Prick of the Spindle: Fiction: Bryan: The Tugs and Pulls of Existence

The creature awoke. The shadowy remains of the late afternoon’s nightmare still formed a faint and incomprehensible outline in its mind. It tried to focus on the outline but lost even the slightest trace of what was once there. Crouched in its enveloped darkness, shaky, wondering what this recurring dream might mean, it began by recollecting, in order, those things it knew with a certainty. It only knew, for sure, it was still alone, it was still trapped, and night was fast descending upon it, and in twilight’s utter and solemn emptiness, and in its nocturnal silence, it was then a strange voice penetrated the cocoon’s outer wall and fell upon the prickly ears of the creature.

The small creature responded as resoundingly as a trapped thing can and as loud as something dares when it is not sure the voice—especially after its recurrent daymare—is a reality beyond the constructs of its own inventive thinking.

“I have walked this forest many days this summer, and I noticed early on this cocoon, fully built, and yet nothing has ever emerged from it. Why have you stayed locked in for such a long time, little creature?”

With its feeble comprehension, the little creature was not able to let the man know that being in a cocoon is somewhat like being in a coma; one does not realize how long one has been comatose until summoned from it, and then the passage of time is only recognizable through exterior indicators. The creature replied with candor, “I apologize, but I do not have the power to break the casing I have constructed.”

“As a traveler, I have seen many predicaments like this before, little creature. Let me guess, you have developed your wings, and in so doing, grown too big for your cocoon. It would be ideal if your strength had developed commensurate with your wings: then you could burst through the thin walls.”

The creature replied, “If I just had a little room to move around, with the slightest momentum I could force myself through these thin walls, but it appears my rapid growth has hindered my escape. Is there anything I can do to get out? If you could condescend to help, I would be forever in your debt.”

The honest and humble reply of the little creature appealed to the man’s altruistic nature.

He knew exactly how to help the trapped creature escape from its cocoon, but his method was neither painless nor conventional—as escapes rarely are. He explained to the trapped creature that the escape would come at a great and inevitably painful cost. But the creature was unable to think about or measure costs, and only desiring the simple freedoms allotted to others, told the man it did not worry about the price of freedom.

“It’s dark now. I will be back tomorrow morning. Think about what I have told you, and if you still wish for your freedom when you wake, then I will help you achieve it. Until tomorrow, my trapped, little creature.”

With that, the man walked off through the forest, but before going, he turned once to mark the place the cocoon hanged, even though he had passed it numerous times, and went on his way. The creature pressed its ear against the cocoon and strained to hear each retreating step of the old man, until even the sound of the quiet footfall was finally inaudible.

Aside from a random cricket chirping now and again, the creature was left once more to the utter and empty solitude of night. The dark night did nothing to impede the creature from feeling excitement and anxiety over what had just happened. In fact, the night had quite the opposite effect upon the creature. As it pondered its pending freedom, the creature could not help but think its abode of darkness had never felt so alone and so dark and yet the shroud of darkness never felt so much like a warm blanket as it did that very moment. The creature experienced the same reluctance a bird has when it leaves the warmth and security of incubation for the ferocity of a cold birth. In life, only the moribund, roused, and yet frightened by the clarion call from the unknown, could comprehend such peaceful and all-encompassing warmth and security of the already-known—for birth is a cousin to death.

The next morning the man was true to his word, and his arrival coordinated with the earliest light bursting through the rheumy walls of the creature’s cocoon.

The creature admitted it slept heavy but soundly, until morning, when it started to wonder whether the man would reappear.

“Ah, a natural reaction, little creature. When we think we are to pass on to something new, anxiety and doubt are the first uninvited guests knocking upon the confines of our frenzied mind’s door. Luckily, anticipation resides deep within us all and is a vigilant guardian of that door. It will not let these transients stay long before it scurries them on their way. And did you, little one, think about the proposition put before you?”

The creature replied with exuberance, “I have, and I have decided a little pain caused presently is worth the end result of freedom.”

“Ah yes, present pain, but you misunderstood me, little one. Proximate pain oftentimes leads to a future fraught with constant suffering, it is the augmenting, not the assuaging thereof. Are you sure, and I mean absolutely positive, you want to be freed?”

The creature thought about its current situation and the lack of movement, and the darkness, and the silence, and decided freedom at any cost would be better than living as it now did. “I want to be freed, good sir, and I would be forever grateful toward you if you could accommodate my desire.”

With shrugged shoulders and a slight gasp of air, the old man responded to the little creature’s importuning through a somber and somehow optimistic, “So be it. Let us begin.”

Having the little creature retreat to the furthest corner (albeit not much because of the creature’s size) of the cocoon, and with the precision of a surgeon operating on his miniature child, the old man pulled slowly on the one loose-silk fiber pinched between his fingernails. As the fiber unwound about a foot or two, the man placed it into the center of a book and then closed the thick book, trapping the string-like fiber tight along the inner spine. The man then had the creature retreat to the other side of the cocoon, and he repeated the process as gingerly as possible; this time trapping the silk string along the spine of a thinner book. Once accomplished, the man sat down near the cocoon so his head was right below the swaying branch. “Now little creature, I want to read you a small passage from each of the two books; seeing as I have employed their integral service in the process, I find it only fair to speak something of what lies in each.”

Turning pages of the first book, the old man began his odd discourse in medias res, without any explanation:

“And not only so, but we glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation worketh patience; And patience, experience, and experience, hope: And hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts.”

Peculiar and as foreign as the words were, somehow they appealed to an innate part of the creature’s abdomen that had lied latent for so long that now, as it acted up, it stung sharp as it burnt within. The man continued reading from what he called the big book.

“Beloved, think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened unto you: But rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers…”

And on and on he discoursed. But the creature did not consciously comprehend anything else, for the part it remembered was sufficient to make its mind reel to and fro and unravel, creating a dreamlike state of consciousness within it. The words were too much for the little creature to take at one sitting. The creature was full, and it was baffled by both the logic and illogic of the statements, at the same time, it wondered what such things might signify.

The man suddenly stopped reading, then after a pause he addressed the creature. “Well, little creature, what do you think of such sayings?”

Another pause and lingering silence pervaded. “Do not answer little one. I know. I know. Such things take time to develop into concrete thought. Ideas are born in liquid. Now, while you sit there thinking, let me read to you from the smaller book.”

He grabbed the other book, and the fibrous silk wedge caught within it caused the branch to sway to and fro for a few moments. Opening the book, the man began on another strange, poignant discourse. The creature did not remember all the man read, but certain passages caused the same burning sensation within its abdomen, only more visceral and accompanied with a caustic tinge creating a singular pain. The lines the man read to the creature unfurled thus:

“I know it; why not try this diversion? Ask every passenger on this ship to tell you his story, and if you find a single one who has not often cursed the day of his birth, who has not often told himself that he is the most miserable of men, then you may throw me overboard head first.”

The discourse gathered impetus, and around it seemed to spin in the opposite direction of the man’s first readings, all the while weaving, in vicious counterrevolutions, with each word, what the other book had unwoven.

