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It isn’t long after Sam learns of the things lurking out in the night that he tells his father he could never kill them; never would, would never want to. The man tries to convince him in a million different ways, but he holds his ground, young as he is. He insists that just because something is fierce, is frightening, that by no means equates to it deserving to die. He won’t ever do it, doesn’t want any part in it. When he says this, he feels something shift in the air, in the man’s eyes. Sam watches as his father, who had for so long had been eager and encouraging as he showed the way to lay the salt or shoved a gun into his son’s hands, gives up on him, decides to stop caring. In an instant, he loses what little of a father he had.
He doesn’t mourn. There isn’t much to miss.
In the tradition of losing one thing to gain another, he quietly befriends a pocketknife. It’s one his brother gave him, purely practical, none of the engravings or enchantments or select materials for killing one thing or another that are so common in his father’s weapons, his hunting knives. He doesn’t use it to hunt, or hurt. He cuts away branches and he cuts cloth to patch up wounds and he cuts the occasional image out of a magazine of some far-off place he’d rather be so he can tape it up to his wall. He doesn’t want to kill — he wants to be somewhere he can go without needing to, maybe even help out the world in some way that doesn’t end with a stake through some hissing thing’s heart. He holds onto the knife, thinks, just because you are made for harming doesn’t mean you can’t learn to heal. Thinks, being born into one thing doesn’t mean you can’t become another. He catches the moths in his room. Looks at them for a while, pondering metamorphosis, before setting them free. He always sets them free.
Either way, he always eventually finds them dead and dry on the windowsill. He cries about it, once, holding a delicate corpse in his hands, and his father scolds him for grieving the inevitable.
I can change. He repeats it like a mantra, each night after prayers or sometimes as a part of them. I can change. I can change. I can change.
When he leaves for college, his first tattoo is of a moth, a shaky outline on his upper arm, and he brings the knife. The girl who gives him the stick-and-poke on the floor of a dorm room asks what drew him to that particular insect, and he says, I think they’re beautiful. Not entirely a lie, but not the full truth — like most of what he says to his classmates, his friends. Himself. And the knife is quiet, unused. Nevertheless, he always keeps it close to him. I can change.
The first time one of the things attacks him, of course, he has it on hand in an instant, and it spills blood before he can even ruminate on the persistence of instinct. It isn’t enough, but it gives him enough time to find a weapon, the right weapon, and soon the thing is sitting lifeless as an insect on a windowsill. He sits with it for a while, there in the silence. Despite himself, he feels sorry for the knife.
He burns the body, tosses the pocketknife into the fire as it rages. A moth to a flame.
After that, he doesn’t stop praying. Some part of him stops hoping, though. For the unattainable. For metamorphosis.
He knows he can't deny the inevitable.