So, it happened that the moth sang to the queen through this distant fluttering. It sang of soft white cocoons being cradled in the bosoms of women who lived in dry places. It sang of toil and earth and sadness. It sang of ceremony and extravagance.
It sang of a dress.
A dress that must be made of the silk spun from the cocoons of forty thousand silkworms. In that lyrical beating of those fragile wings, the queen learned how silk was made from the cocoons of moths that were never allowed to emerge from their transformative slumber. It was the cocoons that were needed and not the moths. As fat caterpillars, they ate their ambrosia of mulberry leaves to gain strength to spin. They spun their nests with an instinctual hope of liberation. To spin would gain them a freedom they had never known. But they had been duped.
There would be moths she learned, that would escape one at a time and fly into her courtyard, bringing along residual threads of their silk cocoons attached to their wings. Because the journey was long and the moth’s life short, they would die upon arrival. The queen must be patient and observant. She was to collect the silk and the wings of the fallen moths and fashion a dress out of this detritus.
A dress, the moth confides to her that would be able to fly.
The queen looks for the fallen creatures as she ambles about her stone courtyard that is lined with an army of white tulips, rigid and blanched as a marble balustrade. She scoops up the husks in her delicate palms and places them in a cut glass urn with a cobalt lid. As if informed of their mission the moths eventually arrive in desperate light-winged fleets. Soon her garden floor is covered with a dusting of gauzy moth wings and broken petals. The queen commissions larger urns to contain the moths and their unraveled threads until her bounty expands to the point where it is necessary to store them in a cask of polished birch; a cask as tall as her own body.
She spins and sews and when at last she completes her dress of ivory silk, she ceremoniously hangs it on a hook by her window. The dress dances in the breeze, occasionally tormenting her with the promise of departure, as it hops about, brushing its hem against the sill. But like a bird with a broken wing, it is animated but never able to take flight.
She decides that perhaps the dress must be worn to fly. She puts it on each morning returning it to its hook at night. Soon the weight of the silk makes her stoop and she grows weary. Eschewing all other garments, it becomes the only dress she owns and she wears it every day. She weaves a set of sheets with the remaining threads she gathers and embroiders upon them a banquet of pomegranates and meandering vines. She makes a coverlet and pillows, which bloom abundantly with white needlework. She adds a canopy then a pair of curtains bearing the gleam of moonlight. At night when the abandoned dress hangs suspended like a talisman at the window, she presses her head to her pillow and imagines she hears the moths vibrating inside the silken cases, chewing their way through the threads in a collective sigh.
