The summer before the astronaut leaves for college is a moth summer. They get into everything: cupboards, closets, boxes and soup bowls, pressed between screen and closed glass of front windows. In the fall, the astronaut will sleep on the sheets her mother ordered special for her, dotted with stars and swirls of galaxies, so cold and soft against her skin, the promise of the sky. The summer is brutally hot and her father insists on keeping the air conditioning off at night; the astronaut sleeps on top of her bedspread, listens to the rustle of moth wings in the dark. 

The sun sets late in the summer and the moths twitch and flutter in the fading light. The astronaut’s mother hates to see anything hurt or trapped; she cups them into her hands, cooing sweet words to them, calling them babies, carries them outside.  

There you go, babies, she says, opens her hands. The astronaut watches them twirl out across the yard. 

When the astronaut’s mother was young, she says, her own mother would put out a bowl of soapy water at night, shine a lamplight into it in the dark. In the morning, the bowl would be heavy with the bodies of drowned moths drawn by the reflection, a few soap bubbles dwindling away. The astronaut’s mother says she remembers coming home and seeing that same bowl upside down in the drying rack. Every day, her mother washed it and put it back out. 

I hated that bowl, says the astronaut’s mother. 

The moths leave pieces of themselves behind, a dusting from their flutter-brown wings, no matter how careful the astronaut’s mother is taking them out. Streaks on the window, crumpled wings from the ones that weren’t found in time, and died. Their little brown bodies curled and dry on the ground, before the astronaut’s mother sweeps them away. 

The astronaut’s mother spends her days, that summer, trimming back daisies in her garden. Her shoulders going red in the sun. 

So damn many daisies, she says to her daughter. 

When the astronaut looks back on that summer, her mother’s last summer, she thinks of her mother as young, so very young, but during the summer itself, she only wished her mother would cover her shoulders better, stop complaining about the stupid daisies. 

Before she comes in from gardening, the astronaut’s mother sets her shoes on the front step, off to one side so no one will trip over them. The astronaut’s father comes in through the garage. He expects dinner will be waiting when he gets home, he expects they will all eat together. It is a summer of pastas and salads, how was your days, and the yearly neighborhood gathering with hot dogs nestled in buns and charred hamburgers. 

The adults all ask the astronaut about college, all say to her mother: I can’t believe how much she’s grown. 

The astronaut’s mother nods and sips from her Solo cup of white wine. 

Time flies, she says. 

Moths fly, the astronaut thinks. 

The girl from across the way sits in the grass beside the astronaut while they eat off of paper plates. She eats a hamburger without a bun, cutting it into dainty pieces with her fork and dipping it into a round pool of ketchup. 

You’re going to be so far away, she says, and their knees, for a moment, touch. The astronaut looks up at the sky and the stars that she cannot yet see. 

It’s not that far, she says, and in the sky, a lone moth dips through the air. She watches it wing its way into the darkness, watches the sky above it. It’s not that far at all. 

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Cathy Ulrich has seen two moths that were bigger than her hand, but most of the ones that get into her house are average sized. Her work has been published in various journals, including Reed Magazine, Briefly Lit and Pithead Chapel.

ART FEATURED
Cindy Rinne
believe
college on paper