wide open and hungry for happy laughing children skipping and hurling themselves into the school’s empty math-testing spell checking finger-pointing belly Swarms of us are swallowed at the ring of the nine-am bell digested and spat out again at the burp of three-thirty For them And there it rings The buzzing throngs throw themselves as one through the doors and down the long hall It’s feeding time Not for me though No Nope I stay on this side of the gate this side behind the tree right here on the park bench I put down my bag and settle in I take off my scarf and fold it carefully and I put it on my lap and stay right here On this side of the gate This side As though the bell never happened in the first place La-la-la-la-la My life I’m nine and I’m a gray moth And I mean an actual gray moth not metaphorically that I’m a dull barely there sort of kid lurking in shadowy corners hold on wait Maybe I mean that too Yeah that’s me I’m Gary Gary Gray Moth Good to meet you 12
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as CHAPTER 2 MOTHER OF ALL MOTHS At my school there are lots of other moths mosquitoes bumblebees ladybugs and fleas an earwig ants flies and lots of slugs Apparently a spider went here once and of course there are butterflies or the butterflies they're better known like they're so fancy or something If you ask me they're not so fancy In fact they're not even that different from a moth if you really think about it Same general look similar build Except different colors I guess It's the cardigans They all wear them You know the ones with the colors and the patterns and the sparkles All I have is my cardigan In gray My mom likes gray But she's a gray moth so of course she does I'm a gray moth too but yeah well Never mind 14
15 Mom used to drop me at school but not anymore She’s a moth who loves to flit my mom It’s common for moths flitting Quick rapid movements that give you no time to think just do Flit skim dart We only live a couple of trees away from school so she would fly me at full speed to the gate no matter what sort of day I was having She’d shoo me in and flit away again Mom in her ironed gray suit and her tiny moth fingers around her neat little list of to-dos Always with the to-dos She’s a doer Do do do I on the other hand need time And calm To think My mom says that I think too much You’ll think yourself into a tizzy young man Just go Gary Get Less think and more do I think about this often Less think more do And now I walk to school by myself More time to think When I was a little moth before I’d even started school Mom would take me to the park in my dad’s old gray cardigan His first ever given to him by his dad at the same age My little gray tuft of hair would be combed back from my face Mom would straighten me up like a pin Gary and steer me towards the other gray moths Go on get she’d shoo me closer go But the cardigan was itchy and always hanging lower to one side or the other I’d pinch and pull at it and scrunch my face and beg Can’t I have a yellow one Mom or something
