Brittle fingers slipped around a pen and the bus drove through the cornfield with the morning taste of coffee, early sun only a lightbulb hanging loosely in our house lamp, a ring of dead moths rung around it. Took a camera, wound the film spool, clicked the shutter, thought non of it. A few months passed, a phonecall and a short walk to the centre. They said “Hey son, here’s your album, check out this one, it’s a keeper”. I was stunned, I didn’t know exactly what it said but it emanated some kind of truth. Something about life and death and what you love will some day destroy you.

I revisited the scene, the old machine was bent and stood there splintered, and peered over into the basket to get a glimpse of what I’d just witnessed. The moths crumbled into dust like cigarette ash as I held them in my fingers, but they were immortalised on a film spool destined to live on forever, or be to dead on forever. There was no difference I could see. Either way these little insects died to help the rest of us see a little more clearly. But they would never know the message and I guess that’s some cruel twist of fate but then maybe these insects were lucky to have only a few brain cells to their name.

A glass was poured and dreams were formed, some evening hollowed out ready to pen those thousand words they say each picture can pronounce. But the paper gave me headaches and the pen would not put out, and then the lamp began to flicker before the power shorted out. I scrambled over low lit floors and swiped a box of matches, lightning candles in some frantic dance, the flames rose through the ashes. Was this just too much to be going for, just too much to be asking from the night and from this picture, was this the hard truth I was masking. Hell no, the pen was grabbed and something scribbled down on this page, a flickered spark, just anything to stop the blankness burning holes deep in the brain. I pulled my eyelids from my eyes in hope to see just what it said and to my horror it read something like ‘Just stop, this page is meaningless, and my dearest friend you are a failure, this is the worst kind of excuse, why can’t you face your pain head on, put it to some artistic use. You’re just a worm, stare at that picture until it slaps you in the face.’ Now I was grasping for the vodka in some panic stricken state.

And as the liquid hit the glass the lightning lit the picture out and I swear that through the thunder I could see the moths fly out. I just gasped and dropped my glass, spewing vodka at the mouth. The chair gave way, the flames grew tall and I was close to passing out. So I took a last drink of angel piss and threw it at the flames, grabbed the picture and the paper, dragged my laughing self away. I laid there in the street to watch my house go up in flames where I laughed and threw up some more, and fell unconscious in the rain.

Yeah these insects were lucky to have only their cruel twist of fate.