It Looked Different on the Model - Laurie Notaro [48]
“Believe me, I know how impossible it sounds,” my husband agreed. “But this was planned. There’s no way someone drove by here at three in the morning after the bars closed, noticed that we had some particularly lovely trees, and happened to have a shovel and tarps. I’ve never known a drunk to choose digging over a three-for-a-dollar taco run. No, this was brazen. I highly doubt these were the first trees they’ve abducted. Now it’s your turn to say something snappy, Len.”
“Yeah.” I nodded. “Why would drunks steal trees when three blocks away there are still two street signs left on High Street?”
“I guess we’ll never know what kind of person steals trees,” he said simply, clapped his hands together once as if the case had been solved, and went inside.
But I had an idea.
The tree theftery wasn’t the first such ridiculously bizarre event to happen in my front yard, and this wasn’t even the same front yard where my potted flowers had been stolen. Several months earlier, my sister was due to pull into the driveway with her son and my brother-in-law for a visit, when my little dog, Maeby, went nuts over something she spotted while standing guard at the screen door. My sister had never been to my new house before, and I knew that whatever went down during their vacation—good, bad, and downright ugly—was going to be in the full debriefing report she would supply to my mother upon her return home. After which there would be a phone call from my mother, who was still quite upset that I had moved beyond running distance from her, and who would delight in telling me that her suspicions about my new abode were absolutely confirmed, relaying that “Your sister said there were weeds in the cracks in your sidewalk, you still haven’t learned to vacuum, and your dog isn’t as smart as you said she is.”
Thinking my sister had arrived early, I went to the door and took a peek outside but saw nothing and chalked it up to a taunting squirrel. Five minutes later, Maeby went nuts again, and this time I walked out into the front yard for a more thorough investigation. It didn’t take more than three steps to see what was causing the commotion.
There, in my fertilized, mowed green grass, was a heap right under the biggest tree in the yard. A heap of human. It was wearing a hoodie, baggy pants belted basically at the knees, and a backward baseball hat. Initially I wasn’t sure how to proceed, but I marched right over to the tree and hoped that I would figure it out once I got closer.
The heap, it turned out, was a guy, lying on his back, his skinny legs bent up, and his arms splayed wide across the grass. He had not been there five minutes prior when Mae alerted me to the presence of an intruder, but he was there now, sprawled out in my yard with less than ten minutes to the touchdown of my sister. He was a young guy, teens, maybe early twenties, but no older than that, I decided, as I looked at his bony, angular, and paler-than-any-pale-should-really-be complexion. But I stopped wondering about the drained color of his skin once I saw an ant crawl across his eyelid.
And then another ant. And another ant.
Now, to say that a swarm of ants was marching across his face may be a bit too suggestive, but I have to emphasize that “swarm” is a relative term when creatures have more than two legs and they appear in multiples. To me, that’s a battalion, and to make matters worse, when they’re invading a landscape that happens to be a face, there’s usually only one reason for that: The face is on a corpse.
My stomach flipped and a curtain of horror dropped on me.
“… and your sister tells me that when she drove up to your house, there was a dead person in your yard!” I could hear my mother dig. “Who has a dead person in their yard? No normal person has a dead person in their yard! There is not one single person in my neighborhood who ever had their