When Mothman Came to Queer Lake

Featured in the collection Nightmare Yearnings, released September 4th

Ellie and I fled Crawford after our big secret came out — pun intended. The mom-and-pop grocery store owner Mr. Reynolds caught us kissing behind the dumpster and fired us on the spot. We were off the clock and out of uniform, but the man couldn’t have homos scaring customers into shopping at Wal-Mart.

He was shocked when we filed a wrongful termination lawsuit, and he nearly fainted when we won in court. Our winnings were enough to score us a plot of land far away from Crawford, complete with a fishing pond and golden prairie as far as the eye could see. Thus, the town of Queer Lake was born. The fact that the state didn’t officially recognize it as a town only made Queer Lake queerer.

Ellie built us a house with slanted floors and enough cracks for mice to nestle in (as if I could do any better), but there was still the problem of food. It was a two-hour drive to the nearest grocery store — yep, that grocery store — which gave us all the push we needed to grow our own crops. Learning to farm was a joyful process, though. We would till rows in the soil and make corny jokes about what we were planting. When the exhaustion set in, we’d spend the evenings cuddling and watching X-Files on our shitty antenna TV. On the rare occasion that we got tired of spending every second together, it was easy to give each other space: Ellie fished the pond while I wandered the hills and tried to avoid prairie dog holes. But on those hikes, I often found myself glancing back at Ellie, admiring her arm muscles as she reeled in catfish, the rod bending under their weight. I could never stay away for long.

However, paradise came with the anxiety that it might crumble at any second. We’d seen energy company vans stopping on the road in front of our house. The workers surveyed the land, taking notes and measurements of who-knows-what. Ellie thought they might be planning the route of an oil pipeline — a black snake that would soon plunge its fangs into Queer Lake.

A more familiar threat also drove that road: trucks sporting Confederate flags and bumper stickers for homophobic senators. Whenever those drove by, Ellie and I went inside, not wanting the drivers to see us holding hands. You’d think we’d be safe doing that out in the middle of nowhere, but apparently not.

Then came Mothman, our strangest visitor by far. We’d first learned about him as children from a library book about cryptids. But it wasn’t until two decades later, as we returned from the fields, that we saw him for ourselves, perched atop our house. Ellie dropped her armful of corn, and I about pissed myself. Mothman was a tall, dark silhouette in the twilight. His eyes were large and red as stoplights, and his wings were long enough to graze the gutters on both sides of the roof. Spotted, he flew upward falcon-fast and disappeared into the clouds. We craned our necks for a good while, waiting for him to reappear, but by the time the clouds passed, the horizon had already swallowed the sun. As we made our way inside, I glimpsed a quick, black shape passing over the moon, but by then I was disinclined to trust my eyes.

We sat on the couch in the dark for a while before either of us could speak. Unsure what else to say, I broke the silence.

“Want to watch X-Files?”

“Pretty sure we just did,” Ellie replied.

I snorted, trying to hold back a laugh, but the dam burst. Both of us fell into a fit of giggles. Tearing up and gasping for breath, Ellie collapsed into my lap.

A thunk on the roof halted our laughter. We stared at each other through the darkness, and neither of us dared breathe.

A minute of silence, then Ellie whispered, “It’s him, right?”

“It’s got to be. Why the hell is he here?”

We’d both seen him, so we weren’t crazy. But just because our minds were fine didn’t mean everything else was. Where Mothman showed up, tragedy struck. In 1967, he tried to warn the people of Point Pleasant about the impending Silver Bridge collapse, but his omens were esoteric at best, transmitted through dreams that left more people scratching their heads than taking action. Forty-six people died in the Ohio River that December, and Mothman vanished.

#

Each morning, Ellie wrote a new tragic prediction on our refrigerator whiteboard: “Ellie will come out as straight,” “Wachiwi will develop a corn allergy,” or “the mice will eat us in our sleep.” Seeing these jokes made me smile, but I couldn’t always bring myself to laugh. Had the people of Point Pleasant done the same thing as us, dismissing Mothman’s omens only to pay the ultimate price? I mentioned this to Ellie one day as we were harvesting potatoes.

