One day my mom absolutely lost her shit. Peering into the over packed, snack heavy pantry closet she exclaimed with grotesque bewilderment “There’s moths everywhere!” This is true, there were many moths that had taken up residence for the summer. Scraping and clinking noises emitted as she shuffled around old cans of tuna fish, lids lightly flecked with brown spots of rust. She jabbered on under her breath about ‘ew’ or ‘oh my god’ worthy sights, and for quite some time. A muffled retching gagging sound grabbed my attention though, and from the closet her face appeared. On it she wore a folded brow, narrowed withdrawn eyes, a scrunched up nose, and lips contorted beyond reason. Disgust. The prettier the face, the worst its expression. My mom looked gross.
“There’s larva in there,” she said, “They’re everywhere.” And of course, though no one but her ever bothered to look, there were larvae everywhere in there. We had no reason to doubt her of course, and still don’t. She went ballistic though. Donning her domestic rubber dish gloves, lilac colored and petite, she dove fist first into moth closet.
She was putting on quite a show, throwing away infected cereal boxes, unopened soup tins, pasta both sealed and not, beans, corn, tuna, marshmallow peeps, and every damn thing that could be considered touched inappropriately by a moth, save the pickles and pre-workout. My brother and I would throw a fit. Her tirade lasted until the last food parcel parted the threshold of the creaky closet door, but continued anew as she redoubled her nerves and turned to face the lovely larvae. ‘Ughs’ and ‘blecks’ and ‘eughs’ and coughs came leaking from the pantry. My mom, bless her, was scooping up heaps of the maggoty little fuckers with her hands, the lovely lilac gloves her armor.
“Instead of snickering over there you could come help ya know,” she said, the familiar good humor still rich in her voice. But ‘no’, we answered, ‘this is your little project’. Silly though it sounds, I’m sure she is proud of this even now. My mom, you see, is not a country girl or a steel stomached gritty city girl either. Nah, she grew up in Queens, the soft served suburbs of a city rich like gelato. But we lived in pudding, out here in Hilton. Shit reeking cows at the end of the road and the sticky summer buzz of cicadas ceaselessly bellowing their boredom to the sky served as the backdrop to our blueberry farm in the middle of east jesus rural ‘burb nowhere. So my mom saw it. That’s what happens though, ain’t it, when you marry a podunk modest man from rah-cha-cha Rochester, who is brilliant and loving and kind but a total hick bore who’s desperately attached to his close knit family of nesters and festering monotony. So I saw it anyway.
You might be more moved to empathy knowing all this, then again you might not. Either way, my mom was still lobbing larvae into trash bags like an almost authentic rural Ruth. Milestones are milestones, no matter what they are.
Now I never would’ve guessed at this point that my mother’s massive moth crusade could have me contemplating my own morality. When all was said and done, closet clean and restocked almost to the prior point of overflow, my dear mom lays on us all a heavy burden. ‘Kill any moth you see, I want them dead,’ she said, or something of the kind. And my brother and father of course comply with this suddenly moth Nazi devil woman’s demands. But should I? Certainly a banality of evil moment, trapped between the command to kill and my own passivity.
Now I’m not some flower child freak that’s lost grip on reality. No no, I’ll kill a moth, an ant, a fly. Especially flies. They’re a game to me. The bzz bzz right in your goddamn ear and the chase is on. You poked the bear motherfucker. You might live to piss people off and buzz stupidly around the house because bzz you can't get through the bzz solid buzzing glass window, but that shit annoys forces much greater than you, and if I emanated a high frequency buzzing noise around massive cosmic entities and they swatted and flailed and squashed me like the insignificant organism that I am, I would have no problem with that. Don’t go buzzing around shit you can’t control that can kill you instantly. Swat! ha.
It wasn’t that moths weren’t annoying. They’d flutter towards your face and relentlessly land on the dim blue glow of your LED screen at midnight when you’re trying to put yourself to sleep with a good TV story. (We learned that from birth.) No, moths might not be as irksome as flies, but they have plenty of check marks against them. It wasn’t the moths that I didn’t want to kill. It was the sergeant commanding the annihilation of a species. Marching orders to abolish all moth kind.
My dad and I were talking one day, by the microwave as it were, about chickens and the holocaust. My argument was that chickens have it much worse than the jews. I still hold that. They are forced to birth eggs that will largely end up as a delicious scrambled, hard boiled, or sunny side up abortion, served for breakfast. And on the odd chance that the hen is used, yes used, for making new chickens, it’s fifty-fifty that the child of this poor captive hen will even live to see enslavement. The chick chicks live to see the maternity cage. The other half of chicken children are boys, and in a cultural one eighty from China, the boys are thrown in a grinder and turned into a goopy pink paste. That slimy sludge is your McNugget, you fat fuck.
I love eating chicken though, great protein, very versatile. I’ll even dabble in the nuggets from time to time. But the point is, my dad and I brought up the chicken enslavement topic to my mom one night at dinner. She was mortified! Ha. The same ugly turned up larvae scooping disgusted face of a soft served girl from Queens. Now hold on. She can’t even entertain the thought of chicken torture, but she can pridefully savage a society of moths and all of their children into oblivion and then instruct her troops to continue her campaign without batting an eye? My dad sliced into the juicy breast of white meat on his plate, chewing at my poor nauseous mother with his mouth open. At least he wasn’t eating moths she said, and he could thank her for that.
Their playful flirty banter bounced back and forth, each picking on the other’s eccentricities, my ears leaking poison. How did it all happen this way? One day and for four years you are frollicking in the whimsical intellectual playground of upper mid range college, free ranged unlike the poor chickens. The next day you are caged, waist deep in a genocidal wasteland in the sparsely populated countryside mocking your poor timid mom for her paradoxical stances on mass murder.
I guess jews, chickens, and moths are pretty different after all. Ever think of cell death? Let’s not. On a scale of moral indifference, how big of a thing will you kill on command? I kill moths now because I care more about my mom’s mental sanity than I do about their minute and insignificant lives. Apparently size does matter.