Dancing The Ants
The sculptor rents a room across the street from the bus station and the next evening a waitress invites the sculptor to a party and her brother picks him up on a scooter. They wind into the hills above town. Shards of glass blink on concrete walls. He reaches out. The trees close overhead. The houses space further apart. A dog runs into the road balking back and forth and terror spreads across the sculptor’s face and the brother bears down on the dog and the sculptor cries out but the dog darts under a fence. They enter a red-lit basement, groaning dance beats like a wolf. An old woman next door sells beers from her kitchen window for a dollar. The waitress introduces the sculptor to her friends. They smile, pinch her elbow. Everyone dances. For a long time the sculptor presses his eyes shut and moves with the galvanized spine of a snake until a girl taps his shoulder and calls him Cristal. He buys a round of beers and taps his chest when they ask why he’s not drinking. They don’t understand and soon the waitress and her friends slip outside, smoke, consider another party and when they go back inside the waitress’s brother says the gringo was just writhing like a madman on the floor and when the waitress asks where he went her brother points towards the trees with his cigarette.
She follows.
A stone quartz path winds away. She examines a set of flowers. They’ve been arranged around a stone like the dots of a clock. She stands on the stone and lets the light from her flash glare off the red petals.
An ant crawls over her toenails, painted white with orange stripes, and onto the leaves of the flower at the seven position. The ant winds to the earth. There are more ants. Black hairs grow from their mouths and connect to a grey tuft growing from the earth. They twitch faintly. The ant that had crossed her toe wanders among them. It tweezes its antennae. It snips a few of the black hairs and scuttles into the grass.
