Foliate Oak March 2016

Fiction

The Ant Lady
By E. Amato

It started simply.
 
Plagued in the night by this feeling this crawling feeling she could no longer take, she trained herself – forced herself awake and to turn the light on and that’s when she realized  - she realized – she wasn’t crazy at all – she was being crawled on – all night long – by ants. Lines of ant soldiers used her as a passageway at night. She jumped from her night bed and began flicking the ants off off off her – she was a bit angered, to be truthful, a bit put off by these ants. She knew they’d found ways inside, she’d had to battle them before, but this familiarity of her body her night body her sleep – this was more than she would stand.
 
So, the next day, she took special care to seal up all their known entrances. She went down to the hardware store and bought a caulking gun, caulk, and boric acid. She filled the holes with the boric acid, and then she used the caulking gun to seal them up. She was sure this would be the end of it. Her baseboards all had white caulking spreading out from them now, but as long as she had sealed away the ants, she was happy.
 
She stayed up that night, caulking gun at her side, and she watched the holes. It was a full moon. In the morning, she woke up on the floor, surprised, but then soon realized that there were no ants – no ants at all. She had done it. She and her home were safe.
 
A few days later, when she was busy cooking her weekly stew, she noticed an ant crossing the counter. She was disturbed – disturbed, but not fazed – it was a lone ranger who’d lost its herd. She took her index finger, and came down on it, breaking its miniscule exoskeleton. She rinsed her hand and went back to cooking.
 
In the bathroom, a couple of days after this, she found 2 or 3 ants wandering behind the toilet bowl as she cleaned. She was a little upset, but then, they could have come through the plumbing somehow. She’d call the building and have them take care of it. She took her finger, and like they were stray poppy seeds on a counter, compressed them and flicked them off.
 
That night she dreamt of a desert, a foreign desert – the kind you see in movies with sand forever. So much sand it becomes a weapon; something you can never escape. She dreamt the way the wind ripples the ridges making patterns, inescapable patterns. The geometry turning into threat. So small to begin with, this grain of sand, yet when joined with billions of its companions, it becomes immortal. The desert was just grains of sand but it was always about to overpower those who dared to cross it. There was no sandstorm in her dream, no heat stroke. Just the pervasive feeling that the landscape might rise up at any moment, and claim its ongoing victory.
 
In the morning, she was making her coffee when she saw it – a line of ants going right through the coffee maker. She was livid. Livid. This surely had to be from the neighbor – the guy next door whose apartment was overgrown with junk and dirt. She would see about this. There were just too many of them for her index finger, so she opened the drawer and found a little Ziploc bag, snack size. She held it open in their path and waited for them to march in, then sealed it just as they were getting confused and starting to turn around. Then she got another bag and did the same thing. She left the bags on the counter as she went next door to complain to the neighbor. He was not at home, or at least not for her. She came back and looked at the bags, uncertain of what to do.
 
She threw them in the freezer.
 
By the end of the week, she had a freezer shelf full of bags.
 
She went to the store to buy more Ziploc bags. She had graduated from snack size to sandwich bags by now.
 
She continued to fill the bags. She didn’t know where to put them, so she just began to carry them with her. She would walk around her apartment, small Ziploc bag in hand, and absent-mindedly between her fingers, she would pop pop pop each one, like the bubbles in bubble wrap. At first she didn’t even realize she was doing it, but then it became a game for her, a way of passing time. She had preferences – she did not like the tiny ones, the ones as slim as feather fronds – they did not have a good action to them. She did not like the very large ones; they were too creature-like – too animate. But there was a perfect size of ant to crunch between her fingertips. A nice medium-sized black ant made a popping sound – tiny – but she could hear it – and gave her a satisfaction.
 
One night a friend from out of town came to visit and invited her out for a drink. It had been a long time since she’d been out, except to go to the store. She dressed carefully – though everything she owned was essentially the same. She preferred black, crisp fabrics, pants and a shirt, but still she tried to order her hair a bit, and she put on some lipstick. Red.
 
As she went out the door, she grabbed her purse, her keys, and a few of her special bags.
 
