She called herself Moth and said she liked the way they flew into flames without flinching. Her real name was Emily, but that was buried under layers of eyeliner, cigarette burns, and a voice that could cut glass. She was thirty, somewhat immature, vindictive as hell, and had a habit of throwing things when she felt cornered. Diagnosed bipolar, unmedicated, and proud of it. “I like the highs,” she’d say, “and the lows make me write poetry.” He was forty-eight, name was Ray.
A former welder turned drunk philosopher. Liver shot, hands trembling, voice like sandpaper. He lived in a one-room flat above a laundromat that smelled like mildew and lost dreams. His fridge held nothing but gin and out-of-date mustard. He’d been sober once, for a woman who left him for a yoga instructor named Chad. That was ten years ago. He hadn’t tried again. They met at a dive called Hole In The Wall. Moth was screaming at the bartender for cutting her off. Ray was nursing his third double and watching the chaos like it was a movie.
She turned to him, mascara streaked like war paint, and said, “You got a problem, old man?” Ray shrugged, “Only with myself.” She laughed like a car crash. They ended up in his flat that night, limbs tangled, breath sour, the kind of fucking that feels like drowning. She carved her name into his shoulder with a safety pin. He didn’t even flinch. The beginning was fire.
They drank, they fought, they made love like they were punishing each other. Moth would disappear for days, come back with bruises and stories about men who didn’t understand her. Ray would scream, throw bottles, then cry into her lap like a child. She’d stroke his hair and whisper, “We’re the same, you and me. Broken and beautiful.” But madness doesn’t stay poetic for long.
By the third month the fights got louder. Moth smashed Ray's guitar against the wall because he looked at a waitress too long. Ray locked her out during a manic episode, and she slept in the alley, curled up next to a dumpster. She started stealing his money, pawning his things. He started hiding bottles of booze in the bathroom and under the kitchen sink. One night, she tried to overdose on his sleeping pills. Ray found her foaming at the mouth, dragged her into a cold shower, and shook her awake. She screamed at him for ruining her death and slapped him. He slapped her back. They both cried. She walked out and they didn’t talk for two days.
Then she came back with a stray cat and said, “We need something to love.” The middle was quieter. They got the cat fixed and named it Radar. Moth started painting again, too, dark violent canvases that looked like nightmares. Ray tried AA for a week, relapsed on the seventh day. Moth didn’t yell. She just stared at him like he was a ghost. They had moments. Sunday mornings with jazz records and burnt toast.
Long walks where she’d hold his hand like it was the last thing keeping her tethered.
He’d read her poetry aloud while she painted, both of them pretending they weren’t waiting for the next explosion, because he questioned her poems trying to understand them, and she felt like he was judgemental. But the abuse lingered like smoke. Ray started coughing blood. The doctor said cirrhosis. Moth cried in the waiting room, then stole a bottle of vodka from the supermarket.
She drank it in the parking lot, screaming at the sky. Ray watched from the car, too tired to intervene. They stopped sleeping together. Not out of hate, but exhaustion. Moth curled up with the cat, Ray with his regrets.
She started writing poems about fire and moths and men who couldn’t save themselves. He read them when she wasn’t looking, because he was tired of upsetting her. The end came slowly. Ray collapsed in the kitchen. Moth called an ambulance, rode with him to the hospital, held his hand while machines beeped like metronomes. He looked at her and said, “You were the best worst thing that ever happened to me.” She kissed his forehead and whispered, “Same.” He died two days later. Moth didn’t cry at the funeral. She wore black lipstick and read one of her poems: Love is a fistfight in a burning room.
People clapped. She walked out before the casket was lowered. She moved into his flat and kept the cat. Got sober. Started therapy. Painted every wall a different shade of red. She wrote a book called Ashes and Gin. It sold fifty copies. She didn’t care. Sometimes she’d sit on the stairs outside, like Ray used to, and smoked cheap Chinese cigarettes, and talk to the sky. “You were a bastard,” she’d say, " but you were mine.” And somewhere in the madness, the intimacy, the abuse, there was love. Twisted, broken, but real, like a moth fluttering to the light of an open flame, never knowing any better.
Bio:
L Christopher Hennessy is an author currently living in Coffs Harbour, Australia.