The Painted Swarm

The first time I saw the moth, I thought it was a piece of ash from the incense burner. It fluttered past my grandmother’s urn in the dim lamplight of our new apartment, and I wiped at my eyes, blaming the itch on dust. I’d moved three weeks ago, into a cramped two-bedroom on the fourth floor of a building that smelled of boiled cabbage and old wood. Moving had been a blur of cardboard and stress, and in the middle of it, Aunt Marlene had died. She was my grandmother’s sister, a woman I’d met maybe five times in my life, always at funerals or holidays, always with a distant smile and a hand that patted my head like I was still a child.

Her funeral was last month. I went because family is family, even when they’re strangers. The service was in a small chapel on the edge of town, and the air was thick with grief and the cloying scent of lilies. But what I remember most were the butterflies. Dozens of them, painted ladies and monarchs, darting between the rows of pews, landing on shoulders and bouquets, as if they were mourners too. It was October. Butterflies should have been long gone. My mother said it was a sign, a message from Aunt Marlene. I said it was probably a miracle of climate change. But the butterflies followed me home. Or at least, I thought they did.

The next morning, I found a single wing on my windowsill, orange and black, like a monarch’s, but the pattern was wrong. The black veins were too thick, almost like cracks in glass. I threw it in the trash and didn’t think about it. But then the moths started. At first it was just one or two, fluttering around the bathroom light at night. Then a dozen. Then they were everywhere, in the kitchen, in my bedroom, their soft wings beating against the ceiling like slow pulses. They were the same pattern as the wing, but their bodies were pale and translucent, and when I squashed one, it left a dark smear that smelled like burnt sugar.

I called my landlord, a gruff man named Mr. Kowalski, who came up and inspected the apartment. He poked at the baseboards, sniffed the air, and shrugged. ‘Probably coming from the old lady next door,’ he said. ‘She collects dead things.’ He pointed to the wall we shared, and I hadn’t even noticed the faint watermark stain in the corner, shaped like a map of some forgotten country. He left with a wave, telling me to get some bug spray.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. The moths were louder, their wings creating a soft, almost musical hum. I got up to get a glass of water, and in the hallway, I saw it: not a moth, but a shape. It was the size of a large dog, but it moved like a curtain in a draft, flowing and rippling. It was covered in wings, dozens of folded pairs, each one the same orange-black pattern. It turned toward me, and the wings opened, revealing a face that was not a face, but a mosaic of eyes, all different colors, all blinking at different speeds. It spoke, or rather, it vibrated, and the words formed in my head like a memory being placed there.

‘You have her chair,’ it said.

I didn’t have a chair. I had a fold-up table, a futon, and a stack of milk crates. But Aunt Marlene had a furniture set, I remembered, passed down to my mother, and she had stored it in a basement locker. The locker key was in the kitchen drawer. I don’t know why I knew that.

The next day, I went to the basement. The locker was a rusted metal box, and inside, wrapped in a tarp, was an antique rocking chair. The wood was dark and polished, and carved into the backrest was a pattern of moths and butterflies, so intricate it looked almost alive. I pulled it out, and something fell from the seat: a small, leather-bound journal. It was Aunt Marlene’s. I opened it, and the writing was delicate, almost feminine, but the content was dark. It described a bargain made, a debt owed to something that lived in the space between wings and light. She had collected the moths, trapped them in jars, and fed them her breath. In return, they kept her pain at bay, but they took her memories, her face, her name. The last entry said, ‘The chair is the threshold. Sit, and they will come in earnest.’

I should have burned it. But I was exhausted, and the stress of the move, of the funeral, of the constant flutter, had worn me down. I sat in the chair. Just for a moment. The wood was warm, almost like it had been recently occupied. And the moths began to gather, from every corner of the room, from the pipes and the vents, until they covered me, layer upon layer, their wings pressed against my skin like a thousand tiny hands. They didn’t sting. They didn’t bite. They just held me, and I felt a strange peace, a quietness, like the static in my head had finally been tuned out.

When I woke up, the chair was empty. The journal was gone. But there was a new mark on my arm, a pattern of wings, identical to the one on the chair. And in the mirror, I saw that my eyes had changed. They were no longer brown; they were the color of a monarch’s wing, orange with black veins, and they moved independently, like a moth’s.

I have an old aunt now, in the building next door. She has a rocking chair, and she needs company. I think I’ll visit her tonight. I haven’t heard from my mother in weeks, and the moths are getting louder. But I don’t mind. They keep the pain away.