“When his highness sends a ship to a foreign land, does he worry whether the mice on board are comfortable or not?”

And the strange discourse continued, but like before, the creature’s capacity to comprehend had already been reached, and the mind was wandering down distant labyrinthine paths and running into constricting walls no matter which way it turned.

And when the man stopped reading and the creature heard nothing but his rhythmic breathing below, the creature must admit it felt a weight it had never felt before, and it began to question whether it had made a mistake by employing the man’s services, for the woe of being was so attenuated by the discoursing, the creature thought freedom perhaps a mistake altogether. Perhaps a life of lethargic stillness had its advantages. The creature’s eyes were clinched tight; a spectral silence enclosed it. It must have sat like that for a long moment of time.

When finally the creature opened its eyes, expecting to see the same silky and soft envelope around it, it was shocked to discover that its chrysalis cocoon had completely unraveled and lay disheveled upon the branch, drooping hopelessly toward the forest floor. The creature was afraid, and its natural reaction was a shudder running from the tip of its ciliate antennae down through the base of its abdomen. It did not know what to do. Through dilated eyes it saw the forest to each side of it, the sky above, and below it, it saw the ashen grey hair of the man who had set it free. It closed its eyes again. The reality of what the extrinsic scene presented to it in comparison with the imagined outer world it had envisioned caused such a dichotomy within the creature that all it now viewed possessed a vague sense of unreality. With a rudimentary sense of fear creeping into its abdomen also came a sinister concern that what it had just done would cause a pain much more distinct and sharp than the joy of the freedom now allotted unto it. At this moment, and discerning the creature’s predicament, the man spoke to it.

“Oh no, little one, closing your eyes won’t help now. You cannot go back into the dark lair you have inhabited. It is gone forever. Shudder if you must, but this is life in its entire, awful and irreversible splendor.”

The man’s words, as harsh as they were, quelled the anxiety the creature was then feeling, and sensing the adroitness in all the man had said and done thus far, the creature thought it prudent to ask him what it should do now that he had afforded it with freedom. But without giving the man time to respond to the question, the creature was curious to see the books used as instrument in unraveling the silk casing of the small cocoon and asked where they were. The man explained the process had taken longer than the creature may have then surmised, and as he had thrown each book in opposite directions, with the stringy silk bedded deep into the spine of the book, the cocoon unwound itself and parted on either side of the creature, leaving the creature precariously alone on the branch; much the way a sleeping fish would look if upon waking, it were to find the lake it roved and prowled for so long had dried up over night.

“I will gather my books now, they are not too far from here, and then I will be on my way. It is almost the season for me to begin my work again. I will not be able to return to the forest; therefore, I wish you luck, creature, in your endeavors.”

The man, using the tree as a brace, hobbled to his legs and peered at the creature askance with imploring eyes that spoke of a sadness the creature could not yet surmise. The man wished the creature well one last time. The creature, in the throes of anxiety and fear tried to stall the man, not wanting to see him leave just yet, for the indecision as to what to do next still vexed the creature. How was it to act?

“But wait kind sir. Do not leave me yet. I do not know what to do, where to go, or for that matter, even if I am able to move!”

The creature looked perplexed, and the man shuffled off a few feet and then turned once more toward the small creature and in an exhortatory tone gave his final advice this day, “One favor, I ask of you, little one. When you do fly, for fly you will, before you go on any predisposed flight of fancy be sure to fly straight up, not teeter tottering to the left or to the right, not vacillating forward or backwards, but straight up until you have a wonderful view of all that surrounds you, and as you hover there, fluttering so high above us down here, take in the immaculate view, see what it is that lies all around you, contemplate where you would like to go, and then begin your trek into whatever foreign region it is you wish to venture. That is all I ask.”

The man looked one more time at the creature and then ambled off into the forest. Meanwhile, the creature hollered a parting thanks to the back of the man who had afforded it its freedom and then sat dejectedly upon its branch. The old man vanished into the stifling wall of black that the trees constituted, and as he did, the poor creature thought to itself, What will I do now, and then realized it had not even asked the man what it was, nor had the man gathered any books before he hobbled off.

After composing itself for a period of time, and allowing its eyes to adjust to the unfiltered light, the creature fluttered and flapped its brittle wings to verify they worked, and in so doing, the creature scuttled forward on the branch—the wings had worked. The flapping motion was as natural as breathing for the creature; it was the physical exertion it was unaccustomed to. Resting for a moment, it decided it was ready to attempt flight. It flapped its wings in furious beats and letting go of the branch, it began its ascent. Unaccustomed to such levity, and with slight atrophic strokes, the creature accidentally veered right and left, then forward and backward as it climbed skyward.

Barring such accidental and miniscule movements from the path the man had set the creature on, it continued to climb higher and higher, rising with each rhythmic beat, slowly gaining the cadence of flight, passing the canopy of black trees in glowing optimism for its heights. The creature noticed the lightness of the air, and with it came an easier ascent. Rapturously, the creature continued its climb, as the fibrillations of its heart pounded unceasing. Nearing the giant cumulus mediocris clouds, the creature decided it had achieved the heights it needed to view its surroundings; any further up and the clouds would obscure its view altogether. It looked down upon the terrestrial earth. Much to its dismay, the anticipation of reaching such atmospheric heights had prepared it for a view congruent with the ecstasy of the climb and the proud fibrillations coursing through its entire abdomen.

What it saw instead was how small, distant and foreign the land appeared. The heights distorted everything. The forest ran for miles, but it was just that—a simple forest. Homes and hamlets were scattered throughout, but there was nothing unique about them. Off in the distance rose a jagged but common mountain range, and off in the other distance, a large and typical river meandered through a valley, but the creature saw nothing out of the ordinary, and nothing resembling life. From such heights, the entire scene resembled a cheap, one-dimensional painting drawn by an artist who could not fathom the disparate depths of the incongruous peaks and valleys, crags and crevices any more than a stick figure drawing of a family could capture the intricacies taking place within each members mind. Moreover, the delicate and subtle nuances which made the family peculiar.

The creature had expected something more from such soaring heights, and all it had found up there was a groping kind of solitude, and a fractured view of flight, and an indomitable longing to be back among the multi-dimensional world it knew so little about. It suddenly grew sick of the heights it had climbed, and the space in its breast, once filled with rapture towards the climb, first turned hollow, then quickly began to fill again. Only this time, it filled with what felt like lead weights, accompanied with a nausea that caused the creature’s head to swirl and feel faint.

The enervated creature decided it had seen enough of its surroundings and immediately began its descent, and much like the climb straight up, the creature descended straight down, veering very little either to the left or right or backwards or forward. It quickly fell toward the canopy of trees and then maneuvered its way through the branches and leaves protruding outward in an intricate web of green and brown limbs. In the heavier air, the creature glided effortlessly, alighting on the exact branch it had left. The creature perched itself upon the branch and waited for the nauseating effects of its flight to depart. The creature sat there for hours with its head pounding and its heart filled with a new pang similar to those it had felt earlier in the day, only throbbing louder. The pang did not seem to stop in the center of the abdomen, but ventured its way into every extremity, including the head and antennae.

