Ants

Ants Audrey comes home from the office to a swarm of newly-hatched ants on the kitchen countertops. She crushes them with her fingertip, lifts the specks to the shaft of light pouring onto sugar-encrusted granite, consoles herself with thinking of the black torrent swelling through spring. The destruction of the individual means nothing, she thinks, idly squashing another ant, then another until she escapes the house, walking around the lake where a blue heron stabs a tiny blue fish in its thin yellow beak, the slender reed of its gullet puffing up like a balloon when the bird swallows, its flute-like adaptation to shallow water a license to kill. Her own body-hauled from job to job, child to child, city to city, museum to museum, from Vermeer to Caulder, Kandinsky to Twombly, Bernhard to Whitman- commands her too, ceaselessly, its beak of language stabbing at culture like silver fish in shallow water. But here, at the lake at dusk, outside the city, the townhouse and the mortgage, outside beauty her body claims as its own, she stands beyond her rights beside a bank, where blue flowers tremble beneath the swarm of devouring mandibles. —Katherine Smith 104 ...