A Dark Sea [of Miniscule Bodies]

Most mornings when Ms. Blankly wakes up, she experiences a calmness in her half-asleep grogginess, which she imagines is the way most people feel when they meditate. The serene feeling lingers for only a moment before the panic grips her again. It begins with a sudden seizing of her chest, like her rib cage is shrink-wrapping itself around her heart and lungs caused by an electric shock that spreads from her chest through her veins until it reaches her scalp and toes. She walks down the hall, past her cabinet of beautiful trinkets she’d collected over the years and arranged just-so, to her kitchen and gets her medication.
She takes three pills each morning from her plastic day of the week container. Today she opens Thursday and observes the big white pill on the left side of the small cubby, the diamond-shaped pink pill on the bottom right, and the see-through gold pill above it. She arranges them in exactly that pattern each Sunday because it reminds her of the golden ratio she’d learned about in school during her math and science classes. She dumps the pills into her hand and remembers that her therapist encouraged her to make positive associations with everyday experiences. As she swallows, Ms. Blankly imagines that the pills are the flowers that bloom each spring in the field next to her childhood home.
The scent memory of the flowers lingers in her mind as Ms. Blankly turns on the weather channel. Even though she doesn’t intend to leave the house, Ms. Blankly wants to be dressed for what’s happening outside. The weatherman is talking about the unseasonably warm weather, which happens to be the hottest day on record for this time of year. Ms. Blankly is aware of the electric tingle making its way out of her chest to her toes again. As she buttons her blouse, Ms. Blankly imagines forest fires and hurricanes. She imagines giant patches of ice crumbling and people wandering the streets, homeless due to permanent flooding. The ideas fade from Ms. Blankly’s mind just as quickly as they started, and all she is left with is a numb feeling in her fingertips.
Ms. Blankly takes her cup of tea and sits down at her computer in her tidy home office to work, placing undecipherable data into new spreadsheets so that it could be decoded by someone else. As she clicks and drags and drops, she listens to the TV, which is on in the other room. It is harder to hear than when she had the TV in her study, but she moved it because her therapist told her to stop having the TV on while she was working. Ms. Blankly tried leaving the TV off entirely, but she found that she often invented worse things than the real news. Deciding to compromise, Ms. Blankly moved the TV out of her study a few weeks ago but left it on for the noise.
Today the newscasters are talking about a man who has been delivering exploding packages at people’s doorsteps. Three people are in the hospital, being treated for burns. The anchor says that people can take precautions by tracking any packages they’ve ordered and are welcome to call their local police if they believe they’ve received a suspicious package. She reassures herself that she never orders anything online.
Deciding she needs a break, Ms. Blankly walks to her living room and picks up the package sent by her brother for her birthday. Packages from her brother are the only ones she ever expects. He always lets her know before that he’s shipping them and when they will arrive. She opens the box wrapped in leftover newspaper, which tears away to reveal a compact survival radio. Her brother believes the world is ending because of the slow decline of society, which, he says, will lead to anarchy and in time, to death. He lives in a cabin in the middle of nowhere with a large mixed-breed dog named Peaches, a cellar full of canned foods, and a wall covered in guns and ammo. She will have to thank him the next time he calls.
Ms. Blankly sets the radio aside and begins making a snack. As she grabs the items from the cabinets, the doorbell rings. Ms. Blankly stops for a moment, and her hand begins to shake. The bell rings again, so Ms. Blankly sneaks towards the door on the balls of her feet, determined to make no noise. She leans gently on the door, looking through the peephole to see a delivery man.
Ms. Blankly’s chest seizes, and her hands glue themselves to the door. She isn’t expecting any packages. This is the man the people on the news warned about. Ms. Blankly takes another look out the peephole. The man is in a standard brown uniform with a yellow stripe running down the sleeve and the side of the shirt, which matches up with the yellow stripe running up from his shoes. He is holding a clipboard and adjusts the large package leaning against his leg. Ms. Blankly wonders how much explosive can fit in a box that size. The bell rings again, and Ms. Blankly jumps. She looks past the man, scanning the neighborhood for someone who might be able to act as an eyewitness to her imminent death. As she looks, her eyes catch on a delivery van, and she recognizes its bright yellow logo shining in the afternoon sun. The delivery man looks real, and the news didn’t say anything about the person using a delivery truck or uniform. The man starts to turn around but stops as he hears the door unlock.
