The Glass Moth

The night the moth came back, I was sitting in my apartment above the old butcher’s shop on Hemlock Street, watching a rerun of a cooking show I didn’t care about. The television flickered, casting blue light across the dust motes, and my cat, Wednesday, was kneading a spot on the couch. My phone buzzed with a text from my sister, Mara, about visiting our father in the hospital, but I ignored it. I was too tired to deal with the guilt.

Then I heard it: a scraping at the door, slow and deliberate, like something with claws dragging across the wood. Wednesday’s ears flattened, and she hissed, her fur bristling. I froze, my heart hammering. I didn’t have a dog—I never had one. The scraping stopped, and I realized I was holding my breath. I forced myself to stand, my legs shaky, and moved toward the door. I put my hand on the knob, but I hesitated, peering through the peephole. The hallway was empty, dimly lit by a single bulb with a dead moth inside. I sighed, chalking it up to the building’s creaky plumbing or maybe a raccoon.

As I turned back to the couch, the air in the room changed. It grew warm, suffocating, like a summer day in a sealed greenhouse. The smell of lavender and stale pipe tobacco filled my nostrils—my grandmother’s scent. She had died in 2008, but that fragrance was as vivid as a photograph. I spun around, and there, at the foot of the bed (which was just a mattress on the floor, because I’d been too lazy to buy a frame), the mattress dipped. It was as if an invisible weight settled just beyond the edge.

But I saw her. She was younger than I remembered, maybe forty, with auburn hair and a face free of the deep wrinkles that had marked her final years. She wore the same yellow sundress she had in a photo from my childhood. She was looking not at me, but at the wall, where I had taped a photo of my little brother, Emilio, who was in the hospital for an appendectomy—the same operation he’d had two years ago. Her gaze was intense, almost worried.

I forgot to be afraid. All I felt was a desperate hope, a longing that made my throat tight. I whispered, ‘Hi.’ She turned to me, and her face softened into a smile. Her lips moved, but no sound came out at first; then, as if from a great distance, I heard her voice, clear as a bell. ‘My darling, how is your brother?’ I answered, my voice trembling, telling her about the surgery, about how he was recovering, about how I was worried because he was too thin. She listened, nodding, and then she asked about me, about my job at the museum, about my lonely nights, and I told her everything, the words pouring out like a confession.

Then I asked the question that had been burning in me, the same question I had asked in my dream many years ago: ‘How are you, Grandma?’ The warmth vanished. The temperature plummeted, and I could see my breath misting in the air. The soft yellow light from the TV turned sickly green, and her smile remained, but it grew too wide, stretching beyond human limits. Her eyes darkened, becoming hollow pits. And she leaned in, the space between us collapsing, and I felt her breath on my cheek—cold, like the bottom of a grave. She said, ‘I was doing fine until you called me back.’

I screamed, and the sound was swallowed by the silence. The room blurred, and when I blinked, she was gone. The mattress was flat, the air was normal, and Wednesday was grooming her paw as if nothing had happened. But on the floor, by the door, lay a dead moth—a giant, glassy-winged moth that I had never seen before. Its wings were translucent, like frozen tears, and they crumbled to dust when I touched them.

I called the hospital to check on Emilio. The nurse said he was stable, but he had spiked a fever overnight, and they were running tests. I didn’t sleep. The next day, I went to visit him. He was sitting up in bed, pale but smiling, and the first thing he said was, ‘I saw Grandma last night. She was standing at the window, and she said she was sorry.’ I grabbed his hand, and I felt a chill run through me. And on the windowsill of his hospital room, I saw another moth, identical to the one from my apartment. It was alive, though, and it beat its wings slowly, as if in a rhythm. And then, without warning, it flew out the window, into the gray morning light, and I knew—I knew that this wasn’t over. She hadn’t come to check on us. She had come to take something, and I had given it to her with my question. She had been looking for a way back, and I had left the door open.