How to Make Moths

The man’s garbled dry heaves began as his chest expanded and extracted, his deep breathing not a practice of meditation but rather preparation for a death-purge. The green plate in front of him, covered in the remnants of a breakfast burrito: bits of egg yolk, portions of cheddar cheese, mottles of green jalapeno salsa, merged unremarkably into hallucinatory inkblots, a bland addition to what was about to be a noteworthy occasion.

As the man opened his mouth, the dryness of his coughing fits filling with moisture, he spewed forth a tiny moth larva which, upon hitting the plate, transformed into the next cycle of its life's process and fluttered away.

It seemed now that his fit was over, his breathing slowing down to the point of pre-sleep calm, his eyes moist from the strain of dispelling the tiny insect from deep within the confines of his inner-torso. As he took another deep, slow inhale, his mouth suddenly exploded - forced agape - green larvae with bright red ends coating the plate, building a mound of pests whose bottom was moths trying to fly away and whose top was thousands of larvae that were keeping them stuck in place.

After hours of playing host to the life-giving process, the man had produced millions of moths so that there was enough to cling to every available space of kitchen wall - immobile and contented by the prospect of any kind of future at all - their bodies painting the room a new color: a dull, muted brown.

The man, after all his exertion, in a state of near-collapse, stood up and walked to the camera on the tripod a few feet before him. Ejecting the small tape from the side of the camera, he placed a label on it and, in a thick black marker, wrote, "How to Make Moths."