My name is Mothereal Mandible, but most just call me “Moth Man” or “Oh my God, what the fuck is that”. Of the two nicknames, I prefer the former.
When I was younger, I was in all the gifted programs. I excelled in fostering terror and distress. They told me I was going places—wild, exotic places. West Virginia, Eastern West Virginia, the whole state was going to know my name.
I guess after a while, all that pressure just got to me though, you know? You spend your whole larval stage being told you’re something special, and by the time you’ve cracked out of your cocoon the whole world is leaving you behind. Where else is there to go when you’ve reached the top? What sets you apart once your peers start to catch up?
Everything gets boring, you lose steam, progress stops. Maybe because there’s nowhere higher to go, or maybe because you just can’t do it anymore. You spend every second of youth pushing yourself, and by the time your wings are dry you just don’t have anything left to give.
The expectations are another thing, too. Cryptid parents nowadays just don’t understand how different the world is, let alone the job. You’ve got cell phones and livestream and urban sprawl that just make it impossible to be inconspicuous (and of course, the bosses still expect the same level of discretion).
Humans don’t scare the same anymore, either. I don’t know what it is, but this newest generation just isn’t right. I went after this girl one time, snapping twigs and following her at an unsettling distance as I do, and she didn’t even flinch. Even when I revealed myself to her, she just started screaming “Go ahead, do it! Eat me! Eat me!”, which is at least a little better than the ones who proposition me, but something about her really got into my head.
What do these humans think cryptids even do all day? Most moths don’t even have mouths, so she was kind of ignorant on top of everything else. Even if I did have a mouth, what would the point of eating her be? How could she tell everyone she saw me, and then not be believed except by two guys on a Netflix documentary, if I had eaten her?
Anyway, sorry. I’m rambling.
Somewhere in the mix, under all that pressure, I started getting really into the local party scene. For a while, it was fun. We were hitting three, maybe four porch lights a night. But our fun soured quickly, as these things often do.
It’s not unusual, you know, to seek out something for yourself… to want something that’s just yours, that you can wrap around yourself like a blanket. The really unfortunate thing in all of it was how long it took me to see what was actually going on. That little spark I was carrying around became a forest fire, and I didn’t notice because I was too focused on the light to notice the heat.
All that is to say: My name is Mothereal Mandible, and I’m a lightbulb addict.
It’s been five hundred and twenty-six days since my last fix. That last time sure was a doozy, I’ll tell you. I’d call it my rock bottom.
We couldn’t have known how strong the stuff was. We’d never tried anything bigger than a porch light. But it was a new supplier. I should have known better.
My tolerance was a lot higher from so many years on the bulb. Plus, you know, I’m eight feet tall. But my buddy Stevie was only dime sized.
God, it was horrible. Every time I go to sleep, even now, I can hear the Zzp Zzp of the electric zapper. Every time I close my eyes, I see his little body fall to the ground.
That night should have been the last one for me, but it wasn’t. Losing Stevie pushed me over the edge. I stopped showing up to work, I stopped making trail-cam appearances. Hell, I even stopped stalking hikers.
It was the funeral, I think, that finally put me on the path to recovery. Seeing Stevie’s mom in her tiny moth dress… she gave me one of his wings. She said I should have it, as his best friend.
I really, truly thought everyone would blame me or be angry. I was definitely blaming myself. I think I still do—blame myself, I mean. The guilt almost kept me from the funeral entirely.
But instead of pointed fingers, his mom wrapped herself around my pinky finger in the warmest hug I’ve ever gotten, and she said something I’ll never forget:
“Bzzzsshh, Bzzshhh Bzzsh.”
Hand to heart, I checked myself into a clinic the next morning. I can’t say I never looked back; staying clean is still a daily effort. And it’s hard, you know? Lightbulbs are fucking everywhere, like, why do so many people even have so many in their homes? It isn’t safe.
If you take anything from this, I want you to know that I get it. It’s tough to be a grown-up gifted kid. It’s tougher to pull yourself out of the fire when you only feel okay in the ash.
But at some point, you’ve got to ask yourself who you are. What do you stand for? Are you going to be remembered as a few weird weeks in small town history, or are you going to go down in infamy as the horror of the West Virginian countryside?
You’ve got to remember you have Stevies to look out for and campers to terrorize. So long as you can pick up one of your many legs, or flutter your wings, or twitch your antennae towards the wind, you can find a way to keep moving forward. And when the pressure of the world sends you into a panic, you don’t have to go searching for a light. Sometimes you should let yourself sit in the dark.
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Carrie R. Hinton is a Maryland-based writer with an unfortunate penchant for decrepit sailboats. Her work has previously appeared in Dread Stone Press, Defenestration, and Sand Hills Literary Magazine.