At the bar, her friend sat with several other people. She had not been expecting this. She steeled herself for the kind of conversation people who enjoy conversation participate in. She smiled, walked forward, and hugged her friend. She found a stool and struggled up with her purse carefully in her lap. There were a lot of people here; it was noisy. The friends of her friend all seemed dynamic and excited. She sat quietly, wishing she could just talk to her friend. Tell her friend the story of the ants and her fantastic victory over them!  But her friend and her friend’s friends prattled on about fashion and drama and the wars and seemed oblivious to her.
 
At one point her friend turned directly to her – the conversation stopped.
 
He said,
 
“You’ve been so quiet – tell me what’s going on with you?” 
 
Everyone looked her way – everyone in the whole bar. She was suddenly tongue-tied – how could she explain – make them interested in her journey – her journey with the ants – she she well, she laughed a dizzy little laugh – the kind she’d seen in movies and she smiled and she said, “oh, me – you know I’m the same as always.” Then she laughed again. Her friend looked at her for a while, but the rest of the conversation started up again as if she’d never been there. As if she was a hole that had been suddenly caulked over, now invisible to the universe.
 
In retrospect, this might have been a great time to leave – make her excuses about having to get up early and go.
 
Instead, she reached into her bag, and, nonchalantly, pulled out one of her little Ziplocs. While everyone else chatted, she silently took her thumb and forefinger and squeezed in successive bursts. Squish, squish, squish, squish. A kind of black soup began to form in the bag. The bar was dark, her movements were tiny and repetitive, but eventually, a pair of eyes came to rest on hers. A friend of her friend’s, a beautiful young dancer, watched her. He said, “Are you hiding some chocolate from us over there?  Not going to share?”  She looked up sharply when she realized this was directed at her.
 
Ten eyes suddenly turned to her lap. “What is that?” her friend said. “What are you doing?”
 
“Nothing,” she said as she tried to put away the bag quickly. It fell on the floor. The beautiful young dancer picked it up swiftly and gracefully. He looked at it before handing it back.
 
“What is this?  What is in here?”
 
“Nothing.”
 
She snatched at the bag.
 
“Oh my God – is this?  Is - are those ants?”

“No, you don’t understand –“
 
“Dead ants?”
 
“No –“
 
“Are you carrying around dead ants?   Why would you do that?”
 
As she was about to try to explain, as a barrage of words began rushing from her throat, too many at once to make a straight line of words – no possible sentences – one of her friend’s friends – one wearing a bow tie and looking very pleased with himself, began singing “Dead ant, dead ant, dead ant dead ant dead ant, dead ant dead ant…” in the tune of the Pink Panther theme song.
 
An ocean liner sank inside her. She couldn’t take this. She was about to cry. She looked at her friend and then ran out to the street. She would just jump in the first taxi she saw and go home. Home. She would go home. Now. She heard her friend calling after her – heard her friend’s lovely, birdlike voice, but she could not stop hearing the laughter and the singing and she kept running until she could not hear the sounds anymore.
 
 
At home, safely inside, she flung out the contents of her purse. She threw some cold water on her face. She did not know what to do next. She sat on her couch for a long time. Right in the middle of the couch, staring straight ahead.
 
Around her, streams of ants were filing past. This was their home now. They had paths and routes. They had infrastructure. Without her constant vigilance, there would be no room left for her.
 
She rose from the couch. Went to the freezer. She looked at the freezer full of little bags of carrion. She took one out. She placed it on the counter. The closest thing she could find was her morning mug. Her favorite coffee mug – the one that said I <3 Victoria, BC with a picture of a maple leaf. She loved that mug. It was perfect. She took the mug now, in passion, in defiance, and began to pummel the frozen bag of ants. She brought the mug down on the frozen mass on the counter over and over; she was trying to break it into a million tiny pieces. Shards of mug went flying all over the kitchen. Finally all that was left was the handle she was holding.
 
She looked down at her ant holocaust. Her work. Her art. No one understood. She did not need them to, did she?  She just needed them to leave her alone. This was work she needed to do. To defend her home from the onslaught of ants that threatened to take it over. While she sometimes felt she was losing the war, what else could she do?  Her home was invaded by hostile forces. If she had to spend her life defending it, well, that was what she would do. She couldn’t let down her guard or let her vigilance lapse. If she did, she’d be infested. Surely this was not crazy. This was her right as a homeowner, as an American, as a human.
 