“I have a package here for an Irene Blankly,” the man reads off his clipboard when Ms. Blankly opens the door.
“Yes, that’s me.”
“Great. Sign here for me.” He passes her the clipboard, and she scribbles her name at the bottom of the page. At her signature, the delivery man nudges the box closer to Ms. Blankly before turning and walking back down the three steps of her porch.
Ms. Blankly waits for the man to climb into his truck before turning her attention to the box. The size of the box makes Ms. Blankly think it will be heavy, and she readies herself to lift it. When she pushes up with her legs, the box flies off the ground, and Ms. Blankly almost loses her grip on the cardboard. She wonders for a moment about the weight of explosives, and figures that the box couldn’t possibly be full of them. Righting herself, she carries the box to her kitchen counter, where she cuts away the packing tape.
Inside is a card in her daughter’s handwriting, wishing her a happy birthday and asking her to give the present a chance. She wasn’t expecting a gift from her daughter, who had been distant since her father, Mr. Blankly, passed away several years ago. Ms. Blankly looks back and forth between the opened card and the brown packing paper, concealing the gift. She sets the card aside and pulls the paper away to reveal a smaller, bright yellow box, which she pulls from the rest of the shipping material.
ANT FARM is printed across the front of the yellow box in giant bubble letters. Underneath the company’s logo is a description that reads, See LIVE ants build bridges, dig tunnels and move mountains. Fun for the WHOLE FAMILY. Inside the box is a narrow plastic scene of a farmhouse and windmill and a printed picture of ants holding farming implements standing in tunnels underneath the buildings.
“Oh my god,” Ms. Blankly says to nobody.
She sets the box down because she begins to imagine the ants crawling up her arms and getting tangled in her hair. The thought crosses her mind that there might be live ants in the box, and she pulls away the rest of the packing paper to reveal a tube marked LIVE ANTS.
Ms. Blankly sets the sealed tube in the kitchen sink and waits for the ants to make their way out, pouring over her counters and floors until the whole room is covered in a dark sea of miniscule bodies, but nothing happens.
She wonders if she should leave them in the sink to let them waste away in the box, which she could toss in the bin in a few weeks, but thinks again of them chewing their way out of the box and deciding the kitchen was their new domain. She wonders if she could let them go in the backyard, but she wasn’t sure how far away they’d come from and if they would kill the grass. Ms. Blankly feels her heart tumble over itself again and a tingle zip along her arms and legs, as she realizes she has to keep them.
Ms. Blankly shoves the packing paper in the recycling bin and breaks down the cardboard box before taking the ant farm and tube of ants into the garage. The heavy door slams shut behind her, and for a moment she is left in the cool darkness, smelling the cold concrete. She flips on the switch and sets the two parcels on the workbench. The yellow box opens easily, and she slides out the instructions, which are full of diagrams explaining how to fill the container with sand, placing food and water, and adding in the ants. She thumbs through the pages quickly, making sure she wasn’t missing any steps when her eyes catch on one of the answers on the F.A.Q. page.
All the ants we send are non-breeding worker ants. This means that your ants will work to build themselves a new home in their farm, but will not be able to repopulate. Most of your ants will work, play and care for themselves for several months.
She takes a deeper breath. A few months wouldn’t be so long, she thinks. She tries to remember what happened a few months ago, but can’t decide if it was when the forests were on fire, or when everyone was concerned with genetically modified farm foods, or both. Or neither at all. Her thoughts turn from memories to forethought, and she wonders what things will be like in the next six months, more hurricanes and flooding, probably, though she can’t say why she thinks of those specific issues. And in a few months, she will once again have an empty plastic container, only full of sand and carbon that she can pour into the trash.
