The Seamstress and Her Moth

1. The First Thread

The closet exhaled bergamot and shame, its shadows sticky as altar wax.

Lanie leaned against the doorframe, rolling a cigarette between her fingers like a cursed rosary.

George stood haloed in the moonlight. Her moon-phase panties hugged his hips. The silver embroidery glowed softly, still charged from last night’s equinox rite.

“Again, Georgie?” Smoke curled around her grin. “My ceremonial silks aren’t your personal brothel.”

He didn’t turn. The panties’ waistband sawed into his flesh, drawing blood-dark beads. “You said they’d… feel different after the ritual. Like touching God.”

“God’s got better taste.” She crushed the unlit cigarette against the doorframe, releasing a burst of bitter yarrow. “Three blood moons to purify those. Now they reek of your midlife crisis.”

George faced her, the crescent moons stitched over his groin, throbbing like a fresh bruise. “I just wanted—”

“—to fuck the divine?” She stepped closer, her heels cracking a vial of dried nightshade. Ash drifted onto his bare chest.

“You’re not a priest. You’re…” She was interrupted by the sound of a moth battering itself against the closet’s lone lantern behind him. Its wings leaving ghostly smears on the glass.

“Yes… you’re like a moth chewing through my altar cloths.”

He flinched. The embroidery dimmed.

“Lanie, please. Let me fix this.”

“Fix it?” She laughed, sharp as shattered ritual glass. “The Ball starts in an hour. My entire wardrobe is tainted by your little pilgrimage.”

He reached for her. A thread snapped.

Silence pooled around them like spilt mercury.

“I’ll do anything,” he whispered.

Lanie stilled. “Anything?”

Her smile tasted like a struck match.

The spell wasn’t an incantation—it was a violation.

George gasped as the panties dissolved, threads swarming up his thighs like carnivorous ivy. “Lanie—stop—!”

“Hush.” She pressed a thumb to his jugular, feeling his pulse thrash. “You wanted to feel holy?”

The threads burrowed deeper, stitching through sinew. Silver moths bloomed across his chest, their wings fluttering with every ragged breath.

His knees buckled. The closet walls warped.

“There,” she crooned, catching him as he collapsed. “Now you’re useful.”

Where George had stood now hung a gown—black silk shot through with veins of liquid moonlight, the hem pooling like spilt ink. The silver moths now crawled along the bodice, their wings twitching.

Lanie stripped slowly, peeling off her blouse with a serpent’s grace. Her supple skin glowed in the lantern’s sickly light, her nipples hardening in the draft. She stepped into the gown, the silk almost sizzling as it fused to her curves.

In the mirror, she smirked.

“Look at you,” she murmured, hiking the slit up her thigh until it kissed her hipbone.

“Hungry?”

The neckline plunged as she shoved her breasts upward, the silk pulling against them like a second skin.

“Better.”

George’s voice slithered through the seams and into her head. *You shouldn't have done this.*

"And you shouldn't soiled my sacred undies." She spun, watching the bottom flare. “Isn’t this what you wanted? To be seen?”

The lantern flickered. Another moth managed to find its way inside and burst into flame.

“Behave,” she warned, smoothing the silk over her hips. The zipper teeth gnawed at her spine in reply.