There is a place inside his spine and, lower, beneath his

peculiar breastbone where moths take up shelter. His

chest wall grows inward, see, and the moths find this comforting,

his inhale/exhale providing a blanket of soft tissue over their

houses carved into his lungs, his heart, his spine. The windows

of their houses are in his spine, so that they may peer out

and see the world. The moths decorate their doors with colorful

silk draped from the pleura swathing his lungs. Soft, gentle,

stained by dark puddles of red. They must replace their doors

regularly, as often the silk becomes lost in the bellies of

larva who soon become the moths to select new silks. The

moths do not know this, but they eat his breath with their own.

They live, and he lives a little less for their lives. Their houses restrict

the room in his lungs. Even his deepest breaths are shallow. The

pressure of their fibrous wings on his heart, their ovens of meat,

an indelible footprint, a locked door. The moths hatched inside him

when he was small, when his bones thought they were growing for a

differently shaped creature. He saw the moths crawling under his skin

and refused to peel back his flesh to claw them out. They began in his

spine but existed everywhere, his movements marked by fluttering.

They ventured from his spine, the trek and steep climb an indignation, and

spread, from shoulders to hips, from legs to neck, from fingers to arms,

and eventually the moths found a home in his chest cavity. He felt their

wings, their feet, their mouths, their ropes reshaping his chest wall to

cradle them closer, their little breaths. He dreams of only moths, chewing

his bones, his sinew, every organ, every thought, until he is

filled with the eyes of their wings, only moths under his skin, only

mouths. And in these dreams, the moths puppet him and wait for a new

esophagus to sprout, a new heart to sputter, a new lung to work too

hard yet still falter, so that they may eat those too. He has never felt at

home in his body. He thinks it is nice that the moths have made him a

home. And on a night when dusk never comes, a moth the size of a house

knocks on his door and says, Thank you for holding my children. I can

take them now. And he may reply, The moths are a part of me, I can’t

let them go. Or maybe, Yes, please, take this burden, I wish to breathe

in clouds again. Yet no matter his reply, the night ends with him joining

the giant moth as it opens its chest to reveal an apartment complete with

floral wallpaper and a velvet couch and one of those lamps made of

painted porcelain, its shade dripping in beads. The moth says, This is

a type of dying. The moth says, Time to go, dear. The moth says,

Welcome home.