I discover the anatomy and geography of my heart, the day the indignant Hertford prize bull forces us up an early summer apple tree––it’s in my throat. We are dead, we just don’t know it. The first time death introduces himself, he screams in my ear, “no one here gets out alive!” Faster than a clock in a molecule factory, I turn coward.

I feel guilty when I parachute to the ground and with turn of foot run home. I also feel true remorse knowing you have been trampled, with our creel full of fat trout. Sadly, the imp in my thoughts whispers, ‘there goes dinner.’

Before I can break the woeful news to your mother, the way chaplains do in times of war, you arrive home breathless, carrying your dad’s wicker basket full of long wet grass and brook trout. I stand shamed by your courage, your relaxed smile.

We celebrate life and ask your father to fry up the fish. He agrees, throwing gobs of trout butter, cilantro and fresh garlic to sizzle in his souped-up cast iron skillet where it begins to rain sweet Marsala wine. Filling our bellies tight, we can’t help but laugh at your pop’s royal charge at the end of the table, where he plays rib boneslike a harmonica, sucks life from his fingertips like sautéed minnows.

***

We fancy our scars multiply like teen landmarks. Those we create together, those we cause each other, all shared. Not all visible. Some I still carry, at times I imagine their weight too heavy to bear, meant for a stronger heart. I should have been there.

***

We think we’ve earned our scratches, our exquisite calligraphy in blood, our rite of passage.

“This makes our third summer,” Bobby says.

“Oh hell no, it’s our fourth,” I answer.

We reminisce on the green banks of the Klamath River, our bare feet full of thorns, and ant bites. We joust of summers and blackberries and imaginary six-foot rattlesnakes with the girth of baseball bats that guiro their dry leaves near the thick briar stalks. And before the day is done, we agree that nothing will keep us from picking the ripe bruises. Who knew this is what it would take? We banter stories of Sally’s and Sue’s.

***

In the middle of what seems yesterday, just before school is out for summer, we find ourselves alone in the high school biology lab. It’s recess, quiet as a funeral.  The air seems stifling, as the vapor of oleic acid wafts into our nostrils, with just a hint of dad’s corroded truck battery. We’ve learned in class that the scent triggers the ants into primordial obedience. In the silence, we make history, as we witness vintage armies march out of our history books. We are back in 1943 Nazi Berlin. Divisions of Lilliputian SS goosestep their pre-programmed binary cadence. In analog group-think, 1,0, 1,0, 1,0 they step, they march. We watch as they scurry away the weightless dead, using their capable robotic pincher mouths, as they advance in a single file, a thin line of smokeless gun powder. One by one by one they drill hills and valleys, and then soldier deep into the woods. And just as we studied, the dead are dumped in crystalline piles—an absent ceremony far away from the hum and thrum and pleasantries of the colony. It’s then I think about faith, and prayer and if we create souls, just by removing the dead. If so, heaven must exist in the form of an ant farm, ten times the size of the red planet. My mind turns dark and alien.

***

Thanks to time-travel, I am in the middle of a cobalt grey December day, in the middle of another ant parade. I am clad in the armor of a black suit, just another Eusocial insect, of the family Formicidae, of the Hymenoptera order. My thoughts once again alien, a matrix of expansive tissue and synapse that sieve formic acid, a defense mechanism against anything foreign, insect or human.  It’s so cold the white of the snow freezes like spackled blood on the petals of all the roses. I am but one soldier ina platoon of pallbearers. But I am a good soldier. In a procession of viewing, we shuttle your remains to the gravesite. I declare you a translucent deity, gifted at the alchemy of insisting time to still, and return all its sacrifices and scars. Your coffin bears the righteous weight of a sarcophagus, insect black with solid brass handles shaped like minuscule femurs, the burnished hinges gleam, knuckled shut in a futile attempt to keep eternity at bay. 

My thoughts are transmitted. They burden my heart:

“Where is my ice-cold crowbar, and my wooden-handled hammer? Stop this crazy parade. Let’s Rube Goldberg, Jerry Rig all of his pieces back together. We can use duct tape, Thanksgiving turkey sting, zippers, sutures, staples, who cares. I’ll make new legs from the tall sticks we fashioned into fishing poles, arms from the branches that still hold up our weathered and broken down childhood tree fort. I’ll bargain with God, the god-damned devil, or both, even though I am sure to be overcharged. I have failed you, Bobby. I was not there. Now I will wear all my tomorrows like masks, ashamed you will find me living there.”

It’s then that Bobby’s dad coughs into his frozen palms, if just to warm them. I am present once again.

He asks, “Would anyone like to say a few words?” The blackening belly of the sky sags and begins to salt snow like a shaker. Silence swells pregnant, with twins. He continues, “Maybe someone would like to say one last prayer for him. Danny, would you like to?”

I look into Angelo’s eyes, and like a coward, I shake my head no, fast like when you are cold. In my frost-bitten thoughts I think, ‘I am the quiet one don’t you remember?’

Besides, I am too angry with God to form words, and if I say anything, it will be to beg and plead for hickory stick matches and buckets of gasoline, so churches can pray up close, to their new God of fire.

***

Thirty years later, I remain a black speck in a moment as I walk the crunchy gravel road at Winema Cemetery. Winema is Native American for chief, deity. It is late July, and she knows it, flaunting her brilliant blue summer dress. She is so thirsty for my affection. I hope she will forgive me, because today all I can feel is guilt.

I hear a familiar stream, fat with rainbows of trout freshly washed from the Hotlum glacier off the North side of Mt. Shasta. Boles Creek serves as a natural barrier between the graveyard & drowsy California Highway 99, between then and now.

Before I leave time behind once again and travel southward back home, I pause to reflect on a shivering winter boy of seventeen, and I take one last look around. It’s then I fox my eyes. Search for black ants.

The End