Mad Thoughts

I lit the fire and went inside to prepare the meat. My daughter stayed outside, and so when I heard the words “Emergency! Emergency!” I went running and was grateful to find that she hadn’t caught fire. She was, however, pointing at the Weber and saying, “Ants, Daddy — ants!” I looked and said that I didn’t see any. The Weber was enameled black, as always. Then the enamel began to seethe, and began to break up, like some experiment in the disassociation of matter. There had been tends of thousands of ants in the bed of soggy ash at the bottom of the grill, and when I lit the coals, they covered the cover, until that got too hot, and the whole scene was like a myrmicine version of the Hindenburg disaster, with cooking ants spilling off the top of the Weber and their horrible glittering larvae streaming through the slots at the bottom, while my daughter ran around screaming the one word that described what she saw.

Then I heard a lethal kind of splashing in the tub, as if a shark had gotten in the water. I ran into the bathroom, and what I saw was a peony-sized bloom of ants whirling in the water and at the same time coming apart, like an oil slick. And my daughter was in the water with it, and what made it the worst of the ant stories was not only that they were on her shoulders and in her hair; it was that she was gleefully drowning them while exclaiming “Die, die, die!” in an utterly convincing exhibition of how exigency trumps ethics and how in evvery siege lies the death of liberal dreams.