Truman Capote started writing short stories when he was about 10 years old in Mobile, Alabama, and "my more unswerving ambitions,” he told the Paris Review in 1957 at age 33, "still revolve around this form.” Since 1985, the year after Capote’s death, the New York Public Library has housed an archive of his papers including his research for 'In Cold Blood' and the manuscript of his novel 'Other Voices, Other Rooms,' as well as some of his earliest writing—yet many of these stories have not been published until now. Written for his high school newspaper 'The Green Witch' in the early 1940s, they show a young writer recording the voices of a small community and trying out dramatic effects. Although it is not mature work, 'The Moth in the Flame' captures in a very short space the vast range of tumultuous emotions that spring from a distressing encounter.

Part I

All afternoon Em had lain on the steel-framed bed. She had a scrap quilt pulled over her legs. She was just lying there and thinking. The weather had turned cold, even for Alabama.

George and all the other men from over the countryside were out looking for crazy old Sadie Hopkins. She had escaped from the jail. Poor old Sadie, thought Em, runnin’ all over in those swamps and fields. She used to be such a pretty girl—just got mixed up with the wrong folks, I guess. Gone plumb crazy.

Em looked out the window of her cabin; the sky was dark and slate gray and the fields looked as if they had been frozen into furrows. She pulled the quilt closer about her. It certainly was lonesome out in this country, not another farm for four miles, fields on one side, swamp and woods on the other. She felt that maybe she had been born to be lonesome just as some people are born blind or deaf.