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Within a stony labyrinth built like a prison was a stream of caterpillars, floating around like ants ensnared in jelly. The tight binding of silk weaved around them by their captors, by doctors and researchers of science, seeked to crush their original soft, wriggling and writhing forms, still so fresh that they had remained naive to their world, arriving so young they may as well have been straight out of their mother’s womb.
Cruelty was a lady, a doctor that entrapped the little larvae by hand, she turned the spindle, allowing the electrical fibre to turn through the spinning wheel, churning out another silk case with new thread. The doctor watched with a snake’s predatory grin as her words and his pain wrapped around the still figure of the boy on the table, filling the room with a sinister silence as he was imprisoned for good. Violent vehemence shone through the snake’s eyes as she whipped at the cocoon, reaching for the child inside. He could feel his bones clatter as the whip reached through his skin, the sharp sound leaving his skin redder than blood as she forced upon him the beautiful horror of metamorphosis. His body, his soul, the very culmination of his being was altered on the table, he felt the liquefaction of his body take place inside the silk shell she had spun him. He changed as Doctor Calloway desired, happy to implant into his brain the genetic instructions for his new re-emergence as a moth.
Transformation complete, Mallory resurfaced from the torn thread of his used cocoon. No longer was he the fuzzy, weak caterpillar that wormed through the leaves, trying not to be picked on as prey, assured the predator joyfully. Upon her instruction, the moth spread out his wings, new and frail they were, the discoloured wings stood out as a symbol of his obedience. He used them to fly through life as an agent, he was free from the labyrinth of Stonemoor and had graduated from his tuition with Monk, but even then it was dull. Mallory didn’t complain however, the colourful comforts and the inexplicable joy of family; the peace of home and the freedom of trusting yourself to choose, were not gifted for the dark and tainted creatures like him. While one may welcome a butterfly, beautiful and harmless as they are, nobody wants to give a moth a chance to chew holes through their clothes. But even so, Doctor Calloway liked him enough to save him, so what if his education was more painful than that of a normal child? He knew that for a deviant child such as him, it was necessary. There has never been a child in the world who has wanted to go to school, and yet their mothers must always still make them go no matter how much they cry or scream. It may have hurt but it was necessary, every shock was meant to teach him each indispensable lesson in control. And so he carried on following the rules and obeying the orders all set in place by Doctor Calloway, the moth guided in by the hiss of a flame.
Similarly, Albert Browne was a boy who experienced the ugliness of being blinded and shocked, whipped into submission and held down by restraints. He lifted as many flower petals across the room as she wanted, longing for her to lift the binding metal off his skin as he so desperately wanted. Despite his form of a caterpillar, pliable and soft as he laid down upon the table his mind could not help but deviate from the wicked doctor’s plan. Unlike what she had expected, his body rejected the silk and the wheels of the cycle never fully rounded over the same curve that would align perfectly with her plan. The line of self-blame stumbled, slipping like a compass in unsteady hands, the wound that anchored the sharp point of the instrument being deep enough to pierce his heart, yet too shallow to secure the success of the circular motion. Nothing like the smooth, uniform circles of her past projects, where all the fingers that pointed at him for their troubles would mirror his own. The wheels of the cycle were broken, and the situation spun out of the doctor’s control. Roughly, the boy tumbled through the real world, rolling and bouncing like a circle with edges. Taking on the world as the dishevelled, discarded, runaway draft of an artist, rolling, his body seamless with the hard rocks and sticks that scratched him from the ground he propelled himself through the worst of it all, launching himself with the straight, sharp line where one end of the circle didn’t meet another. Bouncing like a spring, as if he too had grown wings, he flew above the worst of it all using the one thing Doctor Calloway seeked to tame and control. Never was he enslaved or sold, despite their attempts to corner him like prey he would always manage another day. Albert ran for most of his life, he ran for his life until the hisses of the snake could be heard no longer; living along the cruelty of life forced him to dance alongside it. The rules, prejudices and biases of a town played the music, setting the scene for each event until life’s ambush heaved him upwards with interlocking arms and spun him around in an overwhelming, adrenaline-based ballet. Full of the mind-numbing, wide-eyed understanding of his own peril, he followed on as he could, he was an abettor to a girl who was shunned as was he with whom he travelled with and saw the world; he was a companion of an old fisherman and an elderly merchant; and he was a little girl’s friend. Smiling like the soul of one who had never seen pain, he was so free, incredibly so, that his entire existence stood taller than many of the most heartfelt rebellions of the world.
One day a moth used his flight to clip another’s wings, fulfilling his duties with the same robotic humming of a drone he drove them back to a place not unlike his home. The prison of Milton Keynes was not such a far cry from Stonemoor, they both remained shackled with chains, the boy was once again suppressed by the iron that dug into his skull. Mallory stared at the boy with pity, guilty with the belief that he could have been integrated into society like him if only he had just finished his training, while in Albert’s downcast gaze mirrored the same sympathetic leer. Peering down at a puddle of water, dirty and distorted by the ripples formed by every drip from the ceiling above, the only sound that narrated aloud the irony that hung heavy in the air as the puddle illustrated to the boys warped reflections of each other. Trapped, the two were lost within a labyrinth of mirrors together, anywhere their eyes lingered they were presented with a vision of the other as if they had seen themselves. It was confrontational, unpleasant and no steady hand that stretched its grasp outwards could alter the being superimposed in light no matter how hard one desired. Mockingly, the one-way mirrors kept them apart and laughed at the helplessness displayed as they each attempted to touch or change the other’s soul, both set in their own ways.
Don’t you understand? They will come for you in the night one day, when they see you as useless and kill you!/Don’t you see? All this chaos, they simply want to protect themselves from all that was caused by abominations like you and me!
Life taunted them again and again, testing its reputation of beauty as they tried to escape the maddening frenzy of the glass maze. Revelling in the hopeless attempts of the boy who tried to persuade the moth, ill-fated to die blinded by the burn of a sun-like white flame, to trust him and run through the darkness of the unknown: a truth he had never seen. His attempts were so hopeless in the sense that his position did nothing but reinforce the message of the snake, the prisoner captured to die living proof of the message the moth had consistently been fed. Don’t you see? All this chaos, they simply want to protect themselves from all that was caused by abominations like you and me!
Life’s dancers suddenly broke synchrony, as if a switch were flipped as Albert stepped up to lead the dance and finally break free. To imitate the tone of the mirror and not the image was to taunt and anger, no longer did he reflect the moth, another product of the institution that had force-fed them separate sides of the apple, but in Albert’s words sprouted the death of the snake who had lured and hurt. As if to spit apple seeds at the moth, the boy revelled in the drowning of the now forever silent snake, confusing the mirror as the boy took on the personality of a red-haired girl. Shattering the maze, the moth grimaced with boiling fury. Mallory slammed Albert through the wall, the gust let out by the flapping of his wings displaying the force of Earth’s gravity tenfold, blinded by the threat of tears, the teeth-gritting moth filled with fury remained blind to the boy’s plan. He fractured the iron helmet like bone with the force of his throw, blind to the plan he helped, as blind as he would die. For it was a dozen one-way mirrors, in which they could never truly save the other, they only mimicked the glass in which they played out their tragic dance. In spite of the splintering of the one seen that day, the maze still contained a thousand more mirrors in the labyrinth that life’s maze would use to play, and in every one would contain the same fatal image of Albert angered by a blinded moth…