Ms. Blankly feels the electricity pulsing in her body still, but she picks up the utility knife she keeps on the workbench and presses it against the plastic wrapping keeping the lid of the tube in place. The feeling of a thousand little feet creeping across her body overwhelms her again, and she drops the knife on the ground. It clatters and slides a few feet away. Ms. Blankly looks at the trash bin near the garage door and wonders again if she should put them in and shut the lid on the entire misadventure. It could be so easy to ignore the hundreds of—thousands maybe—of feet inside the tube. She will never have to worry about them escaping that way, no worries about them making their home in her carpet or in the small gaps between the hardwood floors she’s been meaning to fix. She takes a few deep breaths, looking up towards the rafters of the garage.
As the electric sensation fades from her skin, she thinks about the F.A.Q. list. The ants have been sent to her specifically for her to care for, and in a few months they will all be dead. She imagines in some ways it might be less cruel to leave them in a tube, surrounded by their own vast nothingness than to put them in an artificial habitat to create a world for themselves, only to leave it at its completion. She sighs and picks up the knife. Following the instructions, Ms. Blankly gently taps the ants from the tube into the container.
She carries the ants inside, places them on the small table next to the TV, and goes back to her office, forgetting the unopened card and half-made sandwich on her counter.
That night, Ms. Blankly lies awake in bed, which isn’t unusual. Her mind runs through the things she learned today, about carjackers, the drought in the southwest, uprisings in another country, refugees drowning in the ocean. Normally, Ms. Blankly would end the day by thinking about her husband and then the end of the world. Ms. Blankly believes that the world will end suddenly and absolutely. That one moment everyone will be there and the next they will not, a candle’s flame being blown out in a single breath. There is no reason to worry about nuclear bombs and floods and fires. There is no reason to can food or buy a gun or follow any of the advice in the guidebook her brother sent. No reason to prepare at all. But tonight it doesn’t work. In the void of the end, which is usually an infinite nothingness, Ms. Blankly can feel the ants, hear them moving about in hoards in the darkness. A gigantic ant approaches her, its massive head glinting in some obscured light source, its antennae swirling around its head. Ms. Blankly sits up in bed and rubs her hands across her skin, dusting the invisible creatures from her body.
When Ms. Blankly wakes up from her restless sleep, she begins her routine again—a calmness, a panic, a walk past the curio cabinet to her medications, flowers in the field. As she walks through the living room, the new plastic container catches a ray of the morning sunlight filtering through the blinds. She feels a chill coming from inside her body and then a heat.
She wonders why her daughter sent the ants. She thinks to call and ask why she sent them, but wonders if it might cause another argument. They used to be so much closer before Mr. Blankly passed away. All of their routines were upended by his unexpected death. Ms. Blankly can’t recall one argument that led her daughter to stop calling. It seems now that it was a slow disconnection, as the loss weighed on each of them.
She remembers when her daughter was young. They used to tend to the garden in the backyard together. As she prepared the beds for the flowers, her daughter used to lay in the grass and look at the bugs. Ms. Blankly never understood the fascination, but her daughter always told her about the colors of their iridescent wings, hidden under dark shells, the way their feet moved, how groups of them would work together. Her daughter liked looking at the ants the most, watching them move as if they were water, flowing from one place to another.
Ms. Blankly shakes the thoughts from her head. She didn’t like the insects then, and she doesn’t like them now. She then looks at the box of cereal across the kitchen, realizing that she isn’t hungry but that she is going to go through the routine of making and eating breakfast to distract her from the new creatures living in her home. This is how Ms. Blankly spends the next few days, hoping that something, anything, even the horrible events on the news, will trick her into thinking about something other than the ants and whether she wants to speak to her daughter.
