Savannah Gripshover | fiction | Silk Moths Don’t Have Mouths

Silk Moths Don't Have Mouths
                                                                                            [cw: death, suicide, depression, religious trauma]


Baby’s got a tattoo of a silk moth on her shoulder blade and when she sits shirtless at the edge of the bed to sigh and shake off the sleep, it twitches: in the darkness, you might even see the void-black ink of its bug-eyes blink, looking right at you.

“They’re born without mouths,” she tells me. “They live until they starve to death.”

Which, I imagine, can’t take very long. They’re small. They’re delicate. They’re designed by a god less mindful than ours. But Baby’s is sealed forever atop her skin, fossilized in the amber of her body. We both know how gods are: they’re violent and ruthless and absurd. They make creatures, they make the hands that crush them. In the light of the rising sun; in the light of the melting television static; in the light of her angel’s halo; I see her hands. I imagine them cradling me. I imagine them setting me free. I imagine floating right back into her grasp, amazed by the priority of softness.

Baby likes breakfast for dinner so I collect all the best twenty-four-hour breakfast diners across the country and drive to them while she naps restlessly in the passenger seat. Baby likes glam-rock music from bands I’ve never heard of so I scavenge yard sales and vintage shops for half-shattered CD’s and let them stream out of the car radio that hardly works. Baby likes bugs, so I buy her books, I point them out in the fields, I make shadow puppets of butterflies on the ceilings, I listen to every word she says.

There’s more beetles in this world than anything else, she tells me, sitting me down on the counter in the moon-yellow glow of the hotel bathroom; she brushes my hair, she wipes off last night’s makeup, she twists the shower temperature just to the heat I like. We have never – and will never – dominate this planet.

People think that mantises eating their mates is something cruel, something horrible, she tells me as she repacks and unpacks our suitcases, lying our pajamas and jackets onto the bed until what is hers and what is mines blends together; the same strong arms that lift the bags into the back of the van later zip them up quietly, fluff them down gently, fold them flat silently while I try to fix this room’s busted air conditioner/mini-fridge/creaking ceiling light. But it isn't. The male uses the last of his strength to make the sacrifice. He knows, and wants, what he must do.

Monarch butterflies seek out milkweed to have their babies on, she tells me as she rubs my back until I fall asleep; tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day, I will have hours and hours to drive, maps to follow, towns to haunt. The toxins in the milkweed protects the babies from predators. Monarchs refuse to bring more of themselves into the world unless they can promise they’ll make it, at least for a little while.

I stare at the ceilings and out across the roads and down at my hands and wonder what it means to make it. Whether it’s worth it to make it. How we can promise anyone or anything the chance of making it. Good people, beautiful bugs – stomped out by sin, spatchcocked by sadistic hands, blown away by winds. It’s a miracle I’m still here. I see the photos Baby carries in her wallet and wonder why some of us aren’t rewarded miracles.

His name was Heath. He exchanged rings with Baby in the pitch-black ooze of the woods behind their subdivision. The first time when they were fourteen; the second time when they were twenty, having been living together for years since Baby one day slept over at his house and never left, not sure what else they were supposed to do with their lives besides be together.

“His parents loved me like they were my parents. He drove me to school when we went to school, to work when we worked. He was just as much a part of my daily life as anything else could be. So, why not?” It’s hard to hear her voice underneath the rage of the wind streaming through the open window. Her hand flies out to ride the wave, her emerald nail polish flashing like scales against the blue of the sky. “Why not get married? He was my best friend. We did everything together. I always liked his last name.”

The explanation was simple. Obvious. The two of them were woven together. This was destiny, wasn’t it? Baby and Heath, Heath and Baby. Any picture of her was a picture of him; any moment of his was a moment of her’s. They were married half as a joke, half as a union, entirely a commitment.

I asked her, did you love him? 

More than anything, she said, and that killed me, because I knew the love she could offer. Towards the world and its beings, in spite of its faults and flaws; towards someone like herself, like Heath, like the bugs, like me. It was hard to imagine a ceiling to her love. Like a god, her power was limitless. It was almost sickening when I thought about it. How could her love expand from the overflowing multitude it already was? How did she live now that such a bright part of her had its light snuffed dead?

Did you kiss him? 

Yes, we kissed. But we’d been kissing since we were little kids. What was the difference?

Did you sleep with him?

We shared a bed. We always did, ever since that first sleepover.

But did you–

No, she shook her head, silence consuming her. It wasn’t that kind of love.

But it was greater, it was wilder, it was all the more beautiful. And when he died, it was all the more devastating. There was all the more lost.

Heath follows us from county to county, state to state, coast to coast – when we saw Lake Michigan, I knew that what I was feeling was the cool glassy green water curling around my ankles, the sand cradling my soles; I knew Baby was feeling Heath, hearing the laughter he only let loose when he was soaking wet and sunburnt and chasing after her as she shrank into the shore. When we sit in our breakfast diners and order our meals, I feel the stickiness of the counter pressing against my palms, and she feels the weight of his arm around her shoulders, bringing her in close as they share a booth seat. When I feel her heartbeat, those late nights where we share a hotel bed, I feel her. Her warmth, her breath, her flesh. I know she feels me. But I know she feels love when she feels me, that transcendent thing, and I know what love for her looks like. I know what it feels like. I’m willing to be a mirror. I’m willing to drive her across the country. After all, she refuses to drive anymore. Not after what happened to him.