She breathed a sigh of competence. She returned the ants to the freezer. She cleaned up the pieces of her favorite mug. Maybe one day she’d take another trip to Canada, take a trip and get another mug; she’d make it a quest to find the same one again. In the meantime, she would just have to do without it. Or maybe she could glue it – yes – she’d glue it back together. That would be a project. She’d go to the hardware store and ask for the best glue for the job. That would be a good thing to do.
 
Yes. That’s what she would do next.

“…unapologetic feminist, dulcet-toned poet, activist, film-maker, editor of Zestyverse” (LossLit)

E. Amato is a published poet, award-winning screenwriter, and establishedperformer. She has three poetry collections released by Zesty Pubs: Swimming Through Amber, 5, & Will Travel, and is a content writer for The Body Is Not an Apology.

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The Poker Game
By John P. Kristofco

Peter Allen wasn’t grim, though most of the kids on Portage Street thought he was.They never saw him smile, and he always yelled at them when they cut across his yard orjumped the hedges that ran along the sidewalk the length of his property. “Don’t ever buy a house on a corner,” he told his son Alex once, shaking his head.“Worse thing I ever did.” The ten year-old nodded like he often did when his father said things that didn’t seem to matter to him, even though he was perhaps the best hedge jumper on the block, practicing his craft when his father was at work and his sisters weren’t home. They would be only too happy, he knew, to rat him out to dad. Peter Allen would burst from the side door and shake his bony fist. “Damn kids!” he’d yell, then walk his quick, stiff gait out to the hedge to make sure it wasn’t damaged,  pulling and placing it back into shape. 

Having a tidy hedge line, both on top and on the side, was an important matter to him.He had just this summer started to let Alex clip a small section of it, watching as he did.  It would be another year before he’d let the boy trim the entire length. That was his way with so many things, orderly, one right way to do them, and he did them with precision and on schedule.  He was a timekeeper after all. But he did not do them with joy, at least not as far as Alex could tell, and he countedhimself something of an expert on that subject, though he almost certainly would not havethought to call it that.  His Saturdays on bicycles with friends, wiffle ball and little leaguein the summer, Charlotte Crowe sitting next to him at school all brought smiles to his face,even when he wasn’t doing them.  He wasn’t sure what, if anything, did that for his dad. It wasn’t that he was grim exactly, though Mikey Richert called him that once, saidhe was the “grim keeper.”  Alex felt guilty when he heard that from his friend, because hecouldn’t help but laugh. His father was, as Alex named it, “serious.”  It seemed as though everything he did was important, that it somehow mattered to the world. “You know, Alex,” his mother told him once, “things were tough for your father when he was a boy.”  Alex had already gained a sense for that from the two trips back to his father’s home town in Pennsylvania. “He was one of eleven children.  Grandpa Allen worked in a coal mine, and hey neverhad much, so the kids had to pitch in with what they could.” Alex nodded. “Like when he picked up scrap coal from the dump and hunted ginseng in the woods.”  He had heard these stories many times. Mrs. Allen nodded.  “Yes, and helping to keep the garden and the chickens.” “So, that’s where his ‘do what you’re supposed to do’ came from?” Mary Allen smiled.  “Yes, I suppose so.” 

As far as Alex could tell, his father didn’t have friends certainly not like Alex and his sisters had.  Even his mom had Eleanor Poole down the street and Mikey Richert’s mother who she talked with now and then, met with to go down to Terry-town Shopping Center.  He heard her on the phone with them, heard his mother talk about them. But his father didn’t mention anybody in that way.  Sure, he talked with John Zomsky across the street who cut his hair once a month, and he mentioned his boss The Paymaster at work, and there were the guys he bowled with on Friday nights, but there wasn’t a Mrs. Poole or an Irene Richert in his world.  Surely, there was no Mikey Richert. Alex heard him talk about a Joey Petrok a couple times, best man at their wedding and apparently his ‘best friend.’  But Alex was almost eleven, and he had never met the man.  As far as he knew, he had never been to the house.

