven, the first few students arrived, and the figure vanished as if it had never been there. My father tried to brush it off, but the image stayed with him through the morning. He shot the gym, the library, and even the dormitory, but his mind kept going back to the graveyard.

Around noon, during a break, he mentioned it to the campus groundskeeper, an old man with a gray beard and a limp. The groundskeeper’s face went pale. He asked my father to describe the movement. My father said it was like the person was pacing, but also like they were picking something up and putting it down, over and over.

The groundskeeper told him the story. In the 1920s, a woman named Agnes lived in a small house near the cemetery. She was a recluse who collected moths, hundreds of them, pinned and framed on her walls. One night, a storm knocked over her lantern, and her house burned down. She died, but they found her body clutching a jar, as if she’d tried to save her collection. She was buried in that cemetery, right near the spot where my father saw the figure.

After that, the groundskeeper said, people sometimes saw a figure in the grief of the cemetery, especially in the fall, when moths migrate. They said Agnes was looking for her lost moths, picking them up from the ground, over and over, but never finding the one she truly lost.

My father finished the shoot and left, but he couldn’t shake the image. He went back the next morning, before dawn, and saw the figure again. This time, he brought his camera, and he took a long exposure, hoping to capture it. But when he developed the film, the figure wasn’t there. Instead, there was just a smear of light, like a moth’s wing brushing the lens.

He never went back, and he never told anyone until now. But that image, the constant moth, stuck with him. He said he still dreams of it, sometimes, walking back and forth in the fog, looking for something it can never find. And he always wakes up feeling like he’s looking for something too, something he lost a long time ago, but he can’t remember what it is.