The Moth Who Loved the Moon

Alfie loved the moon.

He was a moth. A small one, brown, with two feathery antennae and, so far as anyone could tell, one idea. He had come out of his cocoon on a night in June when the moon was full, and it had been the first thing he saw, and that was that. Some things you do not get over.

Every night since, he had flown at it.

He would go up from the elder bush where he spent the days, up through the dark, with the moon huge and white in front of him, and he would fly, and fly, with all his small strength, and after a long time he would stop on a leaf and look, and the moon would be exactly as far away as before. It hung there, patient and pale and quite unreachable, and Alfie loved it, and the next night he tried again.

On the night this story happened, he got higher than ever.

He had found a tall tree at the top of the field, an ash, and he had gone up the whole length of it, to the last thin twig at the very top, and there was nothing above him but sky. And the moon. It was three-quarters tonight, tipped a little, and so bright up here that he could see the veins in his own wings. He sat on the topmost twig and got his breath and got ready.

“You’ll not get there,” said a voice.

There was another moth on the twig. A big one, grey, worn at the edges, sitting so still that she might have been part of the bark. Her name was Vera, and she had been on that twig most nights for the whole of a long moth life, which is not long, but she had made the most of it.

“I might,” said Alfie.

“You’ll not. Nobody has. I’ve watched.” Vera moved one antenna in the direction of the moon, which was as close as she ever came to pointing. “It’s not that sort of thing.”

“What sort of thing is it?”

Vera thought about it. She was slow, in the way of things that have seen a great deal.

“It’s for going by,” she said. “Not for going to. You keep it on one side, at the same place, and you fly straight, and you get where you’re going. Everybody who flies at night has that arrangement. It’s not there to be arrived at. It’s there so you know where you are.”

Alfie looked at the moon. It looked, as it always did, like something you could land on if you tried a bit harder.

“I like it, though,” he said.

“So do I,” said Vera. “That’s allowed.”

They sat on the top of the ash tree with the moon going slowly over. The field lay beneath them, silver, with the hedges black round it and a barn at the bottom with a slate gone, and a long way off, a line that might have been the sea. Alfie had never seen so much. He had always been looking up.

The moon began to go down. It went towards the hills, and got bigger as it went, and yellower, the way it does at the end, and Vera watched it with her old grey wings folded, and Alfie watched it too, and did not fly at it. He found he did not want to, just then. He wanted to sit where he was and keep it on one side, and see what it did.

It set. It went down behind the hill in a slow yellow slice, and then a rind, and then it was gone, and the stars came out where it had been.

“There,” said Vera, as if something had been settled.

Alfie went down the ash tree in the grey before dawn, and found a leaf on the underside of a branch, out of the light, and hung there with his wings closed over his back, and was still.

Below him, in the barn, an owl came in and settled. Somewhere behind the hill, out of sight, the moon went on round, at its own pace, for going by, and would be back.