the moth and the holy fool
a folk tale etched beneath the shadow of an ancient cathedral.
This tale is a poet’s momentary experiment with the world of prose. I hope the story brings you as much joy and wonder as it did me, as it nestled its feathers in my soul.
Evangeline’s walk took her by the old cathedral. Had it really been ten years since… that? The cathedral stood so stately, untainted, with the top of the steeple covered in clouds. In the setting sun, Evangeline’s disproportionally long shadow rippled along the jagged brick road and along the backs of the roadkill that lined the streets. The cathedral’s shadow seemed to eat an entire side of the city. It blanketed the last remaining corpses of trees where the vultures hunt for the freshest carcass to devour.
It really had been ten years since that, since the city council voted to lock the doors of the cathedral and keep the key under bulletproof glass. Why? Nobody uses it, and it’s swallowing up taxpayer dollars, they claimed. But even their supporters knew it was because the cathedral was a portal into a world that unraveled the soul. Unraveling didn’t belong among skyscrapers.
To preserve the cathedral’s memory, they voted to make Religion 1101 a mandatory class at Heyvn University, where Evangeline attended. Last night, students threw bricks through the Humanities building’s century-old windows, and the janitors were still finding shards of glass along the floor as Evangeline left the building this evening. As she walked past the cathedral, she mulled over the professor’s rant on existential meaninglessness. She shivered.
Evangeline found her shadow progressing closer and closer to the cathedral and had to lull herself into a steady tempo to avoid walking in the other direction. This was the cathedral where she, as a child, with living ivy braided in her hair, used to go every day. It held the fragile web of her life together with choir voices that captured the way that moss grows, and candles that flickered the way that moths flutter in the moonlight. Was she the only one who missed it? All her classmates, with frizzed hair choked in dust, were lulled by the professor’s siren’s song, as if their ivy-bedecked childhood was just a strange dream. She went along with them externally, but internally whispered, you’re betraying yourself. Everything.
The sky isn’t supposed to look this way, like it could suffocate us.
The memory like briars scraped around her stomach. She stopped. Was that a scurry among the fallen leaves? A squirrel? A squirrel hasn’t been seen in the city for months, so it couldn’t be. She turned her head and saw a man who could have been either thirty or eighty walking to one of the half-rotten benches. His clothing could have been a yellow monk’s habit. It had green linen elaborately embroidered with dark green ivy, yet tattered and patched in several places.
You probably don’t want to sit— Evangeline muttered, as he began to sit on the bench. He smiled at her and sat anyway. The bench did not creak under his weight.
I’m not afraid of decaying things, he said.
Nobody was nearby. Dust stirred on the road. Her feet involuntarily crept to the far edge of the road.
What is your name? He asked.
Evangeline.
Evangeline, he paused, as if listening for the echoes of her name against the cathedral wall. My name is Yaakov, but many call me Goldfish.
Where did you come from? She grumbled, painfully conscious of sounding rude.
I live by the riverbank and forage for my own food. He laughed as at a memory. When I cup my hands in the water, the fish swim into them, willingly giving up their souls so I may eat. His wrinkled finger pointed to a stained-glass window. I have come to unlock this.
This? Evangeline was indignant. The key is under thick glass, no one knows where. And, Go – Go –
Goldfish.
She sighed. Goldfish, just look!
Evangeline looked around at the rotting bench, red carcasses, and the Humanities building behind her. She caught the sting in her throat.
Look, she whispered and swallowed.
Who says you need a key? Goldfish smilingly whispered. Look!
He brought a green fruit out of a tattered satchel.
He said, what good would it be for me to remind you of the disease, if I had no cure? I’ve offered it to several passersby, but they’ve walked by like wraiths. Would you want the cure?
When she had sat in the cathedral as a child, Evangeline had heard of holy fools, but she had also heard of criminals, psychopaths, and the like. And alone on the street, she did not feel like deciding. Goldfish gave her a gentle nod and ambled back into the forest, his robe sweeping the dead leaves on the ground. Evangeline scurried back to her dorm and locked the deadbolt with shaking fingers.
The next morning, Evangeline felt the absence of twittering birds as she stared out the window into a perpetual winter. The only sound that she could hear was her beating heart, the blood swimming around her eardrums. Even the paint on the windowpanes had chipped, making the crisp wooden lines feel jagged. And so it goes, she thought. Every crisp line seems to wish to decay.