“What if it’s something serious?” I said. “A drought. A wildfire. Violent homophobes. Or Proud Boys coming to — you know. I mean, there’s nowhere to run out here. No way to protect—” 

“Let’s not psych ourselves out,” she said, wiping her muddy hands on her jeans. “Maybe Mothman was just passing through on his way to Crawford. Plenty of tragedy to warn people about in that shithole. And in any case, don’t you trust me to protect you?”

She flashed a flirty smile and flexed her muscular arms. The tension in my chest eased up, and I couldn’t help smiling back. I felt silly for worrying in the first place. It had been three weeks since the Mothman sighting, and he hadn’t appeared again. It was probably just a fluke.

But Mothman returned that evening. He stood beside the pond, his red eyes reflecting off the water. Ellie and I watched him from the relative safety of our home, daring only to peek through a crack in the curtains. Mothman was shivering. His whole body trembled, and his knees looked close to collapsing. When at last he fell, he landed facedown in the pond, his wings twitching in sharp, spastic motions. Ellie and I looked at each other, wide-eyed and frozen. She sprang into action first, running out the door. I hesitated to follow, suspecting a trap, but if Ellie was going to die, I’d die beside her.

We rushed toward the pond, and the closer we got the more I wanted to turn back. Mothman had the wingspan of a pterodactyl and the build of an NBA player; he could easily fuck us up if he wanted to. But that didn’t seem to register for Ellie as she barreled forward. She wouldn’t be able to pull Mothman out of the water on her own, so I kept following despite every hair on my body bristling.

When we reached Mothman, no bubbles came up from where his face rested in the pond. I worried we were too late, but we each grabbed a leg and pulled him out. His fuzzy form prickled me with static electricity, only the static didn’t discharge after one touch. The sensation was constant as we dragged him onto dry land and, with tremendous effort, tipped him onto his back. Seeing him up close, I could only discern his eyes. Shadows bunched up around his other features as if they weren’t for us mortals to see. It was the kind of darkness one might find at the bottom of a well—an amorphous black that banished all light. And while it sounds like I should’ve been frightened, my heartbeat slowed in his presence.

“His eyes,” Ellie said, her voice far away.

I kneeled down to get a better look. Mothman’s eyes still glowed with life, and something danced below their glassy surface. It was a swirling mist that vacillated between form and formlessness. I caught glimpses of fire devouring homes, tactical boots crushing necks, and people dying in the streets of some town—distant or near, I couldn’t be sure. The images flashed by so quickly that it was hard for me to keep up. But even if I didn’t consciously register each one, my unconscious mind still pieced together their meaning. Tears welled in my eyes. Acid rose in my throat. I turned away from Mothman and vomited into the grass.

After my gut emptied and I’d dry heaved several times, I turned back to Ellie. She was no longer looking at Mothman. Instead she stared off into space, her knees pulled to her chin. My gaze lowered to Mothman, and I realized he was still breathing — hyperventilating, really, the rise and fall of his chest quick and shallow. Not knowing what else to do, I placed a hand on him and moved it in soft, slow circles. The static sensation prickled me even more than before, but the longer I spent soothing him, the weaker the sensation became. Eventually it diminished to nothing more than gentle moth fuzz against my skin.

Mothman’s wing twitched away a horsefly—one of the last still alive before the frost. I stepped back. After a minute of strained movement, Mothman pushed himself onto his feet. He looked at Ellie, then at me. At least for now, his eyes didn’t swirl with a thousand omens. I held his gaze for what felt like hours, wondering if it held a message. With little warning, he took off into the night to carry on his work.

When the black sky consumed him, Ellie shuffled over and hugged me from behind. She sniffled, and her cheek felt wet against my neck.

“I think this place is his sanctuary too,” Ellie said, her voice hoarse.

A truck roared down the road. While I could only see the headlights, I pictured a driver with a MAGA hat inside. I pictured him getting out of the truck with a rifle in hand. I pictured hate pouring from his mouth and screams pouring from Ellie’s. I pictured two unmarked graves. An energy company laying down pipe. Our home demolished. Our pond shimmering with the wrong kind of rainbow, black and viscous.

That night, I dreamed about Crawford and the world we left behind. Ellie woke me when I started screaming in my sleep. And as grateful as I was to wake up in Queer Lake, I could feel that other world encroaching on our paradise. It was not a matter of if it would reach us but when. I wondered where Mothman would rest after this place was swallowed up.