I heard him pull up a chair and sit down next to me. “It is wonderful, isn’t it? My sweethearts, my pets?”
He hadn’t called me those things before, but I was in no condition to disagree. My arms and legs could no longer move—I could only move through the ants. It was like having hundreds of different hands. I could make them go anywhere and do anything inside my body; I’d even started eating with them. Though I didn’t necessarily want to devour my own bone, I had an insatiable hunger, and there was a commanding voice, Eat, Walk, Lift, Chomp. It was my own voice but more powerful, echoing and confident, like my home was a large auditorium and I firmly believed in everything I said. I seemed able to express only one word at a time, but this felt more liberating than restrictive—suddenly every word could be a full representation of myself.
I lost all need for time. Eventually I was certain of only two things: my appetite was getting out of control, and my old eyes were completely gone.
“The rest of the world thinks you died,” the doctor told me. As he swished into the room, there was the sound of yards and yards of fabric being unwrapped and lifted. His words seemed round with satisfaction. “You cannot see it, but I have just unveiled the gateway.”
I would’ve answered him, but I was no longer sure if my voice still made a sound or if words even came out when I felt like I was talking.
“It’s right here on my waist; I’ve been making paths inside of me just as there are paths inside of you. After you came to see me, I began reporting to the government that I, too, hold ants inside my body, but I don’t. Not yet. It is your ants I’m after. You have become the ants who ate you; your consciousness is united with theirs. And when you all crawl inside of me, we will all become one forever.” As his voice continued I could feel the ants rallying, see their legs beginning to kick with heightened motion. “I never actually fed the ants you’ve become. I simply allowed them to eat you whole. But you will not eat me. I will feed you all properly so that you don’t. We will share my stomach—I’ve inserted a tube whereby everything I swallow will also be accessible to you, to your thousands of minions that are now you entirely and do your bidding. I have always loved you, and when you came to my office, I knew this was the way to make you mine.”
And then I smelled something irresistible and began to crawl toward it, into the new pink-gray cave that must be the doctor. If what he said was true, I was somewhat grateful to get inside of him—if my body was now just thousands of swarming ants, I certainly did not wish to be seen.
* * *
Once we had transferred, I was pleased to realize that I could see through the doctor’s eyes in addition to those of my ants. It is calming to look through the eyes of another person. It stills your own thoughts almost to a halt.
“Do you love me?”
The doctor likes to ask this; he does so almost every hour. Although I cannot speak, he always looks into a mirror afterward and smiles and says that he loves me, too.
Throughout the day I have all types of sensations. Some are good, others worry me, but my fears can’t grow so big that they reach outside of his body. Nothing can move beyond this body, so in a way I feel like I am the world, and he is the world, the same way that lovers feel. “How strange,” I often think, though I try not to let him hear me thinking it, “to have so much in common with an unattractive man.”
And then there is the evening, when sunlight pours into the window like nectar. He sits down to the dinner table, again in front of a large mirror—I think so that I can see him, though maybe he has figured out a way to see me. Then he carefully opens the bag of sugar with a knife. When I hear this sound, each of my ants jumps and he smiles, his legs and arms contract whether he likes it or not. And though they are his own, I feel as if I guide his fingertips, that the tiniest of my workers go down into the marrow of his thumb and help to grip the teaspoon.
I love watching him eat. Teaspoon after teaspoon disappears into his mouth; his saliva coats the spoon’s surface with stuck granules that change its color from silver to a crusty white. I cannot decide if he did me a favor or if I’m a victim. When I try to think, all I can feel is the sugary fluid, and a rage that comes when after our feedings I still find myself hungry.
Knife Thrower
“The ghost is friendly,” says Grandmother. She pushes me inside, throws in a loaf of bread, and locks the vent.
There is a strange ghost in the air-conditioning duct and it’s my job to find and tame it. I did not volunteer. It is more of an assigned position.
“Hello?” I call softly. Hopefully, the ghost is Mother. Grandmother killed her a few years ago and has feared her haunting return ever since.
