Secrets are interesting.

Momma said it was bad to be nosy. Momma said that secrets must stay secrets, and you can't ask anyone about them. But Momma also says to tell her everything. She says we can't keep secrets from her.

So why does she keep secrets from us?

I. Wren

The barn moths always came out after supper, drawn to the porch light like it might save them from endless searching. Wren sat on the top step and let them land on her knees, her arms, the backs of her hands, and did not brush them off. Momma said moths were just dumb bugs chasing anything that glowed, but Wren thought there was something holy in how stupid that made them. They didn't know the light would burn them, and even if they did, they came anyway.

She was eleven, and she'd been counting for three weeks now. Momma had made fourteen trips to the root cellar since the Fourth of July, always alone, always after dark, always with the flashlight turned low like she was trying to sneak past her own house. Fourteen trips and never once had she brought anything back up that Wren could see, and never once had she taken anything down that Wren could see either. A secret ought to weigh something in a person's hands, but Momma's secret weighed nothing at all, and carried nothing at all, and still it changed the way she walked, stooped a little, like the cellar door was a mouth she fed herself into.

"You'll catch a chill," Momma said now, through the screen door, not stepping out.

"I’ll take a hot bath," Wren said, eyes trained on the moth on her wrist, ringed in moonlight like a little insectoid saint, wings the colour of a Bible page, dust coming off it in a fine gray sift wherever it moved. The moths had come to her, and that made her light, like a shepherd herding the weak, saving them from burning up and frying in the porchlight from blind temptation, like Jesus. This was a private worship, a small thought so entirely hers, that it may have been a secret.

But Momma didn’t like secrets, and so a hot bath for Wren was in order after all.

II. Del

Del had long since decided that the way to survive Momma was to notice everything and stay quiet. This was a strategy their father would've called sensible, a strategy their mother would've called sneaky, if either of them were around enough to call it anything.

He noticed, for instance, that the padlock on the cellar door did not rust. He noticed that Pastor Ainsley's truck had idled outside the house for eleven minutes in the evening, after Wren had taken her hot bath, engine running the whole while, peering in. Momma had stood on the porch with her arms crossed over her housedress and told Del and Birdie to hurry up and finish their supper.

The steak was tough and grey like meat that had been boiled too long.

III. Birdie

Birdie was six, and being six means that grownups are too scared to tell you anything outright, which means you imagine far worse, and the grownups think the anguish done by their hand is adorable.

She had seen little fuzzy wings fall from the cellar door, so that meant that the cellar was full of angels who had fallen a little bit but not all the way, who still had most of their feathers, just moulting, like Grandpa Hollis's hens after the fox got into the coop. In her version, Momma went down every night to feed them table scraps and tell them they weren't sinners just yet, because how is an angel meant to recover in hopelessness?

She had not told anyone this theory. Wren would say it was babyish, which was also silly because she was always writing funny stories about angels and God and redemption and light and sin. Del would say nothing at all, like he knew a true thing and was choosing not to give it to her, which just made them both mad. But Birdie had heard it. A whole flock of something shifting all together, dry and papery, like how porch moths sounded when Wren cupped her palms around a whole handful of them and they beat themselves soft and frantic against her skin.

It was her bedtime now, and Wren hadn’t been to kiss her goodnight, even though she always did, and by the time sleep had taken Birdie into its slender fingers, it was too late to worry about things like sisters and fallen things.

Outside, against the porch bulb, the moths went on beating themselves toward the only warm thing in a mile of black Iowa dark, and none of them, not one, ever seemed to learn.