As the creature sat there frightened, it felt the cold, depressing wind begin to crash upon its back, and for the first time, it remembered the warmth of its cocoon and the melodious sound the wind had made as it beat upon that once immutable shell. While it sat there pondering such things, the creature felt a loneliness it had never experienced; so real and so powerful was the new melancholy possessing the creature that in its stupefied state, the creature tried to reconstruct its cocoon with the remains of the strung-out silk still clinging to the branch in shambles. But its efforts were futile, for the string was all unraveled, and try as it might, it could not cover its flanks from the incessant wind. The creature sat upon the branch paralyzed and quasi-catatonic throughout the day. It stayed sitting there, cold and disheartened as night descended upon it. With the advent of night, each new gust of haunting wind sounded like the howl of some nefarious demon come to wreak havoc upon the exposed and vulnerable creature. What had its freedom brought it?

As the warmth and light from the nascent sun began to extend the breath of vitality through the wall of trees, the forest yawned to life; simultaneously the wind and the strange noises from the night before began their recession, and for all the force the dominion of dark carried with it during the night, its retreat marked a hushed and acquiescent farewell. When a child closes his eyes to receive the poke of the needle penetrating the epidermal, the child keeps his eyes closed and muscles tensed in expectation that the retraction of the needle from the flesh will be just as sharp and painful as the entry, and only upon opening the eyes does the child realize the needle has already been withdrawn. This painless withdrawal of the needle from the flesh emboldens the child to express, “It was not that bad.” Day arrives in similar fashion and with similar results. In hindsight, it would be ridiculous for the child to call the needle evil just because it inflicted a temporary pain upon it; so too, the night deserved no derision from the creature.

The creature, ecstatic it had made it through the frightful night and still clung to life, arrived at the conclusion that perhaps its freedom might prove worthwhile. Nevertheless, it did not wish to suffer through another night like the previous. It decided on a rapid course of action—to find the man who had set it free. What it would do once it found the man never crossed its callow mind. And so, judging by the direction the man had hobbled off, the creature, heading east, took to the sky for the second time.

After a week of fruitless searching, sleeping near windowsills—the light and afterglow of warmth escaping the homes seemed pleasant to the creature in contrast to the bleak darkness the forest had presented to it that first night—the creature began to think its journey hopeless. In its fits of hopeless despair, however, near the outskirts of town, it espied a man, carrying a shovel caked with dirt. Even from a distance, the creature recognized the slight hobble. The creature immediately fluttered in the old man’s direction, and upon closer inspection and to its heart content, realized it had indeed found the man it had been searching for. Not knowing how to broach a conversation and feeling awkward in its hovering silence, the creature asked the first thing that entered its head, “Where are you going?”

The creature thought about the old man’s comment, and after a pause of consternation, caught up to the old man and asked if it could come along with him. The man suffered the creature to tag along, and so the creature, not knowing where the man would take it and exhausted from flight, settled on the man’s dirty shoulder.

“So this is what you have decided to do with your freedom, eh? Tag along with an old decrepit man.”

The creature did not know how to respond. For the time being it let silence prevail. The old man ambled on through the town, giving nods of affirmation to the passersby but receiving little or no response from them in return. Once the old man left the bustle of the town behind, the creature asked what it was he planned to do with the shovel. The old man did not respond to the question, but rather continued to amble on in silence. The creature mistook the old man’s silence as evidence he had not heard it. It repeated the question. “What will you do with the shovel you carry?”

“I will do with the shovel what the shovel was made to do. I will dig. I will dig a hole—a hole so deep, I will either come out on the other side, creating a tunnel of light through the hollow earth, or I will strike fire at the center, and thus, travel no further.” The creature laughed a little at the man’s odd response until the old man’s discerning and serious eyes rested their penetrating gaze upon it, and only then did the creature stop its chortling and realize with reproach the man was serious. It is a strange embarrassment evoked when a thing of extreme seriousness is mistaken for a thing of naught. The embarrassment is not felt because of an oversight on the perpetrator’s part, but rather it is felt for the complacency with which the offended views the thing in question. How could the old man not know such a response was preposterous?

The man explained that when he was a young boy, he used to help his father dig holes. But the holes were only six feet deep and once the old man (then a young boy) reached the six feet, he always had this unsatisfied, itching feeling that perhaps he should go deeper. Six feet is where the dead lay. He wanted to go beneath the shallow surface and to the bottom of it all.

“You see, little creature, when I was young, I did not know what compelled me to such strange desires. Now I know. And what was taken for a child’s whim back then has become the driving force in my old age.”

“What have you found out with age that has changed your perspective on digging holes?” asked the creature.

With that humble introduction, the old man began his first attempt of many to recapitulate the past, and capture, with veracity, the essence of it, all the while failing to avoid the temptation of extracting didacticism from those moments.

“My father was a gravedigger. Once I was old enough to wield a shovel, I began working with my father. One day, after digging holes for a year or so, I asked him why he had become a gravedigger in the first place. My father replied he did not choose such a morose profession but stumbled upon it happenstance when my mother became pregnant and he was unemployed. ‘Simply to make ends meet,’ said my father. ‘We were in a bind, and I needed to make sure your mother was provided for during her pregnancy. ‘But,’ he continued, ‘I have since learned a valuable lesson because of this job. I have learned that to have a finger on the pulse of humanity requires that you must also have one foot in the grave, son.’ He went back to work and did not speak another word to me that afternoon. I did not put much stock in his saying at the time. I guess it just sort of slipped into my unconscious and harbored there until I needed to recall it.

Anyways, my father and I used to come home from a hard day’s work, and my father would not say much about the day, but my mother knew the routine; someone had died and someone needed to be buried. They always did, and such was the nature of our job. And it was my father and I who would go and do the digging for the town, and we would stand off in the distance as the procession would come to the hole, and we could not help but overhear someone still living say all these nice things about the deceased who was to be buried. It didn’t matter if the person deserved such praise while living; he got it when he was dead. Then the person doing the eulogizing would move on to all the regrets the family had due to lack of time spent with the now-deceased. A son would say how there was no time to throw a ball with him. A daughter would lament over the lack of time to take her to the fair or to help her on her schoolwork. The wife would sob over the lost time to take her on all those promised trips, all those sights they had always wanted to see together, if she could just hold off a few more years until he retired. But now he was eternally retired, and the gulf between the living and the dead is impassable. And my father would sit and listen to this, and he could not help but think of the finality of death, like a cord cut never to be strung back together, because once cut, the tension in the cords caused them to fly in separate directions. My father and I would wait for the family to leave, and then we would bury the deceased, covering him forever with the smattering of earth’s abundant dirt, allowing the man to decompose in peace.

