Kate Simonian
Mothlight
The Texas day is a giant bulb that cedes with a pop to night. Evenings, a truck swipes the streets and seethes insecticide. My block abuts a park so lit to artificial day that a crime must have once occurred there. I circle the park to tire the body yoked to my brain. Like light, I am there and I am not. Moths hoop the lamps insanely.
* * *
Inciting incident: one night, a fox crossed my path. A fox I had seen around the elementary school and traipsing down alleys, but never up close. A gray fox. Fox out for the feed. I had seen foxes enough to carry, on my walks, a miniature cheese in my jacket’s inner seam. The fox saw me and paused. His paw hung loose in indecision. I unwrapped the cheese and threw it. It bounced off the ground like a rubber cap.
* * *
The scratch of asphalt on my back is what I remember, and everything stage-lit. I was a wave, and a particle; it doesn’t matter, I went unobserved. The fox kept picking up and putting down the cheese, picking it up, putting the good fat down. His nose looked like the nostrilled nub of a toy bear: a button to concentrate on, to pull me through the other side. Say the fox was a man instead. And that the cheese was not thrown, but taken. And that it was not a cheese at all. Though why get into semantics, and truth-be-tolds, and all those helpless circles, when all you want is a straight shot home by the stars?
Kate Simonian is an Armenian-Australian writer, hailing from Sydney. Her work has been published by, or is forthcoming in, Kenyon Review Online, Passages North, Colorado Review, Ninth Letter, Chicago Tribune, and Best Australian Stories. In 2017, she won the Nelson Algren Award and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship to the Sewanee Writer's Conference. She's working on a linked story collection and novel set in Syria.