Christine Ma-Kellams
Schadenfreude

<< continued from Part 3

But only the mad write and the world hasn't been perfect since that that first Sunday when the good Lord rested (and then starting the next day-on what else? a Monday-it all started going to shit).

Dad!Dad!Dad! I call again, less sure of myself this second time. I run into our yellow kitchen and look for signs of life. There's the spoon sitting on the bottom of the sink; the shiny white skid marks streaked across the concave stainless steel looks like freshly licked Cool Whip-which, in that household, constituted a reasonable breakfast. I walk back to the bathroom, carrying the silence like a still-born. Nick and Ben are squatting because they were built like Japanese courtesans and I was built like pre-diabetic Paula Deen-just without the class-so they can suspend their asses over their ankles with effortlessness and stupid indifference and I-I can watch, jealous. My unfounded optimism in calling Dad's name must've woken them. Their eyes are downcast but their faces look like its Christmas-fucking-morning. Bleach and ammonia and Windex and SoftScrub are scattered across the linoleum like half-consumed presents. Nick has an unmarked teal spray bottle in one hand and my toothbrush in the other-

"Hey!" I protest, in recognition. Ben is diligently trying to dislodge the blade from an orange Bic. "What the-"

"Do you think they bleed?" Ben asks philosophically. "Gotcha!" He answers himself, as the thin blade surrendered from its clementine-colored captor. Before I can reply he opts for hypothesis-testing and starts methodically slicing the line of ants, sometimes catching linoleum and sometimes catching a torso or head or leg. He looks disappointed.

"My toothbrush-"

"You have too many cavities," Nick answers, "You don't need it." I believe him despite my more empirical self and watch like a little bitch as he uses it to corral a pile of ants into the mouth of the spray bottle to meet their Auschwitz. A few lucky (unlucky?) ones get glued to the day-old toothpaste stuck on the roots of the bristles, spared or doomed I can't tell (depends, I suppose, on whether I'd use said toothbrush again).

"Are you trying to kill them? Because there are better ways." "No, I'm gonna see if they can swim."

"In Windex?"

Nick is silent, oblivious to his methodological confounds and I walk away, hungry and thinking of Cool Whip.

That night, Dad discovers the Coke ants, but only because a string of them managed to pilgrimage from our bathtub to the kitchen and discovered, much to their reward, his poorly- licked spoon in the sink. Apparently both my idiot brothers got tired of experimenting with death traps shortly after Nick's too-successful Windex study ("yeah, they swam all right, but then they got tired and died") and left the little suckers alone to their unabated exploration through the house. Vicky jumps on this early like a gay teen who has just discovered Grindr, and cites it as prime grounds for rendering her incapable of making dinner or functioning in the house at all, really. She waves around a Xanax tucked between her palm and her thumb and with her free hand pours herself a Sauvignon Blanc in a coffee mug.

Dad sees the bathtub painted with coke, sees the ants' shiny chocolate shells coloring Darine's plum calves black, and blinks once, that is all. He does not ask himself how lonely his sons must be to bathe themselves in his soda or figure out a way to subscribe to Hustler and Playboy and the Victoria Secret catalog using snail mail and cash allowances and no internet. He shows no awe for the clear appreciation his nine-year-old has for tits and ass and cola. He doesn't ask, and we don't answer.

>> click to read: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

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Christine Ma-Kellams, when she isn't writing, teaches psychology at the University of La Verne. Her fiction has appeared in ZYZZYVA, Kenyon Review, Baltimore Review, Paper Darts, and elsewhere.

>> Back to Issue 21, 2018