My father and I would not wash our hands when we got home. He used to say to me, ‘You leave the dirt on those hands. It is time to eat.’ He would sit down at the table and eat like he had never eaten before. He would scarf down his food with about as much refinement as a pack of wolves around a dead animal. As if even mastication were a burden for him. He would breathe loudly while he would eat, and food would spill from the sides of his mouth, and he would grab his water and gulp it down and let it run over his chin. Then he would set the cup down and wipe his face with his dirty hands. He ate like it was his first and last meal. The family would watch this atypical communion in profound silence. Hardly was a word spoken during those meals. After this ritual, he would take a bucket of clean water and the lye soap, and he would clean off the dirt and grime that had worked its way underneath his fingernails, behind his ears, in his hair, and any other place dirt manages to hide (he always made me wash up first). After washing, he would come back downstairs, cleansed, like a new man, and he would play with the younger kids, and he had this look in his eye like it was the first time he had ever played with them, as if they had just been plucked from the womb and handed over from a midwife, and he was so happy to see we were alive and breathing, perplexed as it were at our being. The wonderment in his eyes, creature, you should have seen it. It was as if each day he watched the procession of death, it resurrected my father, and his resurrection was this life; he didn’t want to wait for the next. He feared the irrevocability of death that he saw in the drawn-out faces, in the eyes of the living, at those funerals.”

The now old man, looked at the creature and replied, “That statement of my father’s, about one foot in the grave helping him keep a finger on the pulse of humanity, has not left me. It has grown in importance over the years. In fact, it made me realize that I, too, loved to dig. What my father got duped into as a profession because of my birth, I have willfully inherited as his son.”

This being said, the man abruptly stopped walking, swung his shovel head around and began digging.

Although the creature enjoyed hearing the old man reminisce about his past, it remained aggravated. The man had not really answered its question, but had skirted around it. It was about to ask him more on the relevancy of digging holes, but perplexed as to why the man chose such a spot, asked him instead the latter thought. “Why have you chosen this spot?”

“Because, my prying little one, since the world is round, it does not matter where one starts digging a hole. They are the axis, they are the auger, and so long as they keep at it, they will either reach the fiery center that lights the earth and gives it life, or they will tunnel through the center and break through to light on the other side.”

The creature sat on the man’s shoulder and stewed over the strange course of action the man had taken. It was perplexed. It wondered just how stable the old man was, and it wondered if it were safe to stay by his side. But it could not abandon the man. The man had been its source of freedom, and the creature felt a kindred spirit with him reverberating far beyond the boundaries of its comprehension. The man, taking a brief respite from his digging, leaned upon his shovel and once again with the intuitive nature of his, ascertained what the creature was thinking. “You question the validity of such a quest, do you, little creature? Well, let me tell you another story of my youth.”

And again, in an attempt to recapitulate the past, the man delved into another story while the creature sat in silence.

“When I was a boy, I had a bird. The bird loved to sing. Our house would resound with the immaculate chirps and warbles each morning and on through the day. I would listen to it for hours as I read or studied in my room. It was to me, the most sonorous, comforting and joyful of sounds. One day, however, the bird stopped chirping. This befuddled me. I knew it was not because it had grown old, for purchased when a fledgling, the bird still had five or six years to live. I thought it might be its health, and then decided, ‘No, it’s not its health because the bird still eats.’ I knew it was not the wings because they never were clipped. I then realized it must be the blasted cage; the cage is stifling the bird’s spirit. I rationalized that if I were locked in a cage and were able to behold, nay grasp, with my hands through the bars keeping me shut in, the very freedom denied me would quash my spirit as well.

The next day, the bird still refused to sing. Much to my chagrin, I decided to let the bird go free. So with bitter resentment, I opened the cage to let the bird go. The bird stood statuesque on its little perch and would not fly away. I tried coaxing it, letting it know it was free, saying the things a kid would say, ‘Come on little birdie, you are free now.’ The bird would not go. Finally, I tried shooing it to freedom by putting my hand into its cage and forcing it towards the open door, to which action the bird committed its only act of aggression towards me—it bit me. It reached down with its tiny beak, and pecked me hard enough to draw a small pebble of blood where the skin meets the thumbnail. I felt the simultaneous emotions of shame and anger toward the bird’s act of aggression. I slammed the cage door shut and stormed from the room.

After bandaging my wound and letting my anger subside, I realized it was I who should be ashamed for having fallaciously surmised I could grant the bird its freedom by compulsory means. I rationalized that if my parents, through compulsion, goaded me toward some objective, even if the objective was an outcome I had hoped for, I would not be please once it was obtained because my free will would have been manipulated and compromised in the process. The bird did not leave because I was forcing it. I decided if the bird wanted to leave, it would leave of its own volition and on its own terms. The bird would wait for the opportune time when I left the room, and then it would fly away. So, I left the cage door open and stayed away from the room for a couple of hours, giving the bird its opportunity to leave without coaxing.

I returned later in the day and discovered the cage door had been shut, and the bird was still locked in. I figured a gust of wind must have jarred the cage door closed. I moved the cage away from the current of wind circulating from window to window. This time I tied the cage door open with a small piece of yarn and then left the room. I returned again a few hours later only to find the door had been shut. The yarn lay on the ground in tatters, pecked to shreds. The bird sat silently upon its perch, staring at me. That was the last time I tried to open the cage for the bird. I never heard the bird sing again. Two weeks after these incidents I speak of, the bird quietly died during the night. In the morning, I found it lying stiff at the bottom of its cage in its own excrement. We never knew for sure what caused its death.

Now creature, I have thought long and hard about the bird’s tragic demise, and although as a boy I was enthralled by its singing, as an old man it is the bird’s last days that fill me with wonder. I sit up late at night and marvel what drove the bird to such madness; what possessed it to stay locked up rather than enjoy its final fleeting hours; why would it silently suffer in its self-imposed cage and die?”

The man paused from his reflections, and leaning on the shovel, seemed lost in a maze of reverie. The creature reflected as well. It still thought this, the only man it had ever known intimately, was the strangest it would ever meet, but the question occupying the creature’s anxious mind had nothing to do with the bird. The preoccupation was simply: remembering the hollowness of its cocoon, the creature wondered what the old man would do if the center of the earth was also hollow? The creature pictured the man breaking through the crust of the final inner layer of earth and plummeting to his death. The poor old man, thought the creature. What a meaningless journey he will be on if the center of the earth is hollow or if it the earth is so obdurate and compacted as he gets deeper down that it renders his shovel useless.

The man came out of his stupor and looked at the creature sitting perfunctorily on his shoulder. “Give it time creature. You will come not only to grasp my senseless journey, but you will come to wish you could do more to help. It is in your nature.” The creature did not respond. It sat and wondered why it felt so drawn to a man who was so destined to waste away his life.

The man began digging again, making first a giant swath, methodically circling like a field sprinkler, then with slow and calculated steps he maneuvered inward to the center of the hole. Once he reached the center, he would bury the shovel head into the earth at a steep gradient and make a small hole, resembling the center mark of a protracted circle. Then the man would reverse the process of digging and work toward the outer wall in expanding spirals. While the man worked thus, the creature brooded. It was not satisfied with the responses of the old man, and as it brooded over what the man had told it, it continued to harp upon the man’s ridiculous journey. “Why, again, are you digging a hole? Isn’t there something else you could do?”

