The first moth came on a night that smelled of iron and blown-out candles. Calder found it trapped under the eave of a railway bridge, its wings mottled with dust from cities he did not know, as if someone had stitched other people’s departures into its skin. He cupped it in his palm and felt a tiny, steady tremor beneath the fine hairs, as if the insect was carrying a ledger against its ribs.
He did not believe in signs, at least not the tidy sort other men sold in markets. Furthermore, he believed in small objects that kept you honest: a matchbox with a bird carved on its lid, a ribbon knotted so tight he had never learned how to undo it, a coin with one edge worn smooth from being held too long. The moth was none of those things. It was a summons.
There is always a seam if you have learned where to look. That night, it lay in a coin-shaped pool of rain where the gutter met the curb. Calder pressed his heel into the water and felt the pavement give, as if a page in the street had been loosened. Light bent. The world folded like a hand closing. He stepped through because his body remembered how hunger felt.
The town he fell into was built on absence. It had two harbors: one for ships and one for names. People came at dawn with glass jars and slips of paper and set them into the Name-Harbor like offerings. The jars bobbed gently, labels bobbing with them—FIRST DOG, MOTHER’S SONG, CHILDHOOD STREET. Notices were nailed to pilings in careful, practiced script: NO KISSING; CONFESS ONLY IN LIGHT; DO NOT SPEAK A NAME AFTER SUNSET. The instructions read as if written by someone who had learned the hard arithmetic of trade-offs.
Calder walked among the stalls with his hands empty of pretense. He watched how people carried their jars: balanced, fingers curled to the necks like they might drop if they loosened their hold. Two children swapped a jar between them the way other children pass contraband candy; an old man cupped a jar to his chest and closed his eyes, the way a man might hold a cup of hot tea against a sudden cold. The rules made the appetite inside Calder acute—restrictions are an invitation in the bones.
She was under an awning that smelled of brine and old paper. Driftwood hair, mouth practiced into neutrality, a river-scar thin across her wrist. She balanced a small jar on her palm like a coin on a fingertip. When her eyes met Calder’s she did not smile. She set the lid on with the slow habit of someone who has fitted lids to jars for a long time.
She kissed him because she could not kiss him.
It was a quick press of lips, courteous and boxed-in, as if both wanted only to remember the shape of contact. Her finger, when it brushed his sleeve, left a faint salt smear. The kiss tasted of apple skin and copper. When they broke apart, she looked at him as if reading an account. “Do you know the cost?” she asked, voice like a coin slid across wood.
Calder laughed—a polite sound he had learned to keep in his pockets after other crossings. “I always know the cost,” he said, and told himself the truth in a way that was half belief, half wish.
That night he slept on a bench by the Name-Harbor with the moth nestling in his collar. In dreams, the jars drifted like small planets; slips of paper bobbed beneath their corks—AUNT MARISSA; THE LULLABY; THE JOKE ABOUT A PIG. He woke with a hollow where a joke had been. He reached for a card his mother had once pressed into his palm, and could not remember why it had mattered. The particular laugh—sudden, hot, the one that used to make sauce sputter and chairs scrape back—had thinned to a schematic echo. He could form the sound, but not the warmth that made it his.
He walked the quay until the tide left the harbor lopsided and the jars listed like tired boats. In one a child’s handwriting leaned like reeds; in another a name blurred under a cloud of seaweed. Theft felt obscene in that hush; the town catalogued loss as if loss were delicate and should be preserved.
A man approached him with a ledger bound in leather the color of old kelp. He introduced himself as the Keeper of Returns and held the book open with fingers that knew the weight of accounts. Pages were scored with neat names and smaller notes: traded for safety; surrendered to tide; reclaimed with apology.
“You will be asked to give,” the Keeper said. “You will be asked to trade. The sea prefers balance.”
“What if I refuse?” Calder asked. The question was half experiment, half challenge.
“Refusal is a currency too,” the Keeper answered. “It buys watchfulness. Sometimes watchfulness is a sentence.”
Calder watched a woman pry a lid from a jar and suck the name from the slip like a sweet. Her face changed while she swallowed; for a moment she seemed fuller, then emptier, as if the name had been a bridge that, once taken, left two banks staring across at one another. The economy here did not destroy; it relocated. Affection, shame, memory—everything became an object, filed away, insured against further harm.
In a tavern, sailors spoke low of winters when the sea took lullabies and returned only the shapes of them. An old woman told how she had confessed too much one season and lost the name that used to make a child answer. She could hum the tune still, she said, but when she did the name was a blank where the feeling should be.
Fog rolled in like a made-up thing, soft as a shroud. Calder found the woman again near the market. Her jar sat open between her knees; inside floated a single slip of paper, neat handwriting leaning slightly to the right.
“You will keep coming to places that ask you to pay,” she said, not unkindly. “You will keep signing for the feeling of your teeth being bared. Why do you think you will be spared?”
He looked down at the moth tucking itself into the cloth of his coat and felt the answer as a sudden nakedness. “I expect nothing,” he said—true, and the beginning of a lie. He wanted, fiercely, to be spared what the seam had stolen: the private markers that made him himself. He wanted a ledger that read STOP HERE.
“You will not be spared,” she said. “You will be recorded.”
Her scar—the pale river in her skin—glinted in the harbor light. When she watched someone open a jar, she folded her fingers in the same small movement, as if weighing invisible coins. Calder saw the gesture now and banked it like a mark to find again.
He left a coin on the bench before he walked away, a blunt apology to a town that kept sorrow like a civic duty. The seam closed behind him with the soft, decisive click of a page shut. Rain-slick cobbles reappeared, as if the harbor had been nothing more than a rumor. The moth freed itself from his collar and settled at the base of his throat like a small, insistent warning.
He laughed aloud, a habit against tidy accounts. The sound fit its place—polished, hollow—and left him with a new ache: not the sharp, private thrill of transgression, but the knowledge that everything he took would be logged, cross-referenced, and held in someone else’s hand. The cost, he understood with a slow, cold clarity, could be more elaborate than the appetite that drove him.
