The summer Dad left, our house was infested with ants. Ants on the carpet, in the hallways, the kitchen. I’d pour a bowl of Frosted Flakes and after I’d put the milk away and turn around, there would be an ant floating lifeless, drifting between soggy flakes. Mom told Dad to spray around the house with insecticide, but he decided to leave. On his way out he bent down and told me that I was man of the house now and I would be taking care of Mom. None of the other twelve-year-olds on my block had a job to do like this. Maybe, I thought, this would prepare me for sixth grade. Dad said he trusted me.

I watched him get into his car. He stopped and looked down at the gravel driveway. “I love you, Lincoln,” he said without looking up at me. Then he drove down the street with his music playing, heading towards whatever freedom he thought he was driving to.

Mom spent the following days crying. I heard her sobbing in the kitchen alone, smacking the cabinet to kill whatever ants she could. She’d sob every night, and I never knew what to say to her. I’d peek into the living room to watch her. She’d be curled up on the couch in her faded pink robe watching old movies all day. She’d keep the phone next to her hoping Dad would call. I knew he wouldn’t. I think she did too.

One morning I heard her screaming in the kitchen. When I came out to make sure she wasn’t cutting her wrists, she stood over the sink crying.

“There were ants in my coffee mug,” she said. “They’re everywhere.”

I made her another cup and sat her down. She looked tired. Her eyes were red, and her face was puffy from crying. The phone was still on the couch but the only calls we were getting were prank calls or bill collectors. I turned on the TV and found something she might like – a long movie from her childhood – and told her to take a nap. That I would go spray around the house with ant-killer.

“You’re becoming such a good young man,” she said. She put her hand on my cheek and gave me a half-smile. She looked into my pale blue eyes long enough that I knew she saw my dad. She took her hand away and went to sleep.

 

It was late August, and the Midwest heat was at that point where you could smell the asphalt on the street melting. The front yard hadn’t been mowed since Dad left and chiggers bit at my ankles as I sprayed around the house. I watched as ants worked their way up the foundation and into little cracks and slits into the house. They marched in tight formation, and I wondered what would happen if any one of them left that line if one was so unhappy with its life that it decided to abandon everyone else. Would the rest break down and not know where to go, what to do? I wondered this as I sprayed them with the ant-killer and watched them slowly start to die.

I worked my way to the back yard. Like the front, the grass was tall, and clouds of gnats grouped around the fence line. After I was done spraying, I started to mow. This was usually Dad’s job. But now I was man of the house – whatever that meant – and all his duties were becoming mine.

The mower didn’t like the tall grass. After a while the choking sound of the blades trying to cut the long damp grass sounded like a smoker’s cough. I had to kill the mower after a few minutes and bag up what grass was catching the blades. The sun was brutal, and my shirt was heavy on me. I stopped halfway through to hose myself down.

When I started back up I saw a pile of dirt in the middle of the yard. I mowed the grass around it and got on my knees to get a closer look. Dozens of ants crawled in and out of tiny holes in the mound of dirt. They were carrying food crumbs from the kitchen, or little bits of leaves and grass from the yard. They worked together to carry the larger pieces of food. They were stealing what belonged to me and Mom.

I stood up and held my foot over the hill. I imagined myself as a giant terrorizing the small village of these little creatures. Many would be crushed to death, glued to the bottom of my shoe with their guts. I held death over their heads, and they didn’t have a clue. I put my foot down away from the ant hill and finished mowing.

 

Mom slept on the couch when I came in from mowing. I showered and watched some ants spiral down the drain. They really were helpless, when you thought about it. When I held my foot over their anthill, I could have destroyed their empire. Within seconds their entire world would crash down on them, and I would be standing over them. They wouldn’t have been able to do anything about it. They couldn’t even swim in the tub to save themselves from drowning.

I dressed and made lunch. All over the counter the ants crawled in random trails. Looking for the crumbs I left behind. I pressed my finger on top of them until I heard their bodies crunch. I teased them by letting them go before I crushed them. One had a broken leg and couldn’t crawl away from me. It tried but it could only move in broken circles until I put it out of its misery. Ant bodies were scattered around like a battlefield. I ate my sandwich and watched the other ants scurry away from me in fright.

The phone rang around one, but Mom didn’t wake up to answer it. I answered it.