The man laughed, and as he piled shovelful after shovelful of excavated dirt outside of the hole. He figured it was time he should probe the depths of the poor creature’s understanding.

“Let me attempt to explain myself in an abstract way. Perhaps, creature, it is simply this: It is easy to understand life when it goes well. I have yet to hear the happy person complain of their happiness. True, they will complain of the transitory nature of happiness, but at the bottom of their lament is the wish for more of that elusive happiness. However, when life goes sour, and it is a matter of when, not if, and when that sourness is needlessly brought about, it is more difficult to understand the irony of suffering. Now, I am still under the impression most suffering is needless. You will be hard pressed to find a man who has survived the brutality of a war, the depravation of a prison cell, the pangs of unrequited or adulterous love, and on it goes. You will be hard pressed to find one who claims they are the better for having gone through the furnace of such affliction. In each of these cases, an argument can be made that man is at the root of and is the fundamental cause of the needlessness of suffering. I think it would be safe to say the causality of most wars stem from either the petty disagreement of men who spout off prideful denunciations of the diverging party’s beliefs or the irreconcilable differences between them, or the jockeying for geographical supremacy for the rights to natural resources.

Oftentimes, war is nothing more than an extenuation of a neighborhood bully’s charade of lashing out just to prove he can. And the prisons of war are an extended function of those same men’s disagreement that caused the war. Now these other prisons, the ones used to punish or rehabilitate the common criminal, if you believe such a word, are filled with men who are there because of their own vile actions. Love as well is a choice. True, you do not choose who you love—that seems to be biologically or geographically determined, and oftentimes goes against our rationale—but a lover does decide whether or not they will pursue that love and what the possible costs of that affection might be. If they did not wager in advance all the heartache and turmoil love would cost, it is safe to say it was an ill-advised provision for the future on their part. Does all I have said thus far ring true to you, creature?”

“I suppose it is true,” mumbled the creature, keeping its misgivings locked within.

“Then let us continue. Only now, I must leave the summer suppositions and venture into the wintry weather of the subject. This is what concerns me. I hope you have the capacity to follow me.”

“However, there is another kind of suffering that is not brought on by man’s relations to man, or his relation to nature, but rather it is a self-imposed suffering caused by the irrationality of man’s own mind. We produce this atypical type of suffering and manipulate our lives to have it at times—like the bird I had as a child. We say to ourselves, ‘I suffer because I am good and will not give in.’ Or we say to ourselves, ‘I suffer because I am not good enough and I deserve to suffer because I have chosen erroneously and must make penance.’ Why, why do we do such things? It is this type of unnecessary suffering that I believe we must grapple with. Somehow we must come to understand it, creature.

Life seems to be a balancing act between two opposing weights, and the final resting place of the voluntary carrier of the cross or the one dragged down by the chains of hell is way down deep into the dirt; the only difference being in how one arrives at such depths. And if we view life in these terms, life, to a degree, becomes a quest of discerning which weight is dragging us down. Is it the chains of hell or the cross of burden that brings us here, or are both a sham? Either way, it is into the dirt, the ground that one must go to understand such things; one must dig. One must exhume the answers out of the earth’s very bowels. And below it all is it simply this, creature: is this what we will find—the truth of dirt weighs more than the truth of air? Is sorrow simply a taskmaster demanding more than frivolity? And since the obvious answer is yes in both cases, we must then ask “Why?

It is easy, creature, to find meaning in the lightness of love and happiness, but compressed underneath the rock of oppression, depression, lamentation, such meaning is hard to find; yet, these are the depths in which man works out his life. To understand and fathom the reasons why sorrow exists and why man pursues it—this, creature, is a worthy quest. To be able to pull a strand, exhume a grain of light or truth out of the pit of darkness—this, little one, is a quest worth losing one’s life for. I now understand my father’s proverbial saying, ‘the story is in the soil.’ All that has lived and died, and all that will yet live is right here in the dirt. All that live now and seek to find meaning in life must dig past the brittle crust of suffering and arrive deep down where the clay is always hard and speaks of the ironic nature of the true sufferer. Only then, in reverence, will life offer up any of its mystery.”

Once the man rested his head on the shovel handle and the creature was sure he was finished with his story, the creature told the man that he was crazy, that he had lost touch with reality; that the bird had something wrong with it, that is why it did not fly away. The creature spoke in haste those things pressing upon its mind. But once it spoke, it realized it had not spoken with discretion and the man was offended. The man looked at the creature with disgusted eyes, and with a slight inflection of tone adding vehemence, he responded, “Did the bird have something wrong with it? Did it really? Well let me ask you something creature,” his tone now reaching a mild state of agitation. “During that first day of freedom, why did you try to go back to your cocoon?”

The creature was a little abashed by the man’s response. It had not told him it returned to its cocoon. “Why did you not openly embrace and relish your newfound freedom when it was granted you?”

The man continued to lightly deride the poor creature, “Why have you not flown above the tree line since that first day? Did the lightness feel inhumane? Did the easiness of the ascent make you sick, make you feel detached from life?”

The creature sat there dejected. It did not know how to answer a man who had so easily discerned its actions. The man did not give the creature much time to answer, but rather delved into another one of his childhood stories. The creature was beginning to like the old man’s stories less and less each time it heard one.

“I had a neighbor I knew very well. We had grown up together. We got into the same kinds of trouble, laughed at the same kind of ribald jokes, struggled through the same horrible lessons of arithmetic and grammar. Indeed, one could say we were quite similar, as most boys are. The boy was well-liked, good in sports, of a healthy disposition, and a jovial spirit. These qualities endeared him to all who knew him. Well, one day our two families and some other families from our small town went to the lakeshore beach to enjoy the blissful August sun. The boy decided he would go for a swim. Mind you, we weren’t very old then, maybe six or seven or at the most eight, and therefore, the maternal instinct in a mother is still constantly on alert. The boy swam out past the usual marker we swam to, and instantly the mother, concerned, yelled at the boy, ‘Son, son, don’t you go out any further, you hear me! You’ll drown.’ The boy, treading water, head bobbing up and down with each wave, turned back to the shore, looked at us, then looked toward the middle of the lake, looked back toward us again and yelled out, ‘How do I know I will drown unless I keep going?’ The families at the shore lightly chuckled. The parents of the other families were glad their sons weren’t quite as stubborn or brash as this child. The boy looked toward the shore again, and then repeated his turn toward the middle of the lake, like it was luring him in; as if some immense magnetic force lay at the center of it and his heart was a metal ball. He turned back around and with his head still bobbing slightly from the somber waves, he yelled back to the shore, ‘I want to swim in deep waters, Mother.’ He turned his head, and with his back toward us, facing the deeper waters he longed for, he swam on, now possessed with purpose.

Those on shore, especially his mother, began yelling, begging him to get back, ‘Get back here.’ ‘Get back here right now.’ ‘Come back to your family,’ someone chimed in, but the boy would not heed such calls. He kept on swimming as if it were his destiny to reach whatever lay in those deep waters. The calls became more earnest but to no avail. When they finally realized the boy would not heed their calls, two older men, strong swimmers in their own right, plunged into the cool waters of the lake and swam after him. But there was no catching him. By the time they got to where he was when he yelled back to the shore, he had become a speck on the horizon to the spectators. We grew worried. We wondered why he would disobey his mother, why he would keep swimming even though he knew the dangers such a swim would entail.

