The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: How to Start a Coven by Deirdre Danklin

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Attraction

My cousin moved to a forest in the Pacific Northwest.

“There are no other Jews in those woods,” I told her on our weekly phone call.

“No, but I can hear the darkness breathe,” she said.

I didn’t understand the appeal of breathing darkness or mossy trees or being all alone, but I had to admit that my cousin’s voice sounded happier over the line. She liked branches so thick that they blotted out the sky. She liked shadows so deep they could hide a body. I, in the illuminated city, was anxious in a way that made me feel virtuous. My street was flooded with lime-sulfur safety lights. I never stood in the dark. I worried that my cousin was lonely.

“No, a man comes to visit me sometimes,” she said.

“A man?”

My cousin had never had a man before. Or a woman. She’d been solitary by choice, I thought. The kind of person who doesn’t feel incomplete on her own.

“Well, he’s made out of moths,” she said.

The man made out of a cloud of white moths visited my cousin’s cabin on evenings when the darkness felt most alive. She waited for him, naked in the night. The woods around her breathed out a darkness so black she couldn’t see her toes. She knew her man was on his way when she heard his body flapping its wings in the still air. He, so white, appearing like stars. His touch like a flower petal falling over and over on her skin.

“So, he’s elusive,” I said.

“No, he comes pretty regularly and he stays a while. White satin moths, specifically, is what he’s made out of. Leucoma salicis.”

We weren’t the kind of cousins that talked about our sex lives. I, long-married, she, uninterested, we talked about our dreams instead. Maybe, I thought, the moth-man was a dream.

“I had a dream that you died in a wildfire,” I told my cousin. I often dreamed that my cousin died, or my husband died, or I died. All of my dreams were little nighttime catastrophes. She, wearing a long gown of white satin, died in a landslide, in an earthquake, she was carried out to sea, she was swallowed up by darkness. I told her every time I had one of these dreams as if by relaying it I could prevent her death. Shine a light. My cousin told me about her dreams too. She kayaked across still waters. She floated in a blue orb of pulsing calm. She was alone in her dreams, but safe.

“It’s too wet here to burn,” she said.

“Would your moth-man fly you to safety?” I asked. “If something terrible happened?”

“I don’t think his wings are strong enough to carry me. Mostly, he just hovers.”

“Why does he keep coming back?” I asked, suspicious of the softness of these visits, of the
tranquility of their nights. “What does he want from you?”

“You know, I asked him that,” my cousin said. It was raining on her end of the line. The soft pat pat of water on leaves. The dark green light of her midday. She paused to listen, maybe she forgot I was there.

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