I knew that this particular moth, the big walking moth, could not travel more than a few more yards before a bird or a cat began to eat it, or a car ran over it. It crawled down the driveway toward Shadyside, one of the several sections of town where people like me were expected to settle after college, renting an apartment until they married one of the boys and bought a house. It crawled down the driveway because its shriveled wings were glued shut. The moth crawled down the driveway toward the rest of Shadyside, an area of fine houses, expensive apartments, and fashionable shops. It could only heave the golden wrinkly clumps where its wings should have been it could only crawl down the school driveway on its six frail legs. She bounced the moth from its jar and set it on the school’s asphalt driveway. We all left the classroom and paraded outside behind the teacher with pomp and circumstance. The teacher let the deformed creature go.
Its brown, yellow, pink, and blue wings would have extended six inches from tip to tip, if there had been no mason jar. Its gold furred body was almost as big as a mouse. A smaller moth could have spread its wings to their utmost in that mason jar, but the Polyphemus moth was big. The wings could not fill, so they hardened while they were still crumpled from the cocoon.
But the moth could not spread its wide wings at all the jar was too small. When it spread those wings-those beautiful wings-blood would fill their veins, and the birth fluids on the wings’ frail sheets would harden to make them tough as sails. There, at the twig’s top, the moth shook its sodden clumps of wings.
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