As he went further and further out, our anxiety and worry increased. Finally, we lost sight of him altogether. He must have gone under. We searched and searched the distant horizon hoping to find any disruption along the plumb line, wishing perhaps it was him, but our hopes were in vain. By the time three small rowboats were employed to aid the dismal search team, no hope lingered in our breasts that the boy would be found alive. And he wasn’t. Weeks later his bloated body was found floating face down with the flotsam near the outlet of the lake. It was a tragic end to a tragic couple of weeks, and the weeks to find him didn’t soften the brunt of the blow for the family when they finally received the calamitous but expected news. The family could not be consoled. Our condolences seemed trite to them, and they did to us too, but what can one do to help the bereavement of others when they do not suffer from the same hollow pang? Compassion does cause, to a degree, even the one who has not suffered to take on some of the pain for the family, but still an arbitrary gulf between the town, who still had their children, and the family, who had lost their only child, existed. The family moved away several months after, claiming the sight of our faces acted as a vigilant reminder of their constant loss.

Now little creature, what possibly could have consumed the boy to abandon all rationale and plunge headlong into the depths of death itself? Why would he seek such a miserable lot, or was it miserable? And why is it when people know they are going to die they get such satisfaction from the simple rote of everyday life? Why don’t they go somewhere, see the world, and fulfill last wishes before they die? Did the bird suffer more because it chose to stay, or was it some innate stimuli, the workings of which lie within us, that cause us, or the impetus carries us, against common sense and the own goodness of our being, to seek out such experiences in our extremities? Is the bird living a life of deviation because it chooses to face the awful reality one faces before death, or is everyone else living deflected, masked lives—lives that hide from pain and pretend sorrow does not exist?”

The man faced the destitute creature and with a sardonic expression restated the question the creature had asked him so many times, “Why do I dig? Why do I dig? Why do I dig?”

He regained a semblance of composure, but continued unloading his tongue of the massive weight of words it had procured through so many years of solitude: “I ask you, creature, the same question differently. Why isn’t the world digging? Why doesn’t the world attempt to come to terms with the human experience? So many walk around as brain-dead zombies, wrapped up in mummified visions of a false reality presented to them from their daily fix of vanity or any other of this century’s anesthesia; each zombie willing to try anything to deaden the senses, and each as unwilling to dig up the dirt, to unbury the sorrow, that as painful as it might be, lets us know we are alive. Sure creature, my life might be miserable, but at least at the bottom of my misery, I am beginning to realize I am alive, and it is here, in the midst of my pit, that I find life most unadulterated and livable. And no matter how painful that is, I would not trade it for the entire anesthetic this world is capable of producing. No false ambrosia can erase the …”

The old man paused mid-sentence. He looked again at the creature as it sat silent. A type of empathy now revealed itself on the man’s face. No longer haranguing the creature, and in amicable tones, the man now spoke the calm way a guru speaks to a guileless disciple. “I suppose creature, there are degrees to suffering or different types of suffering, and some of those seem to serve a purpose. It appears as if suffering is the great teacher, and the lessons vary upon the person. Suffering is the litmus test of mortality, and when applied, some grow calloused, bitter, angry at their lot in life; others grow humble, patient, full of faith; yet, others experience both poles, but they walk the middle ground, neither hot nor cold—just indifferent. I do not know exactly what that lesson or test is, and I do not claim to understand the purpose of suffering, so I keep digging, looking for light on the other side of all this darkness or hoping to strike it at the core, hoping beyond hope that a ‘light might shine in darkness, and the darkness will comprehend it not’; praying with a heavy heart that I am not darkness, thinking lately I am both the darkness and the light.”

The man’s lecture was not over, but his energy had fizzled out, therefore, he stopped speaking even though the unfinished words still lay heavy on his heart and mind. The man could do nothing for the moment but look melancholic and tired. The creature was saddened by the man’s melancholy demeanor and hoped to console him but did not know what to say. With neither of them knowing what to say to console each other, the man began digging again, and the creature perched itself upon his shoulder to watch him work.

After weeks of digging (much had been accomplished due to the porosity of the soil and the help of a wheelbarrow which the man obtained the third day), the man, invigorated by his progress, deigned it necessary to impart his philosophy to the creature on how to dig a hole. He explained the cardinal rule in proper hole digging was to always leave a way out.

“I learned a valuable and unforgettable lesson early on in my career,” the old man acknowledged. “Let me tell you one more story from my youth.”

“In the vivacity of my youth, without forethought or method, overcome by my urge to dig, I began digging a hole willy-nilly. I dug and dug with the voraciousness and single-mindedness only youth or the obsessed can employ. Before long, I realized I could only get so deep without running into problems. I heaved the shovelfuls up and out of the pit, but rapidly the distance became too far even for me, with my youthful virility, to muster, and eventually the dirt just came crashing back down upon my head. I had dug about twenty feet deep before I realized the predicament I was in. I had reached an impasse. I could dig no further, and now as the light of day was fading, I began to fear lest I could not climb out of the pit. So I ventured to climb the walls of the pit, but the gradient was too steep, and the edges were too far apart for me to shimmy my way up, and when I tried, the dirt began to crumble under the weight of my hands and feet, causing me to slide back down.

After twenty minutes worth of my futile attempts to scale the pit walls, the waning light shone dimmer, and the darkness of the pit grew eerie. I began to fear in the way little boys do—absolute, and thought no perceivable light would reach me in the pit, and I would be forced to live out the night in utter darkness. Such fear gripped me, and instead of causing a resourcefulness within, which would have allowed me to take my shovel and collapse one of the walls around me and pile up the caved in dirt, the onslaught of darkness caused me such anxiety and fear that my mind ceased to function in a rational manner. The final light from the fading day went out, and on a starless night, I thought how awfully I sent myself to my own oblivion. I began to wail in anger at what a foolish boy I was, screaming to myself, ‘Why? Why did I do this?’ I pictured myself, soul and all, disintegrating into the cloak of darkness surrounding me.

It was at this moment of excruciating anguish and despair that I thought I heard a voice from up above. Two villagers, having worked later than expected in a nearby field, just so happened to be passing by the hole and heard the whimpers of a young child. Shining their light toward the vicinity of the pit, the men saw the hole that had been dug and the pile of discarded dirt around it. They walked toward the pit, and casting the light over the lip of the pit, they looked down. To me, light shone as a sentinel, and the outline of the two villagers could not have been more welcome had it been two messengers sent from the heavens. The men looked at each other askance, wondering if they had stumbled upon some modern biblical outcast thrown into the pit by jealous brothers, but there was no coat, and they knew by the pile of dirt and the shovel I had with me that the pit was probably of my own making.

