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8.28.07

Ant

By Steve Finbow

Ant sleeps under the apple. He sleeps all day in its shade. The shade is buttery and smells of toothpaste but Ant doesn’t mind that. Far from. Far too as well. Ant gives the Bishop a gift of a giant tomato and the Bishop sings songs – hymns he calls them – into Ant’s peppery ears. Ant builds a sign that reads ‘Munich – 200 years.’ He thinks it should read ‘Munchen – 200 kilometres’ but the film in which he saw it has been lost in an ice floe and Ant doesn’t have the furniture to follow it. Ant is Argentinean by birth, terrified by death. He looks back over his shoulder at Dog striking a gong with Cat. This is his alarm clock. Its driver is around sixteen years old and grateful looking with a Baroque mental life and the buzz of a fountain in her ears.

The beach stretches for miles and he walks its length every morning. It takes an hour maybe more and he returns tired but content. On these walks, he thinks of all the people who have passed through his life. People he has loved, lived with, liked, hated, ignored. Friends, lovers, family, enemies. The sand between his toes reminds him he is still alive. Just. The breaking waves bring with them shards of life, dead matter, the halt and the sick, and these are picked over by the living, like old photographs, memories. Gulls lift their skirts and rush in and out of the tide, pecking, squabbling. Their yellow eyes. Their clicking beaks. He would lift a pebble, weigh it, half-heartedly throw it at the birds, watch them rise, hover, and settle again on the wet sand.

Ant grips his arm. He is simpleminded but not a bad person. The can of olives he eats for breakfast, monumental and full of splinters, is satisfactory and Ant cheers several times as he swallows the briny juice. ‘I can do anything,’ he thinks, and smiles at the same time – his head hurts for long stretches for days after. Buckets honk in doorways and Ant walks briskly on his six legs to the jewellers where he is to pick up a necklace of cadences for the Queen. Some black kids are hanging around in the 18th century, seemingly having a good time, and Ant joins them for a while, boogying down, wrangling, skewing, just having fun, you know. His aristocratic giblets beyond fault. His cape pumping out danger. His bodyguard ballooning and rumpled. Ant’s antennas are closed Mondays and his semi-transparent sword slips from its scaffolding and clatters on the fire escape. ‘Ooh,’ thinks Ant, ‘Ooh!’

Her name may have been Theresa. She lived on the same street as his school. He walked past her house five days a week, once in the morning and again on his way home in the afternoon. He cannot remember if she went to the same school as he did, but he doesn’t think she did. His one clear memory is of her standing by her garden gate, her face round, plump, her small nose, her small bright teeth, and her eyes hazel and shining. He would stand and talk to her for ten minutes. They would hold hands and he would tell her about his day. Her mother would come out and call her in for her tea. She would stand on the step and wave and he would wave back until the curve of the road made her disappear. He was eight years old.

The spire of the church held in his mandibles cracks and creaks and Ant steps off the high-wire swing, clam in mouth, waistcoat undone, and hails a taxi. Hummingbird, pregnant and the size of a classroom, cha-cha-cha’s overhead, muttering in that speckled egg way of hers. Ant frowns. The airport, thin and roaring with mirrors, noodles among the plumbing. Ant’s spiracles boom like kettledrums. Is he mad? Is he? Mad. Pastrami and the villainous babies stand between Ant and the bridge of despicable machines. Ant tightens his belt, divorces his gecko, and dives in. A mad woman wearing a beard and a dead rock jack-knifes from the doorway, lurches to the bathtub, the precipice, the babysitter, and Ant smells the sawdust on her breath, the thirty-eight insensible curls of her great big bothersome heart.

Theresa – another Theresa, with the unlikely surname of Bloom – lived across the fields by the swings, the roundabout, the slide. In front of her house, there was always parked a broken down car, different each time he visited, the cars had missing wheels, doors, engines; all of the cars seemed to be dark green in colour, the green mottled with rust, smeared with oil; covering windows, headlights, holes, were bandages made from brown paper and masking tape. These cars belonged to Theresa’s brothers. He would nod at them as he walked up the garden path and they would stare at him and make noises, say things he didn’t understand, make gestures he understood less. Theresa had a sister. Her sister’s names was Judy. He preferred Judy.

Ant squeezes his thorax, finds nothing but odd handkerchiefs, totalled watches, and the confused father of propane cylinders furled and steaming. The implication of moonlight is a serious one, the smile senile as tight as a diaper over the gathered raw meat of the sky. Ant accelerates. The florist is just up ahead. No more the flowerless chiselled features of the chainsaws. Snapping up, the flotsam, he leaves by the underground or stays on the outskirts. Baby, step back. Step up, sweetie. He cannot afford the plastic bags full of eyebrows and boxing gloves. A young girl stands, pulls up her bacon-coloured socks, and viciously stamps on Ant’s tarsal claw. Ant groans and gleams. He decides to hang out somewhere else, drink a beer, try to catch some zeds. This is all too much. He’ll go wrap himself in a towel, plunder some of that rumbling egg roll. Scrum. Scuba.

Click here for Steve Finbow's bio and a list of works published.

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