An original fictional account of an invented night-time survey.

I agreed to help because Maya called it a survey. I imagined torches moving between trees, urgent discoveries and a map covered in marks. Instead, we stopped at the edge of an orchard, tied a white sheet between two posts and pointed a lamp at it. Maya unfolded a chair.

“Is that all?” I asked.

She said that now we waited. For several minutes, the sheet held nothing except the shadows of leaves. A few tiny flies circled the lamp, but Maya ignored them. She wrote the time on her form and entered a zero in the first box. I wondered why anyone needed a written record of nothing happening.

At last, something dropped on to the sheet. It looked like a scrap of ash with wings. “One brown moth,” I said, hoping that would be enough. Maya asked me to describe it before she opened her identification book. Close to the cloth, the brown divided into narrow silver lines, two dark commas and a fringe that made the wings appear worn at the edges. I crossed out my first description.

After that, the waiting altered. I began to notice movement before Maya did: a shadow passing across the grass, a flicker near the lamp, a sudden still shape where the sheet had been empty. I recorded the arrivals while she checked them. Some clung flat to the cloth; others shivered their wings as if preparing to leave immediately. When Maya asked whether I was cold, I realised that I had stopped thinking about it.

A gust bent the posts and the lamp went out. The sheet disappeared into the darkness. Earlier, I would have taken this as permission to pack away. Instead, I held the torch while Maya repaired the cable, searching the folds of cloth for anything we might lose. When the lamp returned, a moth was resting underneath the sheet, hidden from the brightest light.

“We nearly missed that one,” I said.

“That is why we look twice,” Maya replied.

On the walk home, she carried the folded sheet and I kept the clipboard. The orchard behind us looked empty again, but I found myself wondering what else was there when nobody had put up a light.