It was a cold evening in January when Alex first heard about the poker game. “George Willis said he won’t be able to host us at his place,” he overheard his father telling his mother in the kitchen. “He said they’re having some trouble with the pipes.  He asked me if we could do it.” There was silence except for the sound of dishes in the sink. “Well,” his mother finally said, “it has been a while, hasn’t it.” “George said it was about three years ago.” “Then I guess it’s our time.” “Okay, I’ll tell him at work tomorrow.” The kitchen door opened, and Alex leaned toward the television as if he was intent on the new episode of Ozzie and Harriet that Wednesday night. “Alex,” his father paused on his way to the bedroom, “get your stuff off the table downstairs and put it in the fruit cellar,” and before he the boy could respond, his dad disappeared around the corner. “Okay,” he said to the back of his dad’s leg. A moment later, his mother appeared at the kitchen door. “Alex,  would you mind tidying up down the basement?” He squinted and tilted his head.  “Uh,…..sure….what’s up?” Mary Allen draped the dishcloth across the stove handle. “Your dad’s having the card game here on Saturday.” That didn’t sound familiar. “Card game?” “Yeah. Dad plays cards a couple times a year with some men from work.” “I didn’t know that.” “Yep.  They’ve been doing it for maybe seven-eight years now.” “How come they never have it here?” “Oh, they did a while back, when you were seven or so.” For the next two days, the house took on a sense of urgency.  Alex and his sisters putaway their things from the small basement. Mary Allen mopped the linoleum floor, took downthe clotheslines, washed the old kitchen table that had been down there for as long as Alexcould remember,  cleaned her old white ringer washer, and, with the help of her daughters,cleaned and ‘prettied-up’ the house’s one small bathroom. Storage boxes with their odds-and-ends were closed, stacked, made to stand in order.

Air fresheners were bought and strategically placed in corners out of sight.  The only two of the six basement windows that actually worked were opened an inch or so to let in cold,fresh air. For his part, Peter Allen’s already serious countenance took on an even sharper focus.He picked up two cases of beer: one Gold Bond and the other Carlings.  He bought bags of chips and pretzels, even some sour cream and onion dip, all things usually reserved for the holidays or the infrequent visits from relatives.  He bought cans of mixed nuts and bags ofM&M’s. It was like a hive until Saturday when they ate dinner early, and Alex’s sisters went off to spend the evening with friends.  Only Alex was unable to make the same arrangements, so he would be at home, admonished  in words that allowed no room for interpretation or latitude that he was to “stay quiet and  out of the way.” The plan for that was simple: watch t.v. with his mother and just go to bed by ten. It seemed a straight forward if not inspired strategy. But, like so many human designs, it did not anticipate every contingency, and when Mary fell asleep in her chair while they were watching Gunsmoke, Alex was left to his own improvisation. Below him were the voices of men he did not know except for one in the house that he helped clean, laughing, calling out, lowering the register for ‘shit’ and ‘godammit,’ sometimes sharing them as if there weren’t a ten year-old and his mother just above them.Twice he heard his father scold an offender, and Alex would hear, “sorry, Pete, okay?”to the squelched laughter of the others.

It was unlike anything he’d ever heard in their small bungalow.  He thought maybeIt would wake his mother, but she was much too competent a sleeper to allow that to happen.He  began to imagine what it looked like down there. It had long ago been discovered by the children in the Allen house that one could geta pretty good view of the basement from the top of the steps, especially when only the fartheraway of the two overhead lights was in use like it was tonight. He was certain that his dad would not want him to do it, that it would indeed qualify as“getting in the way,” and that there might be a debt to pay if he were detected, but the sound was too enticing, surely much more compelling that Miss Kitty’s doe-eyed looks at Marshall Dillon. Alex walked quietly into the kitchen and stood a moment at the door to the steps.  The voices grew louder.  He could smell the cigarettes and cigars, bottles being set back down on the table his mother had cleaned.