Both Mother and Grandmother were knife throwers by trade. Grandmother trained Mother from an early age, as Mother trained me, as Grandmother continues to train me now that Mother is gone.
* * *
“Just you wait,” Grandmother warned the day we lugged Mother’s burlap-wrapped body out to the woods. I kept hitting up against rocks in the dark and collecting large bruises. “She’ll come back and give me my what-for. I won’t know a moment of peace until I die.”
I dug until the sun began to appear and Grandmother’s head finally peered over the hole’s rim. Her normally tight bun was loose and wild; wisps of hair floated around her face like thin smoke. “Come up,” she said, lowering down a rope for me to grab so I wouldn’t get her hands dirty. Once I filled the hole back in, Grandma’s composure returned.
It was not how I had pictured my mother’s funeral.
Afterward Grandma handed me a large, glowing cigar and patted my thigh. She has a scar on her thigh from when Mother dared her to put a lit cigar there for a whole minute. I worried it was my time to receive a matching scar, but she said nothing more, so I sat by her and tried to puff until I got sick and vomited.
* * *
“Hello?” The ghost does not answer my hellos, so I take out a piece of bread and try to shape it like a ghost, then lay it in my lap like a sign. Ghosts Welcome. Ghost Spoken Here.
There is banging as Grandma hits the vent with a broom handle. “I don’t hear anything,” she says. “You must wrestle the ghost and win.” There is more banging and then she goes to boil tea.
At night the ghost has been making rattle noises that sound like music for people who have never heard music, or people who are very lonely for sound. Grandma suspected vermin—she has caught hundreds of raccoons in her lifetime—but then one night she saw a blue glow coming from the vent.
From the sounds of the television drifting into the vent from the living room below, I can tell that it is evening. When ghosts come.
There is a saying Grandma has, “Fit in or else you’ll be sorry.” All I really know about ghosts is “Boo.” I whisper it at first; I want to fit in but I’m also not sure what this word means to ghosts. Then I say it a little louder.
Suddenly a wind takes up all my different hairs. The hair on my head starts whipping about in sections that look very much like snakes, so much like them that I grow afraid of my own hair. My eyebrows and the soft hairs on my cheeks begin to tickle. On my arms and legs, the hairs stand straight up and prick out into my clothing. The hairs bruise and balloon. One hair in the back of my head swells out too much and pops. Injured hair is a strange sensation.
As the wind grows stronger, I start to worry: What if saying “Boo” is like swimmers cutting themselves in a sea of sharks? Maybe ghosts smell sounds, and “Boo” is the strongest scent they know. Large dust bunnies fly past me, now and again a small roach, then just one very fearful old mouse that probably came up into the vent to die and did not count on this at all. He whirls past so quickly that I barely get to see his expression, his lint-covered whiskers, but he looks tired and terrified.
I close my eyes when tiny particles of dust in the fast wind begin to sting. I can no longer hear the television, just the top of the wrapper on the loaf of bread buckled between my knees flapping back and forth. I try to think a
bout my bed, which is soft and has a canopy that Grandmother makes fun of. But I like it. Lying beneath it, I feel like I’m a doll who someone loves.
The wind stops suddenly. Afterward, I squint for several minutes in case it starts up again. Whenever something bad happens in my life, it’s best if I don’t feel relieved when I think it’s over. Like how we buried my mother, and now the house is haunted.
Then I feel her breath on my eyelids.
* * *
Mother. She’s not as beautiful as I remember; her skin has sores and a tooth is missing. Mother’s stab wounds trickle blood continuously. They are the only part of her that appears to be alive.
I forget everything I’ve said to her in the quiet beneath my bed’s canopy since she’s been gone. Our hands try to come together but they are like the ends of magnets. I cry a little and Mother starts crying, too, but this makes her blood fountain much swifter so we stop.
“Grandma did this to you.”
“We had a disagreement. Don’t hold it against her. When I think about it, she was right.”