Rather than asking me what had happened, the older of the two men told me to hold on while he ran to town to retrieve a ladder. I kindly thanked him and as the man left, the other man sat down with his feet and the lantern hanging over the edge of the pit. The man asked me what I was doing down in a pit. I was abashed due to my stupidity, but so overcome by the reality I was safe that I grew bold and told the man about my urge to dig. You see, back then I had the urge to dig and the inherent need to dig, but I did not know why it was I dug. I knew I had no answer that would satisfy the man’s curiosity, so I told the truth. I told him I did not know why I was digging other than the urge. No sooner had the words left my mouth, than I realized how ridiculous I sounded. But the man did not admonish me, rather he told me if I were to venture to dig such a hole, next time leave a way out.

The other man returned shortly thereafter and lowered the ladder down to the bottom of the pit. I clung to each rung tightly as I ascended my pit. Upon reaching the top, the younger man extended his arm and helped me out of the pit. He then patted me on the back and commented on how silly of a boy I had been. I graciously thanked each man for helping me to safety, and as the night was growing late, they told me I had better return to my family who would be worried by now. The three of us parted company as abruptly as we had met.

And now, creature, that I am an old man, no longer shackled with the impulsiveness of youth, I have my wheelbarrow and I proceed to make a small spiral walkway along the outer edge of the hole. I always leave a way out. This, little one, is how a hole is properly dug.”

The man continued to dig and over time, the creature came to enjoy the process just as much as the old man. It enthralled the creature to watch the man, using the sharp spaded point of his shovel, mark a line in the dirt wall where he would begin his day’s digging. The creature would marvel, as during the day, the line became higher and higher, and the distance between it and the creature farther and farther. The man’s pace was extraordinary, and as toilsome and tedious as the job might have been, the man never seemed to lessen his pace. That is not to say the digging did not exact a physical toll on the old man, but rather quite the opposite. For the man grew pale, his skin began to droop and sag; it no longer possessed the semi-tautness or elasticity even of middle age, and the man’s face became emaciated. The eyes still held their piercing capability, but so sunken and deeply withdrawn were those orbs, one would have to look directly at them when the man was not moving to spot the pupil. And on top of all the physical reductions, the man’s entire visage was besmeared with a film of dirt, giving him the appearance almost of a coal miner. He was physically hampered, yes, but mentally and spiritually the man stayed strong and kept a steadfast pace that might make the ancient rock roller himself jealous.

Then the season began to change. And the days waxed colder, and the light turned feeble and the man more somber. If a look of disquietude were capable for a creature, a furrowing of the brow a possibility, both would have been proper indications for the feelings troubling the pitiable thing. The creature was concerned over the sudden slackening of pace. It wondered why the man all of a sudden relented in his digging. “It is nothing,” the man retorted with an air of uneasiness and doubt when asked. “It’s just that I always seem to get to this point and the work becomes so painstakingly hard, I grow tired. This soil is not the light, silty loam we started off with, creature; it is weighty, obdurate clay, compressed by the load of time and the pressure of earth. It is not so easy to move.”

The old man took a break, and the creature, as had grown customary, roosted upon his shoulder in an effort to buoy him up. Also customary, the creature began asking the man too many questions. Only on this day, the burden of being, the heft of his task, pressed so heavily upon his shoulders and heart, the old man forgot himself and felt no altruistic need to shelter his irritability from the creature. And so, when the callow creature asked the man for what seemed liked the tenth time that day, why he was convinced the creature would feel impelled to tell the world the man’s story—as of late this was a theme the man was constantly harping on. The man was convinced that the creature would leave him one day and venture out into the world. The creature would then counter that it would not leave his side but would remain loyal to the end of this task. However, on this day it caught the man with his guard down—the man without malicious intent, but definitely not with the forbearance that defined him, turned to the creature and said, reaching the guttural tones of pity, “You will leave me, and you will tell my story because you do not know what else to do. It is in your nature.”

The man paused, as if seeking to regain composure but in reality breathed in deeper to continue his frantic pace of unburdening. “It is your nature to live a life of quiet conflict against yourself. Born as a caterpillar, you cling to the earth. The dirt is your abode, your protection, it is your mother. But then your transformation takes place, and you climb into a tree, lock yourself up for a time, and reemerge from your second birth displaying your new and ethereal wings. The sky is your new abode, and the light your newest longing, but it never can fully replace your wish to return to your first mother.

Many falsely believe this is why you creatures attack the light. You are angry at being ripped away from your first home and unable to return, you wage warfare against the source of all life. You miss your mother. You wish to return to her and tell her of your struggles. You hate your transformation. You curse life. Yes, that is what many believe. They believe the scorned moth hates the light. I do not believe this,” said the old man.

“I believe the moth loves the light, and is pleased with its metamorphosis, but it never really can embrace the light in the way it wishes, and can never quite shed the habits of its original birth. Memory of its first origins stay locked within.” Taking in another deep breath, the old man continued at the same frantic pace.

“I remember growing up, I used to enjoy seeing the moths enter a lamp-lit room on a summer’s night and watch as they futilely made love or waged war, however one chooses to view it, with the glowing light-bulb; each pass would cast gigantic shadows of the adumbrated moth upon the wall. It was as if I were watching the extrinsic story of its life being told as the moth clung to the light, and yet, if I turned to the wall, the inner struggle was being projected as the penumbra writhed in spasmodic convulsions against the white.

Almost like the shadow was the old self caged within still trying to write its story, and almost like the moth heeded the light in an attempt to forever rid itself of its shadow by burning it up, but I am unsure if this is what it meant. And then the moth would either leave as abruptly as it entered, and the walls would seem so stark white in comparison to what they were, like blank pages to a story waiting to be written, or the moth would waste away its ethereal life by its uncanny attraction to the light, burn up its wings in its futile attempts at merging with the light, and in silence it would fall to the ground to flicker out its final moments in a spasm of twitches and turns. What a fate a creature like you has. The very thing you love and the very thing granting you life is also the source of your sure death. There is an awful beauty in this. No, creature. You will not stay down here with me much longer. You will venture into the light.”

The man was done. He had shattered the final remains of any cocoon-like stage for the moth. It was now face to face with reality. And the creature, for its part, shouldered the load of what it had been told in quite the puerile but normal fashion. It at first refused to believe what the man had told it, clinging to its belief it was a butterfly and its adamant denial it was a creature destined to die prematurely. Next it experienced anger with the man’s blunt and hurtful ravings. The dejected creature fluttered, and finding no real corner to hide in, landed near the edge furthest away from the man, and hid its sullen face with its wings and tenebrously wailed away the shattered perspective it had of itself. The man, able to decipher the creature’s nature, and not wanting to exacerbate its pain by harping on the subject, thought it best to remain silent and let the creature console itself. Only those who have at one time or another been puffed up with the vainglories of their own beauty can understand the dejection the moth suffered when it received the shattering blow of perception, not at the hands of the cruel world, but at the hands of the one dearest to it. The man returned to digging while the creature bemoaned its fate.

