Consider Her Ways and Be Wise
“Playa Viva” by Cyndi Gusler
I wasn’t even six when my dad sent the ants to get me.
It was the same week I almost drowned. I don’t remember the panic of airlessness—just the surprise when one small step dropped me into the deep end. Each time I pushed off the stuccoed bottom only my eyes lifted above the water line before I sank again, unable to suck in breath or yell for help.
The world seemed to waver like that forever. First the garish glare of poolside sunlight ringing with kids’ voices, then life gone warped and wavy, filtered through diffuse blue and the bodily murmur of water. When my brother waded after me they say I scrambled up him like a treed cat.
It was a week of sweetness and boredom. Pried free from Nintendo controllers and flown a thousand miles south, we found ourselves inside a classic seaside trap—one of those pastel towns adults call “cute” because there’s nothing for kids to do. I self-medicated the way preschoolers will, wheedling things from the candy aisle into our grocery cart. Mornings I traced aimless ritualistic loops through the house broken by devotionals back at the snack drawer, my hands powdered with confectioners’ sugar, the chalky wafers I tucked on my tongue dissolving away into the thinnest of blades.
One morning my dad caught me popping Smarties three or four at a time, sandwiching them together like tiny hamburgers.
“If you don’t stop eating all that sugar,” he said, “I’m going to send the ants to get you.”
By five a child can recognize an idle threat. I smiled, I think—scoffing at the oddity of fathers.
The next day someone tickled me awake early. The sensation was so light I almost settled back to sleep. But it was all around my body, gentle and thorough, almost loving. I sat up. I was still in the bedroom I shared with my brother, but my bed was now a kind of altar, elevated and wholly given over to a slick, shiny puddle the color of dried blood. The puddle edges spread and shifted, glinting with feverish eagerness. Little three-dotted bodies scrambled over each other like aggressive ellipses: ants. A whole raft of them. Legs and feelers waved, tasting.
I screamed. Sprinting through the watery predawn to the place my parents slept, I tried to explain that my father had been honest. The ants had come to get me.
In the drowsy, doubtful exchange that followed I felt I was back in the pool again—out of my depth, unable to frame the words to convince people I needed saving. My parents waved me off, consigned it all to a private nightmare. Just then my brother rushed in and made everything real.
Like magic my dad arose. He stumbled into the hall and saw what we already knew. A line of ants marched single-file up the staircase, turning a tight corner into our room. They traced a path up the leg of my bed before spreading into the puddle that first floated me awake. My brother and I watched as our dad spent the next hour crawling along the floor in boxer shorts, crushing the creatures out of existence with paper towels.
For years we wondered what actually happened. We assumed it had to do with the sugar. I must have been sneaking snacks in bed, someone would say. (I wasn’t.) Or maybe my PJ’s were coated with scraps or stains that goaded the ants on. I must have done something to call them forth from under our house, something to prompt their pilgrimage.
I never shared this interest in explanations. What brought the ants, I thought, was immaterial. The moral was about sticking up for what you knew, speaking your truth in the face of all refusals. As I got older I began to see it from another, more chilling perspective. How strange it must have been for my dad, I thought, to see his own throwaway joke come alive—to lie unconscious and innocent while yesterday’s sarcasm hardened into chitin, swarming over those closest to you.
Now that I’m a parent myself I know that’s just how it goes. Every day you wake mystified by a world that has vested you with some new unspeakable authority. There’s no time to be staggered by the outsized mistakes you made yesterday. All you can do is drop to your knees again and set to the work of correction.
About the Author
John MacNeill Miller teaches about literature, animals, and the environment at Allegheny College in Meadville, PA. His creative work has appeared previously at Flyway, About Place Journal, Bartleby Snopes, and Pindeldyboz. He tweets as @Snarls_Dickens.
about the artist
Cyndi Gusler holds an MFA in Painting and Drawing from James Madison University. She is the Director of Visual Arts at Eastern Mennonite University in VA where she shares her love of immersion into these mediums with her students. Currently in her Chestnut Art Studio are oil and acrylic paintings combining Cyndi's physical environment with her imagined reality. Barefoot in the garden is an evolving playground of imagery that grounds the artist and allows her to fly. Her paintings invite viewers to enter and explore the color-saturated richness. To see more go to: https://www.cyndigusler.com, fb: Cyndi Gusler , and Instagram: @cyndi.gusler.