“Hey, buddy,” Dad said. “You got a minute?”

“Sure,” I said. I walked back into the kitchen and cleaned up the ant bodies while I listened to Dad’s breathing.

“How’s your mom?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Does it matter?”

“I just wanted to talk to you,” he said. “See how you’re doing.”

“The mower gets backed up when the grass is long. And I saw an ant hill in the backyard.”

“Did you get rid of it? They’ll keep coming if you don’t.”

I told him I didn’t know how. I didn’t tell him that Mom had been sitting all day crying.

“Just pour hot water down the hill,” he said. “It’ll sink in and if the water is hot enough it’ll kill the ants.”

“Where are you?” I said.

He didn’t say anything for a while. His breathing was heavy over the phone. I thought about hanging up. I wanted to scream at him, wanted to tell him to go fuck himself for what he’d done to Mom, to me. For leaving and making me take on the role he had promised Mom to fulfill until he died. But I couldn’t. He was bigger than me and he could have crushed me like I was one of those ants. But I felt my rage rising up inside me and I knew I’d take it out on someone weaker than me.

“I’m staying with someone,” he said.

I looked over at the living room. I watched Mom sleeping.

“Does Mom know?”

“I’m going to tell her soon.”

“I gotta go now.”

“I love you.”

I put the phone back on the couch and Mom groaned and shifted under the blanket. I turned the TV to another channel and turned the volume up.

I went back into the kitchen. More ants crawled around since I left. They thought it was safe. That the crumbs were for the taking. I began smacking the cabinet, feeling their tiny bodies stick to my palm.

“What are you doing out there?” Mom said.

“Killing ants.”

She came out holding the phone and sat at the table. My hand looked like a glue trap for the ants. They scurried away from me faster after I killed another one. Mom watched me slaughter them.

“Who was on the phone?”

I looked at the ants on my hand. “No one.”

“Was it him?” she said.

“What’s for dinner?”

“Did he say where he was?”

I grabbed a tea kettle from an overhead shelf and filled it with water. I put it on the stove and put the heat on.

“What are you doing?” Mom said.

“Getting ready to kill the ant hill outside,” I said.

“Did your dad say where he was?”

“He said he’ll call you,” I said.

The water reached a boil and the tea kettle whistled. I turned off the burner and headed for the back door.

“Did he say when he’ll call?” Mom said.

“Jesus Christ, Mom,” I said. “I don’t fucking know. He’s gone. Don’t you get that? He left you and me. He’s not going to come back. Maybe if you stopped sleeping all day, you’d understand that.”

Before I could tell her I was sorry she stood up and walked back to the living room with the phone in her hand.

“You don’t get to talk to me that way,” she said. “Ever.”

When she was gone, I headed outside.

 

The ant hill looked like it was moving before I got close to it. The worker ants crawled over the dirt in large formations. They covered the hill, crawling over each other and the bigger clumps of dirt. I felt the heat from the water.

I held the kettle over the hill and watched the ants go about their work. It was instinct to them. Did they understand when someone was standing over them waiting to kill them? Did instinct tell them that? I was bigger than them. It wasn’t a fair fight, but I poured the hot water onto the hill.

The hill collapsed. The dirt became wet clumps of mud. The water trickled down into the tunnels they dug and burned some and drowned the rest. The ants that managed to leave the hill before I poured the water crawled away. I stomped violently as they escaped.

I didn’t know what to do when I was done. The ant hill was completely sunken in and I guessed everything inside was dead. I sat on the grass and thought about my mom and dad. I pictured the hundreds of dead ants that were under me. I realized then that I only had dominion over things smaller and weaker than me. Things that could not fight back and hurt me. I thought about what Dad did to Mom, and what I said to her. We were squashing her with our palms in our own different ways.

A small puddle formed where the anthill stood. The bodies of worker ants floated in the dirty water. The queen ant waded between the smaller ones, her legs moving, grasping for something to hold onto with desperation. I scooped her up and looked at her. She wiggled her mandibles in the air and tried to crawl out of my hand. She had small clear wings that looked broken. But she was alive. I placed her down on the grass next to me and watched her crawl away with her half-broken body.

It was after dark when I finally went back inside. Mom lay on the couch half asleep watching another one of her movies. I kneeled down and hugged her until I cried into her robe.