TE23 Double Feature

Anke Laufer

“The Silver Moth”

to the horizon. Thinking about it, I had a premonition that morning. After breakfast, I spent an unusually long time sitting on my rickety steps. So I was sitting there, and I could see the years that remained to me. Heatwaves, floods, corn poppies, lark-song above ripe crops, hate speech and marriages, extinctions, peppermint chewing gum, storms, hate speech, plane crashes, cherry blossom, miscarriages, floods, rebellions, heatwaves, hopelessness, storms, jubilees, heatwaves, hate speech. Looking back, I can’t be sure now that the chewing gum was one of the things I thought about. Anyway, the time I had left on earth seemed incredibly long and tiring. Nothing would help and nothing more would happen to me. I would never write another line. Certainly not a whole poem. But then I did actually feel something. It was the stab of despair, right through my numb heart. That evening, it rained into my service station paper cup as I was taking the first sip and walking back to the van. I wasn’t 182

thinking about anything in particular, it was one of those days, you know, when you feel a little chilled from the inside out and you’re not expecting anything, at least not anything miraculous. Someone was standing with their back to me on the edge of the kerb, looking out at the sweep of woodland beyond the barrier, a mottled grey-green sea, the clouds iron battleships, the treetops in turmoil. There was a smell of electricity and diesel in the air. The woman was at least a head taller than me and wearing a rubberised coat that the rain ran down like oil. When she turned round I could see that she was a few years my senior. She seemed to dissolve into the woods, into the mist that was growing up the tree trunks, through the bracken and scrub. Rain dripped from the rim of her hood onto her forehead and ran down her face. She blinked the drops away. It was the second time that day that something had pierced through my torpor. It felt like my heart muscle tearing. Perhaps because I suddenly began to doubt that it was just rain running down her face. Was she crying? She 183