It was all too irresistible. He flicked off the kitchen light and opened the door slowly, quietly, just enough to peeka head through.  He stretched out on the floor and looked down the stairs. There in the hazy halo around the table, six men sat, two of them facing the stairs; oneof those was his father. They sat as if they ran the world, some secret group hidden from the sun.  Smoke driftedup to the single light as if  it bore the burden of their lives breathed out, cleansed by lukewarmbeer pulled from cardboard cases by the wall. These men from the factory, the offices that took the days away like canceled pages from their calendars, faces, hands lined and tired, so far distant from the time they dreamt of what they might become some day, sheltered for this gauzy island’s five-hour respite. They slapped down cards and coins, chided one another, drew smoke deep into their lungs, tossed their heads back for more beer. And there among them, with a green visor on his head and his shirtsleeves neatlyrolled, Peter Allen sat with a smile on his face that Alex had never seen.  It cut through thesmoke to him as if a veil had been lifted for a moment. The smile was wide, unfettered, set free if only for this time, as if the man knew his car and all the others  owned by the bank sat icing in the January night, and he didn’t care.  None of that mattered.  For those five hours all thatmattered was that hazy circle in his basement. Alex felt his own face smile in a way it never had before.  He slowly shook his head,rose, closed the door, and went back into the living room. He never forgot that evening, the night the poker game came to his house.

John P. Kristofco's poetry and short stories have been published in about two hundred different publications, including: Rattle, Slant, Cimarron Review, The Chaffin Journal, and Sierra Nevada Review. He has published two collections of poetry and is currently working on a collection of short stories, of which "The Poker Game" is one. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize five times.

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Mourning People
By JT Lachausse

​Dreary stood on the roof of the Sedan and swung a shovel at the air. A routine, you could call it, a ritual she made within the past year, swinging that big black shovel at nothing, her feet denting the steel roof inward, her mouth liberating wild strings of slobber that dampened the top of her dress.
 
Dreary would wear only this dress for her shovel-swinging activities. It was a bright green muumuu ornamented with a great red dot at the center of its chest, an attachment made after months of saliva weakened the fabric enough to need such repair. Most nights, she possessed the energy to swing her shovel with unyielding might, her screeching and stomping commencing after dinner and concluding before bath time. A particularly good night, such as tonight, would find the jade green splotches extending down to her knees, the rivers of a map crawling forth from the ocean-dampness at her chest, splitting at the circular lava bank that was the red dot and rushing down; it would find the trenches on the roof of the Sedan to be filled like thick basins of spit, Dreary’s feet splashing it all about onto the windshield and between her toes.
 
From across the street, where the Pleasants would watch Dreary through their dining room window, they would tilt their heads in unapologetic interest. The street light that rose from their driveway illuminated the dark just enough so that Dreary seemed to be but a floating garment.
 
“Confined to her misery,” Mrs. Pleasant had said, as she usually did.

It had taken a few months for Mrs. Pleasant to find the words she wanted to say about the Dreary-shovel-swinging situation, but once she had found them, she made sure to use them daily. One of the first incantations of this phrase was, “poor thing, she will never not be miserable,” but she figured this was much too wordy for dinner talk, as dinner talk was meant to be brief; “confined to her misery,” she would say, and then take another sip of soup, or tea, which it was always soup or tea. The Pleasants understood that consistency in life was important, and as such, while they found the Dreary-shovel-swinging situation to be rather despondent and horrific, they respected her consistency.
 
“Mmm,” Mr. Pleasant would grumble, as he always did, and then, “what a pity.”

He found comfort with these brief beginnings, Mrs. Pleasant believed, and he too seemed to understand that consistency was important to fostering a better self, that even in conversation you must exercise restraint, and so he closed with a “where is her mother?” before taking a slurp of his oatmeal, or his coffee, which it was always oatmeal or coffee.
 
The Pleasants had known Dreary’s mother for many years, as she had grown up in the house across the street. Merry had always performed herself with “consummate elegance”, Mr. Pleasant would often explain to Mrs. Pleasant, and so it baffled them as to how Dreary came about. How had Merry’s child fallen so far from the landscape of human decency? Perhaps it was the father, Mrs. Pleasant would hypothesize, as Dreary had never before been seen until her father had died. Perhaps the consistency of her life had broken and now Dreary could not function as the rest of society could, although she did have her routine, and as such, she was “sorting herself out”, she was “adjusting her consistencies” Mrs. Pleasant would conclude before another spoonful of soup, or tea, which it was always one or the other, or both.
 
