Transfiguration in a candle flame

by Annie Dillard

ILIVE ALONE with two cats,who sleep on my legs. Thereis a yellow one, and a blackone whose name is Small. In

the morning I joke to the black one,Do you remember last night? Doyou remember? I throw them bothout before breakfast, so I can eat.There is a spider, too, in the hath-

room, of uncertain lineage, bulbousat the abdomen and drab, whose six-inch mess of web works, works some-how, works miraculously, to keepher alive and me amazed. The webis in a corner behind the toilet, con-necting tile wall to tile wall. Thehouse is new, the bathroom immac-ulate, save for the spider, her web,and the sixteen or so corpses she'stossed to the floor.The corpses appear to be mostly

sow bugs, those little armadillo crea-tures who live to travel flat out inhouses, and die round. In additionto sow-bug husks, hollow and sippedempty of color, there are what seemto be two or three wingless mothbodies, one new flake of earwig, andthree spider carcasses crinkled andclenched.I wonder on what fool's errand

an earwig, or a moth, or a sow bug,would visit that clean corner of thehouse behind the toilet; I have notnoticed any blind parades of sowbugs blundering into eorners. Yetthey do hazard there, at a rate ofmore than one a week, and the spiderthrives. Yesterday she was .workingon the earwig, mouth on gut; todayhe's on the floor. It must take a cer-tain genius to throw things away

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from there, to find a straight linethrough that sticky tangle to the floor.Today the earwig shines darkly,

and gleams, what there is of him: adorsal curve of thorax and abdomen,and a smooth pair of pincers by whichI knew his name. Next week, if theother bodies are any indication, he'llbe shrunk and gray, webbed to thefloor with dust. The sow bugs besidehim are curled and empty, fragile,a breath away from brittle fluff. Thespiders lie on their sides, translucentand ragged, their legs drying inknots. The moths stagger against eachother, headless, in a confusion ofarcing strips of chitin like peelingvarnish, like a jumble of buttressesfor cathedral vaults, like nothing re-sembling moths, so that I would hes-itate to call them moths, except that.I have had some experience withthe figure Moth reduced to a nub.

TWO SUMMERS AGO I was

.

camped alone in the BlueRidge Mountains of Vir-ginia. I had hauled myself

and gear up there to read, amongother things, The Day on Fire, byJames Ullman, a novel about Rim-baud that had made me want tobe a writer when I was sixteen;I was hoping it would do it again.So I read every day sitting undera tree by my tent, while warblerssang in the leaves overhead andbristle worms trailed their inchesAnnie Dillard, a contributing editor 0/Harper's, is scholar in residence at IFesternIFashington State College in Bellingham.

over the twiggy dirt at my feet; andI read every night by candlelight,while barred owls called in the forestand pale moths seeking mates massedround my head in the clearing, wheremy light made a ring.Moths kept flying into the candle.

They would hiss and recoil, reelingupside down in the shadows amongmy cooking pans. Or they wouldsinge their wings and fall, and theirhot wings, as if melted, would stickto the first thing they touched-apan, a lid, a spoon-so that thesnagged moths could struggle onlyin tiny arcs, unable to flutter free.These I could release by a quickflip with a stick; in the morning Iwould find my cooking stuff deco-rated with torn flecks of moth wings,ghostly triangles of shiny dust hereand there on the aluminum. So Iread, and boiled water, and replen-ished candles, and read on.One night a moth flew into the

candle, was caught, burnt dry, andheld. I must have been staring at thecandle, or maybe I looked up whena shadow crossed my page; at anyrate, I saw it all. A golden femalemoth, a biggish one with a two-inchwingspread, flapped into the fire,dropped abdomen into the wet wax,stuck, flamed, and frazzled in a sec-ond. Her moving wings ignited liketissue paper, like angels' wings, en-larging the circle of light in theclearing and creating out of thedarkness the sudden blue sleeves ofmy sweater, the green leaves of jew-elweed by my side, the ragged redtrunk of a pine; at once the light

contracted again and the- moth'swings vanished in a fine, foul smoke.At the same time, her six legs clawed,curled, blackened, and ceased, dis-appearing utterly. And her headjerked in spasms, making a spat.tering noise; her antennae crispedand burnt away and her heavingmouthparts cracked like pistol fire.When it was allover, her head was,so far-as I could determine, gone,gone the long way of her wings andlegs. Her head was a hole- lost totime. All that was left was the glow-ing horn shell of her abdomen andthorax-a fraying, partially collapsed-gold tube jammed upright in thecandle's round pool.And then this moth-essence, this

spectacular skeleton, began to act asa wick. She kept burning. The waxrose in the moth's body from: hersoaking abdomen to her thorax tothe shattered hole where her headshould have been, and widened intoflame, a saffron-yellow flame thatrobed her to the ground like an im-molating monk. That candle had twowicks, two winding flames of iden-tical light, side by side. The moth'shead was fire. She burned for twohours, until I blew her out.She burned for two hours without

changing, without swaying or kneel-ing-only glowing within, like abuilding fire glimpsed through sil-houetted walls, like a hollow saint,like a flame-faced virgin gone toGod, while I read by her light, kin-dled, while Rimbaud in Paris burntout his brain in a thousand poems,while night pooled wedyat my feet.

So. THAT IS WHY I think thosehollow shreds on the bath-room floor are moths. I be-lieve I know what moths look

like, in any state.I have three candles here on the

table which I disentangle from theplants and light when visitors come.The cats avoid them, althoughSmall's tail caught fire once; Irubbed it out before she noticed. Idon't mind living alone. I like eat-ing alone and reading. I don't mindsleeping alone. The only time I mindbeing alone is when something isfunny; then, when I am laughing atsomething funny, I wish someonewere around. Sometimes I think itis .pretty funny that I sleep alone. D

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