I remember that night. They were fighting about tequila. “It’s been you, then? Haunting the house?”
“I’m sorry. When you’re a ghost, not haunting is like trying not to laugh. It tickles and pushes until it hurts. Of course there are a lot of boring ghosts who find it easy not to haunt. In the afterlife, so much is boring.” She tilts her head and looks at my neck, my chin. “You’re getting beautiful. Hector would be proud.”
Hector is my father. I remember him running away from our home when I was very little, and Mother running after him, throwing knives.
We stare at one another. It’s nice to have her in front of my eyes. It doesn’t make me hurt inside the way photographs of her do.
“Dear, how about we scare Grandmother together? That way you’ll be in on it, and you won’t get frightened.”
I shrug. Grandmother is already grumpy. “You’re not the one who has to live with her,” I say.
Mother smiles. “You always were very good.”
The running blood bothers me. I take a piece of bread and hold it against her belly like a sponge. There is no magnet-force this time; I can feel the warmth of Mother’s blood beneath the bread.
“I miss you,” I tell her. I hold up another piece of bread and she pushes her nose into it like it’s a mask until her imprint appears. The bread begins to take on the smell of Mother’s perfume. Then we hold hands through a piece of bread. I put another piece over her chest and then put my face to it and listen for a heartbeat. Her chest sounds like the inside of a giant shell. We do this until all the bread grows thin and falls apart, then I mash its crumbs into a thick ball that smells like Mother and blood and dough.
When Mother disappears, the vent goes very dark. I tuck the dough ball into my shirt pocket and crawl toward the exit. The door must have blown open in the wind.
Grandmother is asleep in her chair next to a lit candle. “Hello,” I say, and Grandmother gives a frightened gasp and opens her eyes.
“Your hair.” She makes a big circle motion around her head. “It is ghost-blown.”
After I nod, she asks if it was Mother. “No telling,” I say. “I passed out from fear.” She motions me off to bed, then her eyes move toward the vent as she lights a cigar. I run up the stairs so the smoke won’t take away Mother’s smell on my hands or on the bread in my pocket.
Deliverywoman
It has been a long day of intergalactic delivery, and I’m feeling a little boxed-in. Though I like the homey atmosphere of my ship’s small confines, about a week into a mission the air starts to smell like recycled sock.
When my Message Station Board lights up pink, I know it’s Brady, WordCalling. I’ve never met him, but he says he’s forty-three, and early on in our talks he sent a very promising five-second video of himself tensing then relaxing his back muscles. Like me, Brady is an independent outer-space cargo transporter. We are the truckers of the galaxy.
Yet our connection runs deeper. The very first time he messaged me on SingleMingle (initially, it was a bit of a debate whether or not to look past his screen name of FluidTransfer69 and try to get to know the man within), I felt that Brady had to be a Sagittarius. That’s how well we clicked. And lo and behold, when I told him my suspicion, he admitted that while his birth month technically made him a Scorpio (my astrological enemy), he was born prematurely. His true sign is indeed the keeper of my star-charted soul.
Tonight we wax intellectual for a bit before getting flirty.
FluidTransfer69: Do u think that when we die, we will be together forever, in a type of paradise? How old do u think ur dead eternal body will look? Probably younger than u actually are, right? A hot 30? Supple 27?
As always, I open myself to him completely.
CargoBabe: Brady, I’ve thought about this a lot.
CargoBabe: I think, and I honestly believe this, Brady, that in the afterlife, everyone will be so extremely beautiful. Perhaps even more beautiful than it is possible to be on Earth.
FluidTransfer69: If u were here right now, what would u suck first?
With Brady clearly aroused by the parallel between our love and eternity, we talk until our conversation culminates physically, at which point Brady writes,
FluidTransfer69: Got 2 clean keyboard, bye!
