Ordinary Monsters by Karen Novak

Author:Karen Novak
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781596918672
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-11-24T00:00:00+00:00

Entr’acte: Abby

I am here to tell you the truth. You know, before you start making assumptions. Whether or not you believe me, I can’t do anything about that. But, for whatever it may be worth, everything I’m about to tell you is true - which is not the same as saying it actually happened.

Six years ago, when I was eleven, I had an accident with a magnifying glass in the vacant lot at the end of my street. I was looking at ants, the tiny red biting kind, for a ‘Nature in My Neighborhood’ journal we were keeping as part of our environmental-studies project. I’d followed a grasshopper all the way up Madera Canyon Drive, although it probably had no idea my interests were limited to that of a sixth-grade class assignment. It probably thought I was chasing it because I was hungry. I was hungry, but by age eleven I was getting good at figuring out how to not feel what I was feeling. I exiled hunger from my belly, sending it to pace around the edges of my mind like one of those cage-crazed animals we saw on field trips to the zoo.

The vacant lot filled the curve of the cul-de-sac and spread out in a pie-shaped wedge until it hit the upward slope of the next hill. It was a rocky but level space covered with weeds and prickle plants. The air was full of chirping insect sounds. I had my notebook and pencil and the magnifying glass I’d borrowed from my mother’s cross-stitch stuff - she uses it for enlarging patterns and undoing mistakes. I lost my grasshopper in the vacant lot; it escaped me, disappearing in the rustling brittle grasses. I was trying to hunt it down when I spotted the ants. Fire ants, they’re called. They swarmed in curlicue lines around the tufts of brown grass to get to whatever was inside the lunch bag someone had dropped out there. The lunch bag was what they were after, but it took me a while to track down the hole in the crumbly earth where they were coming from. I felt tingles on my feet, crawling on my ankles and bare legs. I kept thinking the ants were on me, inside my socks and shoes, trundling blind up my thighs, up under the cuffs of my shorts. I slapped at myself and jumped around. I must have looked like a dork. But I didn’t want even one on my skin. A single fire ant won’t bite; it waits until a bunch of its buddies are on board, and then through some sort of ant ESP, they bite simultaneously. They got on me once when I was little and playing at a friend’s house. I learned real quick how they earned their name. I screamed and screamed until my friend’s mom came and turned the garden hose on me full blast to wash them off. My skin, where they’d bitten me, went sunburn red.

In our nature journals, we were supposed to note all our observations of the habitat.

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