An extract from Rowe Irvin‘s ‘Life Cycle of a Moth’, our June Book of the Month.

Everything sounds, even the air when there is no wind in it. I am always hearing. All murmur, all patter.

The objects in the Museum sound different to other things in the forest. The Museum is an apple pip, dried-grass plait, acorn cup, alder catkin, big grey stone, bottled puddle, squirrel tail, birch leaf, thistlehead, finger-shaped root, finch nest, smooth black pebble, owl feather, moss, pine cone, dried worm, black beetle, shiny conker, large dead spider, coughed-up owl pellet, crow foot, millipede, dried sap blob, blue egg, dandelion stem, shrew nose, mouse tail, bracken frond, badger claw, rusty metal ring, seed pod, rat spine, crispy dead wasp, rabbit paw, hazel twig, rook beak, white garlic flower, bramble thorn, bent nail from the doorway, scab of lichen, vole skull, oak leaf, hawthorn bark, snail shell, walnut shell, splinter from Myma’s heel, apple bark, muntjac hoof, dried redcurrant, hedgehog spike, rabbit rib, dead woodlouse, pigeon wing, weasel foot, sycamore seed, holed fox tooth.

These things have names hidden inside them.

When I finger-thumb-plucked the pip from the apple pit the sound it made was full and round, like a humming in the throat or a whomph of wings. I felt the thrum of it behind the bone of my breast and knew that it was my name, my first.

I said to Myma, Now I am Pip, and she looked at me a moment then said, Pip-Daughter, okay, yes, and she wrote it in the dirt with a stick and showed me it was an unusual word because it reads the same both ways. But when I held the apple pip to her ear so she could listen to its hum, she shook her head and frowned.

I don’t hear anything, she said. Must be for your ears only, Pip-Daughter, Seed-Kin, Little Soon-Grow.

She tugged at my lobes, then nibbled them to make me wriggle. I didn’t understand because when I lifted the pip to my own ear it was so loud. The buzzing of it. And it was more than just sound. It did something to the air around it, the way heat makes a shimmer around the cooking pot.

If you say it’s special, Myma said, then it is. You must keep it safe in your pouch.

And I did, until the long green fronds came sighing their sound at me and I pulled them up by the roots and said, Now I am Grass. Myma made a plait of them so they would stay together in my pouch. The apple pip went on the window ledge, and soon the plaited grass dried up and joined it, then the acorn cup, then the catkin. When I was Stone I lugged the big grey humming rock around with me for four moons. It was a strong name and it made me strong too. But when I set it on the window ledge with the rest Myma said, You’ll run out of space soon. You need to put these in a Museum, so they don’t get lost. I said, Museum? A collection of objects, she told me. Things that are special but not used any more. Like the names I have been, I said, and she said, Exactly. And she took the empty bottles out of the glass-front cupboard and dragged it through to the room where we sleep.

Some names I have held on to for ages, like Finger, the crook-knuckled beckoning root I carried in my pouch for more than a whole season-cycle before the name stopped twitching in me and was replaced by Nest. Others are short-worn, like Scab, the lichen crust I peeled from a dead branch of oak, then peeled from myself after only a few lights.

Before Mud I was Tooth. I found it whining at the edge of the clearing, the fox canine with a hole going right the way through. It had just rained and the tip was poking up out of the earth. Tooth was a quick-snapping, gnashing name that made me more irritable than usual, and it was a relief when the bite of it dulled and I could be Mud, cool and glopping.

In the Museum the objects quieten. The names are still inside them, and when I listen close I can hear them humming, but they are never as loud as when I first find them. They no longer sound in my chest, but outside me. Sometimes I lie awake after Myma has fallen asleep and in the stillness I listen to the objects murmuring low together. I start to wonder then about all the names I haven’t yet been and I get so worked up that my hands twitch and I feel my eyes growing big in the dark. All the unfound things pulsing out names in their hidden places, like midge bites in places on my skin I can’t reach.

When I am unsure of myself, the things in the Museum remind me of all the names and Daughters I have been. Touch them and know myself.

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‘Life Cycle of a Moth’ is out now and available here, published by Canongate.