The Night Mothman Crashed On Black Mountain And Other Lies I Told Myself
2025-Aug-26 • Rachel Savage
That year, October had settled into the hills like a quilt on a grandmother’s lap. Everything was turning burning, bruising colors. Coal-bed oranges and black-eye purples fell from the trees. It was cold, but not winter-chilled yet—that’d come right before Thanksgiving, with the first freeze creeping across the mountains.
On that particular night, I’d escaped from the trailer out my window. Daddy had broken the glass during one of his accidents back in the spring, and the screen jiggled out of place whenever there was a hard breeze. The wind scratched at my drawings lining the wall: tugging Bigfoot's toes, rippling Nessie’s water, and setting Mothman’s wings quivering. Mama was crying and Daddy was hollering—as soon as I heard the crunch of his fist through sheetrock, my brain sprouted legs and I turned into a deer running.
My jeans were holey—Mama did her best to patch them, but she’d been sick a lot lately, sticking to the couch like a bug to flypaper. I pulled my backpack through the window and shouldered it over my coat. Daddy’s yelling and Mama’s wailing shifted into owls hooting and tree frogs murmuring as I walked further up the mountain. The trees seemed alive in the dark—jutting, many-limbed creatures. They made me feel safer than home ever did.
An hour must’ve passed before I stopped, clambering onto a rusting pile of metal. My tummy grumbled—I hadn't eaten anything that day except half a ham sandwich at school. I reached into my backpack and dug out the jerky I’d swiped from White’s Store the day before. Daddy had taught me how to steal real good, and while he and Mr. White were arguing over the price of Marlboro Reds, I slipped as many packs of snacks into my coat as I could hold. I was supposed to give them all to Daddy. Keeping one was a big risk, but I was starving.
The pile underneath me slid and I fell backward, like in a nightmare where you wake up gasping, your limbs seizing. I landed hard on something soft and solid all at once, the spilled dried meat raining down on me.
That’s when I found him.
He was long-limbed, tall with dark gray skin and tattered white wings hanging loose from his back. He sat in a metal seat. His eyes were reddish-black, bulbous things. I knew who he was immediately.
“Mothman!” I squealed, leaped into his lap, and flung my arms around his stiff neck.
He didn’t answer, but I knew he felt the same happiness because he didn’t get up and go. Otherwise, he could have spread his wings and flown away, leaving me in the pile of metal and cords.
But he didn’t.
I snuggled up close. I pretended he was my Daddy, and that he always protected me, fed me, and kept me happy.
“I'm glad you're here!” I squeezed him.
I swear his arms squeezed me back, a silent “Me too.”
That's how I fell asleep that first night, snuggled up to Mothman's chest. I dreamed I was a caterpillar in a cocoon, and when I woke up, I'd spread my new wings underneath a full moon and fly up out of the holler. Somewhere far away where I wouldn't be hungry or cold again.
***
I visited Mothman every day after school. Sometimes I'd bring him asters and bindweeds, and once I brought him a book: "Cryptids and Their Stories.”
"Listen, Mothman," I nestled in his lap again, "This story’s about you."
And I read it all to him, every bit. At the end, I repeated what Mama said about him in her bedtime stories. He wasn’t bad, just misunderstood. He wasn’t a monster. “Mama says that we don’t gotta become what people believe we are.” I know he smiled at me, and we spent the rest of the night counting the constellations until dawn turned the sky pink.
***
On the last night, Daddy was rattlesnake-mean. He’d pushed Mama against the woodstove and had the ax hoisted in the air like he was gonna chop her up. I ran into my room, pushed out the screen as fast as I could, and scrambled up the mountain until I couldn’t see the trailer or hear Mama’s screams anymore. I climbed up in Mothman’s lap and fell asleep sobbing.
It’s been 74 years now since the last time Mothman held me.
That night, Daddy did chop Mama up. After, he wedged that ax right in his own skull. I’ve thought a lot about what I could have done differently in all this time separating me from it. But I was a kid, barely nine. I know that Mama’s last breaths were spent praying Daddy wouldn’t get hold of me, too.
The cops found me out in the woods, asleep in Mothman’s lap. They said he was a science teacher who’d been missing since the launch of his homemade rocketship. They said he was dead.
But I knew that wasn’t the truth.
I might have been young, but I was never dumb. When the men in black suits came—not the sheriff and his deputies, but strange flatlanders who talked funny, I knew something was weird. When they took him away for “research”, I knew he wasn’t a damn schoolteacher.
You see, that pile of metal I found Mothman in? It had lights everywhere twinkling like tinsel at Christmas. I felt him breathing when I sat in his lap.
The truth of it is, I knew he wasn’t Mothman. But he wasn’t a human man either.
I told everybody that. The cops. The foster parents. I know they all called me crazy, in whispers or thoughts. They all thought I was a traumatized little girl.
But I know who Mothman was, just like I know aliens aren’t little green men, and a UFO once crashed on Black Mountain in the Appalachian Range.
And I know I’m not crazy, because my Mama said that we don’t gotta become what people believe we are.
Rachel Savage
Rachel Savage is an oversized hobbit living in a kudzu-choked crevice of North Carolina. Her stories tend to lean toward the Southern and strange. Rachel has work featured or forthcoming in Wallstrait, New Flash Fiction Review, Uncharted, and Door is a Jar.