Silkworms
Mom brought home silkworms and placed them in a pastry box at the top of the closet. Dad and I found a mulberry tree on our street and gathered some leaves to feed the worms. They lifted me to watch them eat in their box.
Later, I got sick with a fever and couldn’t go to the kindergarten, so Mom stayed home with me for a few days. When I started to feel better, she took me over to the closet and set me on a chair so that I could watch the worms spin themselves into white cocoons.
I pictured silk being spun into fiber. Mom in a white silk dress. Moths flying away from the box.
I waited every day for the moths to emerge.
One day, after I had recovered, I came back home from kindergarten to find the pastry box gone. The moths had flown away, Mom told me. She had opened the window to set them free.
I imagined the moths flapping their dusty wings against the window glass.
But later I saw the pastry box sitting by the garbage with no cocoons inside.
“I am sorry,” Mom said. “I didn’t want to upset you.”
Later, whenever I walked by a mulberry tree, I would look for worms spinning silk.
Babak Lakghomi is the author of South (Dundurn Press, 2023) and Floating Notes (Tyrant Books, 2018). His writing has appeared in American Short Fiction, NOON, Electric Literature, Fence, Southwest Review, Ninth Letter, and The Adroit Journal, among others, and has been translated into Italian and Farsi. Babak was born in Tehran, Iran, and currently lives and writes in Toronto.