There Is No Year - Blake Butler [40]
Certain of the stairs had been eaten through so completely the son felt his foot go through, sucked into the house.
The son felt sick. His eyes were spinning. The son bumped and fell against the wall, raining a sheath of loose ant matter off the drywall, off the layered phrase of paint, each layer making the house that much smaller, along the stretch of dry partitions, creating space, the ants made veins toward the ceiling—webwork. The veins throbbed and fed the bodies into the overhead. The ants had ruined the hallway carpet, slurred in the fibers, drumming, gushed. They’d dug a rut around the bottom of the son’s doorway, a series of smooth flat ridges gnawed—over which if breath were blown the right way, the fluted holes would give a sound. They’d moved the son’s bed slightly to one side and seemed to be trying to flip it over. They crawled into drawers and across the mirrors and up more walls and across the ceiling, patterns. They’d congregated at a small hole that had been cut into the wall, thrumming from the crack into the bathroom. Their tiny backs were mirrored bubbles, glistening, bejeweled. The ants, in silence, programmed, at last there sharing the son’s air.
ENTER
The son stood above the ants. The son stood watching. The son could not feel his fingers or his arms. The small reflective surface of each ant’s head showed his head back into him, a chorus of him, gifted through the house. The son squeezed his phone so tight the skin in his arms and knuckles lost their blood. He could feel ants inside his organs, digging rings and ruts and lines. He could feel them eating in his lids, licking the color from his cornea and replacing it with something other, drummed, undone—something from inside the ants—something digested. The son could taste them in his mouth. He could feel them swimming in his bloodstreams, bathing. Through his colon. Threading his back. He could feel them in the center of his each tooth and hair stem. A black box building in his belly. The phone vibrating in his hands.
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