She feels sick when her wish is answered, as if she caused it to happen. There is an attack on the U.S. Embassy from the leaders of the uprising in another country. The major news organizations replay the same cell phone video footage provided by a citizen journalist who happened to be nearby at the time. The building and flags are in flames, people run through the smoke, someone trips and falls between the feet. Ms. Blankly focuses on the feet, moving around, over, almost through the person, imagining what it would be like to be trampled to death, a slow crunching of bones into organs. Then someone pulls the person up and drags them away from the fire. The video plays again and again as the anchors talk about what would happen next if the violence escalates.
Ms. Blankly sits and watches as the news outlets report each new insight they have into the incident, trying to determine whether there will be more attacks, whether there will be more retaliation, whether there are bombs to be considered, whether, whether, whether… But between the speculation, when the commercials play, Ms. Blankly finds herself watching the ants, already building a world all their own, full of twists and turns and mounds taller than the farmhouse painted in the background. Each time she catches herself, a chill runs through her and she turns her eyes back to the screen, desperate for the news to play again. Each time she wonders why her daughter sent the ants and imagines how the conversation might go if she reached out. Each time she brushes away the idea and switches her focus away from the ants.
A week after receiving the ants, Ms. Blankly wakes up and experiences a brief moment of calmness before the panic starts to spread through her limbs, and she makes her way past her curated curio cabinet to the kitchen. She takes her medicine, thinks of the flowers, and makes herself a cup of tea. As it brews, she walks to the TV to turn it on and is transfixed by the small lines of ants, moving in perfect synchronicity, around and through the lines moving up and down and across the plastic container. For a moment she remembers the busy streets of Vietnam, filled with motorists on scooters and small cars all moving together, water flowing through fingers. She and her husband had visited years ago, and stood on the balcony of their hotel, looking down at the lines of vehicles, mostly scooters, rumbling forward in a chaotic symphony of motors and honking horns. The ant she is watching stops and turns, reaching its body up the wall. Ms. Blankly shakes her head and presses the button on the TV. Nothing happens.
Ms. Blankly presses the button on the TV again, waiting for the screen to brighten from the center with a ring of static. When it doesn’t, she reaches around the back and runs her fingers along the cords, checking that each is plugged in. All of the cords are in place, so Ms. Blankly crouches down to the floor, cranes around the TV stand and presses the electrical cable into the outlet. She stands up and dusts herself off. She hits the power button again, but still nothing happens. Feeling the electricity begin to spread through her limbs again, Ms. Blankly walks down the hallway to her office, her eyes briefly catching on the lucky red dragon at the back of the cabinet that had returned from Vietnam with her. She listens, waiting to hear the drone of the computer breathing one long, unending sigh, but the room is quiet. She presses the computer’s power button, but like the TV, it doesn’t turn on.
Ms. Blankly leans against the desk, her pulse in her ears. She imagines all of the spreadsheets in her queue, waiting to be cleaned, she imagines her boss emailing her over and over, waiting for a response. Ms. Blankly looks out the window. The sky is grey and the trees are swaying in a gentle breeze. The neighborhood looks normal, the cars are in their normal places, the houses all look the same. Then Ms. Blankly realizes the woman isn’t out walking her dog. The woman always walks her dog at the same time. The electricity coursing through her body shocks her into motion. She picks up the radio her brother sent from the kitchen table, where it had been abandoned at the arrival of the ants. Ms. Blankly sits on a stool at the counter and fiddles with the knobs on the radio, moving between static and the faint traces of voices until she lands on a station.
“Sometime in the night, yes. It looks like they’ve managed to hack into our electrical system,” one of the hosts says in response to an unknown question. “They’ve already got the best engineers working on it, but they’re not sure how long it will be before power is restored to the entire metro area,” he continues.