The following week, the creature remained aloof from the man and refused to talk to him. The man did not seek to instigate any further harm to the fragile creature, and surmised that when the creature was ready to talk to him, it would initiate conversation. Until then, the man, at his regular slow but steady pace, continued digging. The creature did not know what to do. It sensed the man had told it the truth, and therefore, it should not be angry with him, but at the same time, it was wroth and loathed the manner in which the man had so bluntly burst the bubble of self-perception the creature had developed.

After wallowing in self-pity for a time, the creature decided it could not stay angry at the man, and whether it was a despicable creature or not, it did not have the capacity to hate anything for a very long time. So, as the man went about his work, the creature took to the adumbral sky of the pit and flew near him seeking reconciliation. The man recognized the creature was signaling a token forgiveness of sorts to him. And with such foresight, the man spoke the first words of truce among the two to spare the despondent creature the trouble of formulating words. “I am terribly sorry for how you took what I said to you, little creature, and I beg forgiveness for the blunt manner in which I went about telling it to you, but there is no easy way to dash the perception of self one creates. I fear I have destroyed the brittle ego you had, but in so doing, I have opened your eyes to a true vista of possibility.”

The creature briskly forgave the man and told him it had come to terms with the fate it was consigned to. The man then told the creature that as awful as it seemed, it was not so. From what he had seen of nature, the man believed moths to be misunderstood. Sure, certain books of authority have cited the moth as destructive and have paired them with the locust, but that was just misunderstanding. The old man believed the moth to be a far more beautiful creature than that. The man explained to the somber creature his belief that the moth could sense something, an elemental substance entities emitted. It was this reason they would cling to light, that they would sleep on windowsills to partake of the effluvium of humanity slowly wafting through the window and warming the needy soul of the moth. The man went on to say, “It is simply probing light to gather the story of each place. Humans believe if walls could talk they would tell the story, but the truth is the light that emanates from us, from the sun, from the bulb, carries with it the story of time immemorial. It is the moth that has found the way to unravel the message such light carries. Some still think the moth is destructive, but it is rather the innate need to know the story that forces the moth to act so, and anything that does not emit such light, like cloth, and fabric, the moth seeks knowledge of the story through devouring it.”

The man turned to the creature with his all-knowing eyes, and sadly looked upon it as if he had discerned the entire life and fate of the poor thing, and said, “Sure, it will kill you to tell your story little moth, but at least your life will serve a purpose. Butterflies do nothing but act beautiful; besides, outer beauty usually masks an inner filth.”

The man laughed. For his physical appearance possessed little, if any, of what the opposite sex might call allure.

The old man removed his chin from the wood handle of the shovel and began digging. The creature, meanwhile, pondered the man’s words and realized he was right. There was some presence, an essence so real the creature could almost feel it exuding from the man, and it was that nebulous light that had drawn the creature to him, and it was that glow the creature had felt which warmed its entire being and kept it from leaving. The creature now realized in its first days of freedom it was drawn to those windowsills, against its will even, because the attraction was too great to deny the impetus of its pull. The creature had to have such light to live. It fed off of it. And the creature had discovered a supernal truth. The impulsion of a moth to seek out life-nurturing light is the same impulse of survival that guides a newborn’s mouth to a mother’s nipple. And when the mouth receives the mother’s milk, it does not question from where the nourishment flows, it just knows it has found it; neither does the moth need to fathom what the light is to enjoy the radiance it emits. So what, thought the creature, am I doing at the bottom of a pit? Why don’t I flee this pit and venture out amongst the light? It feared the darkness more than anything, and yet, for the creature, in the midst of the darkness, discerning the light was easiest, and it was here the creature unknowingly was honing its skills.

Over the next few weeks, the creature was unable to contain the excitement harboring in its abdomen. It now knew why it acted the way it did, and it recognized for the first time the immense import of what the man’s quest of digging could mean to the world. With fervent anticipation it longed to tell the world what it and the old man had been doing. And it also longed to discern and decipher the warmth and light emanating from humanity. From that moment on, every day was a burden for the creature. It wished the old man could dig a little faster and get a little deeper than they had.

Another type of transformation was affecting the creature during this time. It would not know whether it was a natural transformation that occurred to all moths or if it was caused as a direct correlation to the old man dashing its perception of self and helping it to recognize how to perceive the world, but the creature no longer saw the traits, of old, wrinkly, and gray, it had used to define the old man. These traits were camouflaged by an actual substance of light emanating from the old man’s presence, and from that light the creature perceived moods, disappointments, emotions, and motives; however, this new power the creature possessed was just burgeoning and at times would flicker. Only with time and repetition would the creature come to apprehend the relevance of its newfound power and be able to employ it. Regardless, this new revelation filled the creature with even more desire to leave the pit and venture out into the world.

Daily, the creature would pine away in the old man’s ear: “Should I fly up yet, and tell the world what we have found. We are close now, old man. I can sense it.”

The man would look at the anxious creature and admonishingly reply, “Patience, little creature. We are one hundred feet deep at the most, the ground has grown hard, the pace is slow, and light or fire is nowhere near yet. We have just scratched the surface.”

The old man’s reply would not quell the anxiousness of the creature. It might be a moth’s lifespan requires chronological events to proceed rapidly; otherwise, it feels as if it is wasting away its short time. And measuring the creature’s anxiety by human standards would be inadequate, for so short is the span of a moth’s life, and so valuable are the last remaining days of the moth’s life it can not even find the time to eat. Humans do not have an equivalent anxiety.

So, the creature would suffer attacks of restlessness particular only to a moth, and it would count the minutes, the seconds, and wish it were time for it to flee the pit and tell the world the old man’s story. It could not stand to watch another day go by without breaking through to the fire in the center, or hollowing through the earth and finding light on the other side. And as the October sun descended and drew to a close another day at the bottom of the pit, the man set his emaciated body upon the cold floor, curled up in a ball, pulled a blanket over his small body, and promptly went to sleep for the night.

As the man slept, the creature’s anxiety increased. Late that night, it decided it must abandon the old man and take to the skies. The need to speak out to the world was too pressing to stay put. The creature could not bear to wait any longer. It began its ascent up and out of the dark pit. The pit had seemed so deep, when from the bottom the creature used to look up at its mouth, and that light had looked so distant. Now, as the creature was leaving, the nearness of the lip and each mark on the wall awoke a keen sense in the creature at just how little the old man had actually accomplished.

The winged creature cleared the lip and took one final look down and into the pit. At the heart of the immense darkness, it could just make out one, infinitesimal, white dot at the center of the black circle. The sleeping man resembled a distant and stellar pupil amid earth’s dark iris.

At 2:25 AM, the creature breathed in the fresh air, and as it made its way through the dark night and away from the pit it realized just how long the two truly had been digging. And although it may not have been a long period of time when measured externally, internally it had felt like an eternity. The creature scurried along, seeking some sort of light to rest its wearied head nearby. Clouds now hid the borrowed light of the moon. The night was pitch black.

Alec Bryan is a freelance writer and editor. He has taught English at Weber State University and currently manages a paper route while living in his parent’s basement. Alec enjoys fly-fishing, traveling and writing. Alec is currently working on his first novel and expects to be finished by the end of this year. To see Alec’s shorter works, check out For Every Year or alecbryanblog.com.