HARRIS, Thomas

Silence of the Lambs

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I collect church collapses, recreationally. Did you see the recent one in Sicily? Marvelous! The facade fell on sixty-five grandmothers at a special mass. Was that evil? If so, who did it? If he's up there, he just loves it, Officer Starling. Typhoid and swans - it all comes from the same place.

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We rarely get to prepare ourselves in meadows or on graveled walks; we do it on short notice in places without windows, hospital corridors, rooms like this lounge with its cracked plastic sofa and Cinzano ashtrays, where the cafe curtains cover blank concrete. In rooms like this, with so little time, we prepare our gestures, get them by heart so we can do them when we're frightened in the face of Doom.
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They waited for the elevator. " Most people love butterflies and hate moth," he said. "But moths are more interesting - more engaging.

"They're destructive."

"Some are, a lot are, but they live in all kinds of ways. Just like we do." Silence for one floor.

"There's a moth, more than one in fact, that lives only on tears," he offered. "That's all they eat or drink."

"What kind of tears? Whose tears?"

"The tears of large land mammals, about our size.

The old definition of moth was, 'anything that gradually, silently eats, consumes, or wages any other thing.'

It was a verb for destruction too. . . .”

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