We’ve been chatting back and forth for several weeks now, although it seems like years because the cultivation of our bond has been so rapid. He tells me that his face is badly scarred from a fuselage accident, and that because of this he fears my disappointment and is reluctant to meet me in person. I constantly assure him his appearance doesn’t matter, but he hasn’t yet been able to summon up the courage. Brady’s back and buttocks, however, are a source of self-pride—additional photo stills, he promises, are coming my way.
* * *
It’s always hard to wake from dreams where the universe has instated a galactic monarchy consisting of myself as queen and Brady as king. In them, Brady prefers to sit on the throne and generally rule in the buff.
I roll out of bed to find that the ship’s septic extrication unit has broken and the frozen waste has melted. I begin my day by mopping the thaw. Because my mop sponge is fiercely rectangular, it cannot get around the tighter edges of the file cabinet and I must reserve that job for Q-tips.
Yet it is a brighter afternoon when I sit down to find that among various junk email pyramid schemes there is also a message from Brady. I open it and see a forwarded news release.
Hey Babe,
You reading this in a towel? Check out the second story. Apes can do everything. Ha-ha!
Luv, B.
The story, indeed impressive, involves an ape both calling for help and pumping his owner’s stomach with charcoal after watching her attempt suicide for the third time. He is a helper-ape, assigned by the state in the absence of family funds for a more human in-home caretaker. The woman is ninety-four and deathly afraid of primates.
Yet what catches my eye is the story just below it. Justice Freeze, a cryogenic contractor largely employed by the government’s penal system, is going belly-up and holding a large auction. Several criminals whose permacapsules are programmed to not unlock for centuries are up on the auction block.
I am interested in one in particular. Below the notorious big-font names that will no doubt go into the home foyers of heavy-rock musicians, there is a smaller one, barely visible, ending a long string of nobodies.
My mother, Debbie “The Destroyer” Harlow.
Mother led a life of crime. Her real screw-up, the one that landed her 450 years, involved a large day care facility and a hidden boon of methamphetamines.
She also killed my father. He was a good man, but too talkative.
As I stare at the monitor, an antsy feeling begins to overtake me. Finally, against my better judgment, I sigh and program my ship toward the auction city’s coordinates.
* * *
Upon arrival I’m given a numeric paddle
. I find it eerie the way the prisoners’ capsules are intermixed with used and defunct science equipment. Each capsule has a large number with a minimum bid written across the icy window in grease pen.
Lucky for me, Mother’s starting bid is quite low. Freelance outer-space cargo running is a hit-or-miss trade, and this year in particular has been difficult: treatment for an antibiotic-resistant infection I picked up from a toilet seat in Goron, a dome community where I dropped off a payload of refurbished filtration equipment, racked up the medical bills. Luckily, though, this hopeless time coincided with meeting Brady. My empty glass became half-empty, which can even be seen as half-full.
I’m no delicate rose, but looking at all the frozen criminals, I start to wonder if this is such a good idea. The capsules are especially frightening. They’re dimly lit and humming like vending machines.
All the high-end infamous criminals were frozen bearing menacing expressions. I wonder if they made these poses intentionally, like a funny face for a driver’s license photo. A few look almost peaceful; one woman in particular has an extreme glow about her. I check the paperwork and see she’s been frozen for multiple homicides.
When I finally reach Mother, I’m a little taken aback. The frozen years have not been good to her. Technically, one doesn’t age while frozen, but she has clearly been through a lot. Her expression is wincing and concentrated, as if she’d been paused while taking an ardent dump. She also has what appear to be freezer-burn patches decorating her cheeks and forehead. These are especially prominent along her scalp, and look as though an irritating home-perm solution was left on far too long. Does hair freeze? Her mashed-up locks resemble a matted pompadour. Now and then I see a wisp quiver beneath the gust of the capsule’s internal fan.
The auction begins with the most expensive items, and I realize I’m in for a long day. I decide to check the mobile WordCall terminals to see if Brady is logged into the system. I’m quite nervous so I eat a few double-fudge squares and pray that he’s on—only his virtual presence could give me the strength I need to abstain from stress-eating an additional twelve-pack of Galaxy Bars.
Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls Page 7