That was how she found me. That hospital hallway, the sterile white lights, as clinical as sin but as holy as a halo. I saw her: pale, sickly, face reddened with tears. She saw me. Shaking, standing there in my bandages, debating to make a break for it. We were both approaching the open window. Outside, the grass was green, the sky was blue, and golden tulips twinkled like stars against a field as expansive as the atmosphere. I thought about jumping, about slashing myself with the glass, about hating and hating until the pressure collided like a supernova and I simply ceased to exist, shedding stardust – but, for some reason, I asked this stranger what she was thinking, instead of sitting with my own horrid thoughts.

I want to see the world, she told me. She gestured towards the tulips. More of it. All of it.


We sat and had lunch together in the hospital cafeteria for eleven days. Her as a visitor and me as a patient. Heath was fading in and out, soul growing fuzzy, body bleeding thin, machines weeping beeps and blinks. I was coming back. I was slowly relearning how to walk and talk and move and breathe and smile and think. What a thing life was. What a life I was living. 

As we talked, we learned more and more about each other, the little ways we had been haunting each other: the way we both went to the same church, odd little girls trapped in odd little dresses, watched by the same odd little wooden prophet descending from the ceiling. The way we both stopped going to church by the time our adult teeth and our adult sins came in. The way we both ran away from home when we were in high school. The way we both missed those days fondly, no matter how clumsy and ugly they were in their pursuits to stomp us dead.

After he was gone, I plucked those golden tulips and wrapped them in lavender cellophane, brought them right to the address she told me to find her at. She was hollowed out by loss. It was the first time I had seen her outside of those horrible white lights, and instead, embraced by the warmth of the world. The world she yearned for.

Okay, I told her one day, while we were smoking on my porch and laughing, let’s go.

Okay, she replied. And in minutes, her bag was packed, and we were abandoning Pennsylvania for Ohio, Ohio for Illinois. 

This was our existence: living off of the money Heath spared for his best-friend-wife-sister-soulmate, sleeping in hotel rooms, driving for hours, running through fields, coming so close to touching only to pull away – as if the contact could kill us. But we still lingered in each other’s orbits. I still caught her looking at me. I still had her hands braiding my hair, her chest against my back in bed, her voice in my ears as she sang out loud to challenge the wind.

“Do you think you were in love?” I ask her as we waddle through a tiny creek in a tiny park, our van sat far away in the sprawling parking lot. “I know you loved him. I know it was an amazing love. But were you in love?”

“Sometimes I wonder if I don’t know what falling in love feels like.”

I know. I just don’t know if I can survive it. But then again, I didn’t know how much I was capable of surviving.

“What about you?” She asks me as she bends over to tug up her pants over her calves, freeing more of her bronze-toned skin to receive the cool rush of the water. “Have you been in love?”

“I think I’ve come close.”

Later, we lie with our backs in the grass. The sun melts around us and washes us in warmth. She reaches for my hand. I let her hold it, limp as a ghost. I turn to her.

“We need to get back on the road if we’re still planning on making it to Colorado by morning,” I remind her, and as I pull her up to stand beside me, I don’t let go of her hand.

“Let’s eat first.” She decides, and we walk through the blue-black haze of night, feet tickled by grass, hands intertwined. The swatches of darkness paint us pale.

Fireflies flock to her and it’s the most divine thing I’ve ever seen. She smiles, hums, watches them flutter; she raises a finger and they land on it, and she’s careful not to laugh so she doesn’t startle them. They flicker on and off. They come and go. I wait for her voice to introduce me to them, but she doesn’t. She stays silent. There’s a bittersweet glaze polluting her eyes, a sad smile contorting her lips. She doesn’t let go of me, even though I know in another world, she’d have both hands raised to welcome all the lightning bugs she could.

In the diner, we eat quietly. We can’t bring ourselves to speak. I feel heavy enough to sink through the earth, light enough to drift into the sky. I look at her across the table. She’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

“Tell me about fireflies,” I beg of her, although it probably looks just like small talk to anybody else. Maybe even to her. But when I say tell me about fireflies, I mean tell me about light, tell me about what you love and how you love it and why you love it. I mean tell me why we’re so tiny and weak and yet we’re still here. I mean show me your heart and I’ll crawl inside it. Make me a monarch and I’ll search for the milkweed in your mind to lay my eggs. Make me a mantis and I’ll give myself up so you can feed. Make me a beetle so that I can be one of the million things you love. I mean hold out your hands so I can prove to you how gently I can land. I mean be my god, my grand giant gorgeous god, and I’ll trust you not to kill me, to crush me, to make me escape from a cocoon with no mouth, born only to die. I mean tell me how you want to live so I can live with you, beside you, among you. I mean tell me about fireflies.

And she does.

“They communicate with others by flashing their lights,” she tells me, and we share our breakfast, and we share this moment, and we share this space, and when I think of Heath I think of the grief we’ve inevitably shared, and when I think of Baby I think of the love we’ve inevitably fallen into.

Fireflies are found on every continent on earth. No matter where I go, how far I stray, how long I live – there is a light, blinking, speaking, saying what it thinks.

I love you. I love you. I love you, the lights say, as primal and instinctual and desperate as any other biological response. I love you, I love you, I love you.