Coyote Palace 🦋 7

Mona sat across from the man and stared at him with a small 

amount of hatred as he continued to prattle on about his dead 

mother.

She let herself sink into the leather of the chair a little bit 

more than she 

thought was probably professional but she didn’t care if the man 

noticed that she could care less about him or his dead 

mom. 

She was ready for this con to be over, just waiting for the 

moment when it would finally get interesting. She was staring up 

at her fake diploma on her wall when he spoke the words she had 

been waiting for.

“They come for her at night, but I wont let them take her.”

Mona sat up, a hungry smile developing on her lips. Her eyes 

beginning to sparkle.

“They? Who are they?”

“The men in white. I know they’re there for her but they cant 

have her. I’m not ready. I wont give her up.”

“Are you talking about the paramedics.”

No one knows she’s there, no one. I haven’t told anyone but they 

know 

they come for her at night when they think I’m asleep but I’m 

not. I wont.

I know its hard to let go, but you cant keep her body, Gray.

Not her body, they can have that. It’s the other thing that they want, the thing I caught. 

Gary unconsciously reached to touch his jackets inner pocket and Mona knew then that he had it. 

“Caught”

I was there when she died, right there, standing over her just 

counting time in my head. How many seconds she hade been out of 

my life and then I saw it come up out of her mouth. 

It?

A moth. It floated in the air, the last breath my mother would ever take pushing it out and I caught it. I cupped my hands over it and found a mason jar to put it in. It’s her, I know it is. Her soul. But they cant  have it. No one can know.

Mona thought about pushing him on the last part, know what, but she wasn’t overly concerned about getting him to confess. The authorities could do that, she was more interested in the jar he was trying to hide in his jacket.

“May I see this moth you have?”

Its mine

I know it yours, I’d just like to see it. To see that its real. You do want me to believe you, don’t you? If I saw it I could know that you’re telling me the truth.

Gary became paranoid. Looking around no longer sure of where he was or why he had come here. He looked back at Mona, his voice becoming angry. Who are you, again? Mona could read Gary’s agitation and was hoping to calm him down. “Im a psychologist. My name is Mona. We met last night when you were at the grocery store buying some food. It was late, remember. You were distraught about your mothers passing and I offered to help. Someone to talk to.

The temperature of the room began to drop rapidly and Mona had to hug herself to stop from shivering. A blinding white light started to seep through from underneath the door slowly flooding into the office expanding outward creeping along the walls like a fog, obscuring the corners all sense of dimension vanishing until it was as if they were in the middle of a wide expanse of nothing but light. The furniture had disappeared from sight around them. It was still there but no longer visible. Gary was curled up in a fetal position on one end of the couch, shaking hie head as if that motion would make it all stop. 

“No,no,no how did they find me? They cant take her, she’s mine. 

I killed her, she belongs to me.” Mona saw that the jar with the moth in it had slipped out of Gary’s pocket and was about to fall to the floor. She opened the bottom drawer of the desk and reached in to grab an object inside.

The area containing the west wall shimmered, breaking into a pattern of dots that resembled the burning of a frame of 35 mm film stopped in a projector, as the figures of four people began to emerge from it. It was four men all dressed identically in white three piece suits. The men all had white hair cut the same length and even though their facial features were similar they all looked slightly different from each other. Mona felt a familiar nausea over take her; Gerald and his crew.

Gary leapt from the couch, his melt down over for the moment as he went into territorial mode, advancing around the couch to take on the lead individual, Gerald. His forceful leap from the couch caused the mason jar holding the moth to fall to the floor and in that split second Mona reacted, quickly moving to the couch and swapping the mason jar on the floor with the one she had taken from her desk. Inside of it fluttered a different moth, hopefully different enough from the other one that no one would notice. Mona moved cautiously back to her desk, not wanting to attract the attention of Gary or Gerald, but they were both so locked into each other that she needn’t have worried. As quietly as she could, she opened her desk drawer and set down the mason jar containing the moth that Gary was convinced was his mothers soul. 

Mona opened her eyes and looked up at the security camera monitor. Neither Clark nor H were there anymore. How long had she been somewhere else, been someone else , herself but in a different timeline or dimension?