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 Storage of stories written for The Bradbury, 2025. |
| Various stories created at the (hopeful) rate of one a week for the year 2025, |
| Moth Karl found himself unexpectedly awake at three a.m. Soundly asleep at one moment, he was fully aware at the next. He listened to the sound that had hauled him so rudely from slumber. It was a soft sound, low and unremarkable, a sound he could identify with some accuracy. An insect was hovering close by, the beat of its wings feathery and muted, typical of the nondescript moths so common in the region. Karl listened to the frrfrr of its flight in the darkness. It was coming closer. Had it been the hum of a mosquito, Karl would have been lashing out in blind fury to keep it away. But this was so clearly a harmless moth that he waited without moving, curious as to its intention. The sound continued in fuzzy indecision before going suddenly silent. Karl felt sure it had landed on his hair, although he could feel nothing. The creature was too light and formless to impact his nerve endings. Karl swiped lightly at his head, aiming at his best guess of the insect’s position, and then lay still again. The flutter of soft wings rose from the darkness, just a brief flourish before going silent again. His attack had missed its target apparently. For a while, Karl waited quietly, hoping that the moth would give away his position. In the dark silence that ensued, sleep crept upon the listening human, stalking him like prey. Karl’s eyes closed and his head began to slip sideways. Then suddenly the noise of the moth’s wings filled his awareness, this time louder, a quick burst of activity accompanied by the light touch of a foreleg in the entrance to Karl’s ear. Now the staccato blips of wings came one after the other as the moth forced its way inside. Too late, Karl clapped a hand to his ear. The moth continued to try its wings so that Karl was constantly aware of its struggles. He remembered that he had read somewhere on the internet that hackers released little sound files that mimicked the sounds of insects burrowing into ear canals. He wondered whether he could be experiencing one of these. But that was ridiculous. How could such a file give so realistic an impression of an insect in the ear, especially without an attendant computer to carry it? Karl realised that he must be at least half asleep to have imagined such a thing. He focused again on the sounds his little visitor was producing. The moth’s struggles were getting weaker and more intermittent. Karl had expected that he would feel it scratching at his eardrum but it was only the sound of wings that advertised the creature’s presence. And even these stopped after a few more desultory efforts. It seemed the moth was either exhausted or dead. Karl considered how he was to remove it from his ear. A warm water spray should do it, he reasoned. Then the sounds began again but in a different key. Karl’s wife had turned her head away and was now snoring quietly into the empty space on the other side of the bed. He marvelled at her ability to snore in such an excellent imitation of an insect’s flight. Word count: 538 For The Bradbury 2026, Week 1 |
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