She Kind Of Dipped Her Toes Into Murder

She knows the verge of bug-ridden summer is cresting across the span of springtime because there are ants in her house again, spread out across her walls like a pointillism painting’s pinpoints dismantling themselves and drifting out of the frame to run amok. Her eyes find them in her quick paranoid glances about the kitchen. She regularly hallucinates spiders around two-fifty-nine am behind her bed’s headboard, so she usually would ignore the wandering dots itching her peripheries – but she’s felt the smug of thunderstorm heat crawling under her epidermis all week. These dots are real, proven by the shudder rippling through her shoulder blades that she isn’t quite able to suppress this time. She finds a tissue (not Kleenex, she can’t afford name brands anymore) to squish the nearest ant and hunts her butternut-squash-coloured cupboard doors to cripple its sestet legs. When she works up the courage and works out the angle at which to strike, she presses her fingers hard against the ant (the size of the full length of her split and bending thumbnail). A muted thump. There is a moment of panic that sucks the breath from her alveoli because she’s terrified she hasn’t calculated the right spot to attack; the ant could crawl out from under the tissue at any second – run up her fingers and wrist and arm and neck and into her horrified open mouth to attack her from the inside chewing with its devil-black mandibles. She twists her pressure point and presses ever harder until she hears and feels the microcosmic crack that could be called akin to a tiny human spine being snapped under the weight of a malignant god’s pinky. She hopes it’s dead, afraid to look, because the truth is the thing that’s under that Kleenex-not-Kleenex could still be as alive as her mother when everyone thought she was dead but really she’d just gone to Greece and come home with secondhand travel guides to Guam and Madagascar that she picked up at a used book sale there (because they were the only things in English) and read on Rethymno without getting a tan. But just like getting that postcard she sent to her to confirm her life was indeed carrying on beyond the deadweight of motherhood, she has to confirm if the ant is still wriggling or if it has been bruised into pulp. She pulls the tissue away slowly and it reminds her of peeling away the first bandage she put on her shin after she hit puberty and grew leg hair, the real reason she started shaving it all off. The ant stays still. A black and broken corpse unraveled from the sterile sheets in the morgue of her fingertips. Her mouth remains unmoved, since she never bothers with facial expressions when she’s alone, but inside she feels the thrill of success fornicating with a flutter of repulsion. She swings the garbage bag out from under the kitchen sink. The deceased ant disappears as she thrusts it down into the trash, beside metal tins of sardines that she suddenly decided she would now eat every morning for breakfast. The edges of the cheap yellowed tissue turn transparent as the soy oil the fish swam their last marinating swim in soaks into it. The ant becomes visible again, its tri-segmented body smashed in like skulls dug up from a Mayan sacrificial site. She tries to look away, but the spines she peeled from the silver sardine bodies (she can’t stand the way they crunch between her molars and feel like grits of sand) add a halo of horrific gore and glorify the massacre in such a macabre way. She’s mesmerized until a whiff of that summer breeze blows in the window like a moist exhale and she smells the stench of life gluing itself together again after the ice-shattered winter. The sun burns between her bent venetian blinds and she can see the unfurling leaves trying to get their photosynthetic fixes before the Earth teases and turns away yet again to make their vivid greens go red, go yellow, go brown. She looks out the horizontal slits with her characteristic lack of expression plastered thick across her cheekbones, then back down again at the tangled legs of the ant pushing up from the tissue, trying hard not to remember the way it crunched beneath her fingers, or to think about the possibilities that could have arisen should she not have killed it on the first try.