Ms. Blankly is sure the host keeps talking, but it becomes background noise as she walks to the living room and collapses onto the couch. She feels a gap opening up in her stomach, a dark hole slowly expanding and consuming each of her limbs one by one. Then the images come to her like a flipbook, one right after the other; empty streets, a man kneeling in front of a large machine with a bag of tools, a map of the city where the lights flick off one by one, stop lights going grey all at once and unguided cars running through the untamed intersections, surgeons with pounding hearts left in a back-up generator-powered room, the man being trampled at the embassy, a flag with flames eating from the corner inwards, people covered in smoke and soot running down the street, an empty grocery store with its shelves raided, a woman sitting on the porch fanning herself because it’s too warm inside without air conditioning, people huddled around a radio after their portable chargers ran out of battery and their cellphones died, sirens warning of planes in the sky instead of lightning.
Ms. Blankly feels numbness spread from the center of her body outward, following the path of the electricity, as if she has been powered down too. The sound of the radio hosts starts to come back into her consciousness, and she sits up straighter on the couch.
She wonders what Mr. Blankly would say in this situation. He always was the adventurer. He convinced her to become an explorer. When she was with him, she was certain that there wouldn’t be anything amiss. And, in the impossibly small chance something came undone, Mr. Blankly had all the tools they needed to fix the problem.
He would probably tell her to get herself together, that the power would be back on soon enough. Nothing to worry about when the cabinets were stocked, the weather was pleasant, and the house was comfortable. Ms. Blankly decides that this is the best advice. Business as usual.
She decides to get a jumpstart on the cleaning she planned to do this weekend as she listens to the news on the radio. She begins by scrubbing the sink and the counters in the kitchen, staying close to the radio, listening to the hosts, waiting for them to have something new to share. As she finishes cleaning the kitchen, the hosts begin talking about supplies to have and what to do if medical treatment is needed. Ms. Blankly looks in the cabinets, confirming that she does, indeed, have enough supplies to last for a few days at least. She moves through the house, dusting and sweeping and swabbing until the sun starts to sink towards the horizon. Everything in the house is clean, and there is still very little new information.
Ms. Blankly settles in for the evening and moves the radio into the living room. She lights the few candles she has and gets out her flashlight. She is determined to treat the entire thing like an expedition, just like Mr. Blankly would.
As she places the lights around the house, she pauses for a moment at the ants’ container. She brings a candle closer to the plastic container and watches the light glint off their bodies. As they continue their never-ending parade, she realizes that they are not bothered by the darkness. It surprises her at first, but the more she thinks about it, she realizes that, left to their own devices, they would operate in darkness most of the time, wandering through their world of tunnels and continuing their work well into the nighttime. She sets a candle next to the container anyway, just in case they manage to get out.
She wonders if her daughter ever had an ant farm. Maybe her daughter has one now, and she is also watching them in the candlelit darkness. Ms. Blankly considers trying to get ahold of her daughter to, at the very least, let her know that she’d received the ants. She isn’t sure how she will accomplish it, though. The phone isn’t working, and she’d refused to get a cell phone since she worked from home. It will be a chore to drive there, with the traffic lights out. Maybe there are officers directing traffic, but it will be a nightmare still. And Ms. Blankly knows it isn’t wise to show up unannounced. No, she decides she will think of another way later. In the morning, maybe.
Ms. Blankly picks up a book and tries to start reading. She struggles to hold the book and the flashlight, finding it irritating to set the flashlight down each time she wants to turn the page. As she continues, the sun slips behind the houses and the horizon and the world is truly dark. The flashlight illuminates a circle on the page, where her eyes focus, but in the corner of her vision the other letters seem to wiggle and turn into lines of ants, so that every so often she turns the flashlight on the ant farm to make sure none of them are making their way across the carpet to her. They tried to scatter at the sudden change of light, creating dips in their otherwise perfect streams. Deciding she’s had enough of the ants, Ms. Blankly blows out the candles and makes her way to bed.
