The name I did not write

Text: an original contemporary personal-account-style practice extract.

By midnight, the white sheet was crowded. Under the lamp, it shone like a second moon, with moths scattered across it like scraps of handwriting. Every new arrival seemed to demand a name, and I supplied one before anyone else could speak. I moved along the sheet briskly, turning wings into entries in my notebook. Here was a neat row. Here was proof that I knew what I was looking at.

Arun, the survey leader, pointed to a moth whose wings carried two dark curves. “What makes you sure?” he asked. I showed him the picture in the identification guide. He looked from the picture to the moth and asked the question again. It did not sound like a trap, which made it harder to escape. My notebook became untidy: arrows fled into the margins, firm labels acquired question marks and one confident answer was crossed through so thoroughly that the paper softened beneath it. I stopped naming them.

Without the shelter of a label, one small moth became unexpectedly difficult to dismiss. Its wings were not simply brown but bark-brown near the body, ash-grey at the edges, with a silver mark that appeared only when it moved. As I looked from the moth to the guide and back again, it lifted from the sheet. A pale fleck crossed the black garden and vanished. At the top of a fresh page, I drew a box for its name and left it open. By dawn, that empty space had become the most accurate entry in my notebook.