Yaakov, a sage. Goldfish, a fool. Perhaps: Goldfish in sheep’s clothing, Yaakov, a wolf. The dream of restoring the cathedral had been Evangeline’s Eden for as long as she could remember. Eden had both angels and serpents plodding on its soil. Dreams, too, are always peopled with both beings. But, as much as Evangeline feared the serpent (What do we live for? Her professor had asked the class. We are born to die.), she was shivering, soul and body, and needed to hear the flutter of an angel’s wings. Goldfish?
Pushing the gray covers away, she got up and wove a strand of paper ivy in her hair, one she had made months ago when nostalgia gnawed at her. She put on a gray dress, the only color she had. In a morning chill without any dew or mist, she tiptoed to the cathedral. Her footsteps were the only wind, and they disturbed dry leaves.
Even in this calloused morning, Goldfish’s yellow robe held more of the dawn than the sun. Leaf shadows danced on his clothes, on his arms, and on his silver-bearded face, even though none of the trees had leaves. His face glittered with the dew that failed to fall on the grass. His blue eyes seemed to be the last drop of sky the world had left. Evangeline, from the safe distance of the uneven road, stared at her own pale skin to find only the faint shadows of branches there.
She looked back at Goldfish. He looked at her, cupped his hands together, and blew a gentle breath into his palms. When he opened them, a bright green Luna moth fluttered there. Its long antennas glittered like golden feathers and the spots on its wings looked like Jupiter’s moons. Its twitching antennas seemed to give Goldfish a kind glance, as if it were listening for instructions. He smiled at it, and it fluttered out of his hands, floating to the vents just below the steeple. It slid through the vents and became the first living being to see the inside of the cathedral in a decade.
Goldfish looked at the vents and then at Evangeline.
Do you want to be her? He again reached into his satchel. Only take a bite of this fruit.
Gravity felt unbearable. Evangeline tiptoed across the road as a loose brick shifted under her feet. The sheep, the wolf, the sheep, the… tortured her thoughts into a pendulum. The hair on her arms stood up; chills raced through her body. She could hear the air fluttering through the hairs on a moth’s wings. See its golden antennas twitching under the crimson light of stained glass. It was as if her body were already changing just by reaching out her arm to touch the green velvet rind of the fruit…
Her hand was suspended in the air.
I have heard stories like this, Evangeline let out a heavy breath and looked Goldfish in the eye. The blue lines in his irises seemed to swirl like water. Eve, for one. How do I know you’re not a serpent?
Goldfish held his elbow with his opposite hand and tapped his fingers. After a moment, he whispered, There were seven thousand fruit trees in Eden, Evangeline. A hundred yards from the Tree of Life, there was something like a pomegranate, translucent like a ruby. It cradled the sunlight and gave its eater divine creativity. I saw it in a vision once. Beside it could be found an iridescent lemon tree. The parents of mankind used its golden fruit to purify the muddied waters outside Eden when they wandered there. Look, Evangeline, he whispered. She looked at him, her hand still suspended in the air. Not all beautiful fruit has a rotten core.
It all sounded like a made-up fairy tale, but at the same time, it felt true. She went through it all again: the heavy stomach, the shifting earth, the chilling air, the footsteps of the moth, until she felt as if she were no longer in her body. From somewhere, her soul watched her suspended hand touch the soft fruit, felt its velvety rind tickle her palm. She peeled off the rind, and the juice trickled down her arms and onto the cracked soil. The corpses of the blades of grass beneath her turned from brown to emerald wherever the juice fell. She bit into the sweetest fruit she had ever tasted, something like honeydew, and after she caught the glimmer of Goldfish’s smile in her peripheral vision, she had something like a vision of her own, or something more like metamorphosis.
It has been almost a century since Evangeline became a moth and entered the cathedral. Once inside, she used her antennas to unlock the doors. Goldfish opened them from the outside. Those who were brave enough entered, with their gray garments stirring the dead leaves that now had eerie patches of green. Goldfish found the old, exiled priest on the borders of the sea and invited him to lead the congregation once more.
The congregants commissioned a statue of Goldfish the holy fool to be placed near his tomb. They walk under his shadow, plod over soft grass, and listen to singing finches every time they come to the cathedral. Sometimes while the priest, with an ivy-embroidered robe, angelically sings psalms of resurrection for the ivy-laureled congregants, a green Luna moth lands on his shoulder. The young congregants are convinced she has been there forever, and they are right.
.
.
feel free to sign this tale’s guest book by commenting below, or include this tale in your next letter to a dear friend.
either way, as you now leave my forest, I hope you picked some healing herbs to lighten your travels through wild lands.