The next morning, Ms. Blankly almost forgets that there is no power until she walks down the hallway, past her collection cabinet, and into the kitchen, where the radio is waiting for her. She presses the power button and there’s a brief moment of static before the voices of the hosts cut through the silence of her house. She makes herself breakfast, and as she eats, Ms. Blankly realizes that she has nothing to do today. She supposes she could go to the grocery store, but she doesn’t want to be packed into the crowded aisles full of panicked people picking over what remained on the shelves after yesterday. The hosts say that the engineers are still working on the issue, but that people should expect the power to be out for a few more days. Ms. Blankly imagines the chaos that might unfold downtown by the end of those few days. The hosts say that the president is considering the next move, finding a way to balance the need to retaliate with the need to end the escalation, and she imagines the drones circling down like buzzards to a strategic target, one without citizens, all while people are working away to restore the power.
Ms. Blankly takes the radio outside and sits at her little-used table in her small backyard to read her book. The sun is warm but the air is cool. The neighborhood is still quiet, except for a few cars trundling along the street behind her house and a few children playing down the road, laughing and screaming as part of a game. She imagines this as the regular routine. There is a peacefulness about the quiet, everyone at home, but Ms. Blankly knows that it is not peaceful at all. That there are people struggling with being too hot in the day and too cold at night, people who are going hungry because the store was empty by the time they got there or because they couldn’t afford the food to begin with, people trapped in houses with their abusers, people wishing for the lights to come back on and let them out. Everything strange and twisted, amplified in the darkness, covered by the beautiful blooms of early spring.
Ms. Blankly finishes her book as the sun starts to sink. Before she goes inside, she strolls along the empty garden beds, thinking about what she might plant there when summer returns. She wonders if her daughter might like to come over to help this summer. Ms. Blankly feels the static again at the thought of having a conversation with her daughter. She very much does not want to argue anymore, but it seems right to try to reach out. Ms. Blankly feels a slight guilt that ignored the promise she made to figure out a way to talk to her daughter. With a refreshed resolve, Ms. Blankly promises she will try soon.
She goes back inside and begins her new routine of lighting candles, moving through her house, walls illuminated by the yellow-tinted light of the flashlight, and then the uneven movement of the flames. When the candles are lit, Ms. Blankly sits on the couch. The radio plays music because there is nothing new to report, so she listens to the music, remembering distant times brought back by the lyrics. She still watches the ants out of the corner of her eye, pretending that they are listening to the music too and changing their routine to match the beat. She slinks onto the floor, moving closer to the ant farm, and leans on the coffee table.
As nighttime rises and the house grows darker, Ms. Blankly watches the ants. She is equally repulsed and enraptured, both bothered by their presence and comforted; she is hypnotized by their infallibility. They are not bothered by the news or the light or the darkness. They are unaware of the broader world, unaware that everyone is waiting for something to give, snap, make finality out of the situation. All they know is a world full of food and water and tunnels. They sleep and play and eat and clean themselves. Ms. Blankly begins naming them after the characters in the book—this one is Charlie, this one is Inez, this one is George, this one is Peter, this one is Marta, this one is Penelope. And when she runs out of names from the book, she continues through names of people she’s met, people she’s heard of, names that she knows from some passing comment. When everything is dark, Ms. Blankly blows out the candles one by one and goes to sleep.
When she lies awake in bed, her mind racing about the power outage and the war and robberies, Ms. Blankly begins to imagine the end of the world, the infinite nothingness in which to float. This time nothingness is through a door at the end of a long corridor made of trees reaching up higher than she can see, their tops tangling together beyond. Mr. Blankly stands at the end of the corridor, beckoning her to join him on another adventure. She starts out, but the path is longer than she first imagined. At each bend there is something in her way; a burning flag she stamps out; a man crumpled on the ground with dusty footprints on the back of his jacket who she helps stand up; a mechanic searching for his tools, which she finds in her pocket. Then the soft light of the forest fades and she is lost in brambles and thorns, the door in the distance her only guide. Her clothes and hair catch in the branches and she is trapped. Along the branch in front of her face is a line of ants, carrying out their duties, some holding leaves and berries pulled from the bushes below. She watches them move, traces their pathway with her eyes, and soon she is in the unending darkness of sleep.