“Perhaps,” Mrs. Pleasant began, which was uncommon, as the conversation was usually made to end after her closing hypotheses, “perhaps I should see about giving the poor girl one of my old dresses.”

Mr. Pleasant looked up to his wife with a furrowed brow, his oatmeal spoon waiting in the air to be eaten from, his coffee steaming up in anticipation.
 
“Mmm,” Mrs. Pleasant heard him say as they both turned back to the window.

Beyond, Dreary’s garment spun around in the air, that same phantom presence as always; but there, in the reflection, Mrs. Pleasant noticed her husband’s face staring back at her, a floating head that seemed to sway with the dress, almost responding to it, the steam of his coffee rolling up the glass and curling around his face. Mrs. Pleasant reached out to the window and rubbed a forefinger at the condensation, brushing the cheek of her husband’s reflection, forming a line on the screen, and through it, she found a paralyzed green garment watching her, the sound of a shovel banging against metal.
 
Dreary stood atop the vehicle motionless, the shovel tumbling onto the steel and then off onto the concrete driveway. The blood and innards of a crow had erupted onto her, the beak caught in her saliva-laden hair, the feathers stuck to her dress and her face, the basins of spit mixed in with a dark, brown juice. She looked down onto her chest and found one of the crow’s eyes stuck to the center of her red dot. “What a wonder, what a wild thing to happen,” she thought. Dreary looked up into the sky, as if the crow would still be hanging there, glaring down at her like, “Hey! What’s the big idea?”, but it was gone. She looked across the street where she found one of her neighbors, Ms. Pleasant, seated at her dinner table. The woman ate by herself, always, always watching Dreary from across the road to keep her company, maybe, always talking to her behind the glass window.
 
Dreary crawled off of the Sedan and walked back into the house. It was time to take a bath, she said to herself, carefully walking through the front door and down her hallway, careful to not touch anything. She entered the bathroom and slipped out of her clothes. She stepped into the bath tub and turned the faucet on, the clear water flooding up and eating away at the grime on her body.
 
Her throat was sore from screaming and her arms were tired. She found it hard to clean herself, but now she was too exhausted to think, which was a good thing. Dreary told herself that she was done crying and so she was done crying. She told herself that the day was over and there was no reason to worry anymore, that tomorrow would bring something better for her, like her husband had always said. After she dried herself off, she watched the black water spin at the drain and disappear.
 
When Dreary woke up the next morning, she put on her work clothes, as usual, and stepped out the front door. In the yard across the street, Ms. Pleasant watered her flowers and looked up to greet her, as she always did.
 
“Morning, Merry!” she called, and Merry returned the greeting with a wave.

She stepped into her Sedan and turned on the ignition. As was always the case, she would need to clean off the windshield, and so she sprayed some water on the glass and turned on the windshield wipers. She put the vehicle in reverse and started to back out of the driveway when the Sedan jerked up in a violent reaction, the sound of a loud rupture coming from beneath the car. In the rearview mirror, Merry could see Ms. Pleasant waving her arms frantically and striding across the street.
 
Merry stepped out of her vehicle and found her shovel broken in half, the metal handle punctured into one of her wheels, her Sedan gradually sinking with a gentle hiss. Ms. Pleasant stepped beside her and wrapped an arm around her shoulder, both of the women staring down at the broken shovel, the blade still stained with the gory crow remains.
 
“I can give you a ride to work, dear,” Ms. Pleasant said to Merry.

​ “I don’t think my husband would mind.”

JT Lachausse serves as the co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Matador Review and is an associate editor at Hotel Amerika. His work has been featured in Quail Bell Magazine, and he has work forthcoming in Enizagam, apt, Polaris, and Praxis. Originally from Aurora Sparks, Texas, he now lives in Chicago, where he attends Columbia College for Fiction Writing.

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