WHAT THE SON LEARNED THE ANTS HAD DONE

Downstairs the ants were in the TV—in the wires—in the nodes—as they had always been, in all homes. The ants were in the son. They’d etched their way into certain cushions, chewing room in for their den—they’d already formed a throne room—they’d made lengthy galleries and tombs—a nursery for the many coming newborn—the next time someone sat down on the sofa they would crush an empire and never know. The ants were in the son. The ants had crowned the son’s image in the house in several portraits by eating holes into the paint around his head—they’d made rubbish of the inner workings of the simple lock in the son’s doorknob—they’d covered every square inch of the son’s bicycle—they’d nested slightly in his mattress—they’d kissed each other on the heads—they’d formed a necklace for several moments around the son’s neck as he slept, which thereafter remained as rash—they’d gnawed a tunnel through the meat of certain books, the text around them chawed to mush. The ants were in the son. Other insects also had come in, though unlike the ants they hid in layers. They spun in futures. They knew the mindset of a mold. Small white spiders small as pinheads hung jeweled along the ceiling of one room. The quilt the mother had been making for her one-day grandchildren—the dream of other children always in her head—had been ribboned through and through with mites. A flood of fluttered butterflies had collected on the velvet slide hung over the mantle, a wide piece of woolen fabric that had been in the house when the family moved in, and the family before them, and before them and on and on. The ants were in the son. From certain angles if you held your breath and asked a question, in the velvet you might see the profile of a man—though now the man’s head was encrusted with chrysalis and soft wing gyration. Some certain kind of insect had laid its waste all through the foyer, the stink raising the temperature in the room by several degrees. Grasshoppers in the rice cooker. Roach babies in the sink. Wormy blankets burped by spiders—enough to wrap your head. Termites bundled in a jacket. Chiggers in the coffee grinds. Beetles in the grease and vents and elsewhere, waiting to awake. Insects so loud they could not be heard, obliterating words.