A week after the power went, Ms. Blankly sits on the couch and waits. She has read all the books in her house and she is sure she has named all the ants in the container. The hosts say that it will be a few more days, just a few more days. There are more attacks and more retaliation and more people sitting in the dark. Ms. Blankly decides to rearrange the items in her curio cabinet. She takes them out one by one and carries them to the living room, where she lines them up on the coffee table. She picks up a ceramic cat that has blue gemstones for eyes.
“This one,” she says, as she wipes away the dust on its head, “belonged to my grandmother. It sat on her dresser next to her jewelry box. I always liked watching the eyes sparkle as she got ready.” Ms. Blankly trades the cat for a small etching of a mountainside.
“And this one.” she looks over at the ants. They are undisturbed by her voice, so she continues, “is from our ski trip in the Rockies. It was so beautiful, all of the trees topped with snow, just like in a movie.”
She continues to tell the ants about each of her trinkets, where they had come from, who she was with, as she dusts each one. When she has cleaned them all, she takes them back to the cabinet and places them in a new order. She stands and looks at the curio cabinet, satisfied at her work and lingering on the memories of adventures with her husband and daughter. This reminds her to fulfill her promise. She will find a way to reach out to her daughter.
Ms. Blankly thinks for a moment, staring into the glass-front cabinet, before walking with purpose down the hallway to her office. She pulls open a drawer of blank letters and envelopes she collected over the years. Ms. Blankly riffles through the pieces of folded cardstock, searching for one specific card. She finds it near the bottom of the stack. A garden scene with grass arching upwards and gold-trimmed flowers decorate the front. A line of ants runs along the border on the inside of the card. She pulls her desk chair out for the first time in weeks and picks up her favorite pen. The ink pools at the point while she thinks of what to write to her daughter.
An idea strikes Ms. Blankly, and she puts her pen to the paper, leaving a smudge on the first letter as the gathered ink blots onto the page. When she’s done, Ms. Blankly tucks the card into an envelope, which she addresses and stamps. She has received some mail, so she hopes that the mail carrier will pick it up. She turns the envelope over in her hands, realizing that she finds the card too important to be left to fate. She decides that she will go to the post office tomorrow morning to see if it is open.
Ms. Blankly wakes up with the sun. She experiences a calmness in her half-asleep grogginess before remembering the tasks ahead of her today. Her toes tingle and she drags her feet across the floor to disguise the feeling. She walks down the hall, past her cabinet of collected memories and lingers for just a moment, before going to her kitchen. Ms. Blankly picks up the card with tender fingers. She takes her three pills from her plastic container and then dresses in her favorite outfit for comfort rather than the weather.
She takes her keys from the bowl by the door and stops for a moment to watch the ants, marching onwards. The light from the window is shining into their container, so she shifts it into an area of shadow. Ms. Blankly goes to the garage, opens the door and looks out on the neighborhood. The sky has dusty grey clouds across it, but it is still bright. She knows Mr. Blankly would be excited about this outing. She has to admit that she might be too.
Her car grumbles as she turns the keys and then roars to life. The radio tuner lights up, but no noise comes out. As Ms. Blankly backs down the driveway onto the empty street, she wonders why she never took the car to get the radio repaired. The only sound in the car is a faint buzz of the air rushing through the slats of the vents and the tires running against the pavement.
Inside her house, the sun stretches into long streaks across the floor as the day slides by. A spiral of dust by the door catches in the light before drifting downwards to the floor, catching on the coats and couch and shoes. The radio cuts in and out of static, interrupting the announcers as they talk about a bomb that has just exploded downtown. And the ants continue their parade, an endless cycle in their plastic container.

***

Stephanie Wood is a second-year MFA student at Arcadia University. They are a fiction editor at the Marathon Literary Review and a freelance article writer. Stephanie lives in Brooklyn with their significant other, a shelf full of houseplants, and foster dogs. They have previously been published in Walkabout Journal and Journal TwentyTwenty. You can find them online on Twitter @SAWood_Writer and TikTok, where they share writing advice, @The.Third.Person