Like An Ant Farm

by Sherri Collins

Marilyn held a stack of pictures at least two inches thick, and she could see that Joe was eyeing them, probably thinking that the funeral home didn’t need that many.  They probably didn’t; they would likely just use twenty or thirty and then set the photos on a loop, accompanied by music that somehow managed to be both somber and upbeat at the same time.  Michael had a great life, the music would say.  Never mind that he was only twenty-two.  We should be happy for all these fine memories.  Just look at them!

As Marilyn flipped through the photos in an older box, she paused on one then pulled it out.  At four years old, Michael grinned into the camera, his cheek and lower lip streaked with grime.  He sat on a dirt mound in the backyard and held a slender stick in the air like an orchestra conductor’s baton.  Marilyn hadn’t realized when she took the photo that Michael hadn’t just been playing in the dirt with the stick; he was using it to collect ants and then eat them.  After finally witnessing this, she recoiled in disgust and told him to stop it immediately; it would make him sick.  Michael just looked down at the dirt and the scattering ants in disappointment.  “But I want to keep them for always,” he had said, his lower lip puffing out.  He patted at his stomach.  “Like an ant farm.”  Concerned about how many little bodies had already been consumed, Marilyn considered inducing vomiting, but then decided to just keep an eye on him and let nature take its course.

Still, eighteen years later, when the oncologist displayed the images they had taken of Michael’s stomach, pointing to this and that, Marilyn couldn’t help but hope that the doctor was just looking at the work of those ants in those images.  Perhaps they hadn’t died like she thought after all.  Maybe there was a whole working colony, alive and well, creating homes and tunnels, living their lives and starting families of their own.  Maybe they were staying with Michael for always, just like he wanted.  That would be something they could deal with, surely.  He was older then and had no use for ants anymore; she would be able to convince him to give them up–make them live somewhere else–and then everything would be okay.  But as the doctor prattled on in his sympathetic tone, she knew that it wouldn’t be that easy.  Nothing would ever be easy again.

Marilyn ran her hand across the photo, tracing the line of dirt on Michael’s cheek.  Then she reached into her desk drawer, pulled out a pair of scissors, and cut a circle just around his face.  Laying the rest of the photo down, she stared at her son’s eyes for a long time, so mischievous in his mission.  Those were the eyes she wanted to remember, so happy and healthy and full of all the years that should have been promised to him—not the gaunt, pained eyes that she looked into at the end.

While Joe wasn’t looking, she carefully folded the circle into a half-moon and slid it onto her tongue.  She closed her eyes and swallowed it down.

Sherri Collins is a full-time attorney and part-time writer, living in the foothills of Tennessee.  Her work can be found in The Big Jewel, The Molotov Cocktail, and Bartleby Snopes, among others.