Burning Ants

by Andrew Cusick

Prabir Kashyap

She says that if you catch them in the right summer light, with that little magnifying glass she keeps under her bed, you can hear them scream. She says she feels bad about it sometimes, tracing a thread of blonde hair through her teeth. We’re watching old Price is Right reruns inside and her Dad is somewhere else and when I ask her when he’s coming home she doesn’t answer, says we should just go outside and kill the ants. When we were kids, we used to raise caterpillars in old mason jars.

“Let’s stay inside. It’s gonna rain soon,” I say.

“Let me show you.”

“No,” I reply, my head down.

“Why not?”

“It’s mean. I don’t want to.”

“Let me show you.”

She runs her hands up my arm on the couch and rests it on my thigh, tan from the third week of summer vacation.

She brings me in the backyard, storm clouds overhead, and she says she’ll kiss me if I do it so I say okay, I’m thirteen after all. She tells me to keep my hand still and the magnifying glass turns into the Death Star, 100 degree Jersey summer for sure, and it starts smoking up the concrete beneath and some of the little ants must sense it and so they start scurrying away and I say I don’t want to and she says no, go ahead and do it, don’t be a baby, go ahead and do it, but I can’t and then she just says “quit being such a pussy” and she grabs my arm and holds it in place and drags one of the baby ones underneath the light. It squirms and spasms for a second before it catches on fire and then you can hear what sounds like a desperate shriek as it wriggles in agony and tries to get away but she drags my arm and follows it and the screams get louder and louder before finally just sitting still and burning and wilting away in the flames.

“Come here,” she says after, beckoning me to the woods behind her house. I wipe my eyes on the walk.

She kisses me by the pond where we used to skip stones. Thunder and lightning. She kisses me again and then she takes off my board shorts and the thunder turns to rain.

The rain doesn’t stop the rest of the day.

The next day we go to see a horror movie and by the opening credits she makes me stop paying attention. A month passes and she takes me to the beach where we used to watch the 4th of July fireworks and when I point to the pack of dolphins just offshore she points to the dunes where she wants to lay down.

One day, as that first late August chill takes over the morning, she asks me to come outside and try something new and we do and afterwards she says that we’re adults now. She makes me leave when her Dad comes home.

She shows me the stuff she finds in her sister’s dresser. She shows me the magazines underneath her Dad’s bed. She shows me the insides and outsides of fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen, and she writes me inside of her story.

I write her a letter when she goes away the first time, after the cuts, after she vanishes into rumors and whispers and a lonely address, and I write another letter when she goes away to a different place the second time. I go to her house and scream at her Dad and he just shrugs and mutters nothing things about nothing, and when he dies, they raze the whole property. I watch them rip the foundation out and wipe away any trace that anyone was ever there, and I watch from a distance as he’s buried alone.

I come home from school one summer and I walk through her old yard, the weeds overgrown now, and I buy a house a few towns over and I find somebody different, somebody softer, and we write each other inside of our stories.

I drive by the old property on the way home from work here and there and watch the grass swallow up the memories. At one point, my wife asks me who used to live there, and I tell her who, and she says it’s funny and sad and somewhere in between the way in which people stitch themselves into our hearts. She falls asleep on my shoulder before we decide what to watch on Netflix.

She shows me a red strip one day and that night, I send one last letter to ask if anybody knows what happened, and months later, when they send the news back, it all finally feels conclusive.

When he’s old enough, my boy asks me who is this girl, pointing at an old Polaroid, and I tell him a story about growing old and he says how do you remember these people from so long ago and I tell him that, inside of our heads, we’re one age forever, and he doesn’t understand…but nobody does, I suppose.

During summer, I catch him and his buddy with a magnifying glass in the backyard, close to an ant hill jutting out of the garden.

“No, no. Don’t do that. Don’t ever do that,” I say, taking them away.

He gets older. I do my best to write myself inside of his story.

I show him how to catch caterpillars in a glass jar and how to put tiny branches and fallen leaves inside the jar and how, if you let it out in the rain, with the right kind of light, and you keep it warm at night, you can raise a butterfly, but how hot the sun can burn in the day when nobody’s watching, how it can just burn some things away forever.

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Andrew Cusick lives and teaches at the Jersey Shore. He’s been published in Blood Lotus, Flash Fiction Magazine, and Underground Voices. He’s working on his first novel.