This entry isn’t made for boons of this size, so accommodations must be made. Slowly, particle by particle, the entryway is crumbled wider, and one finger points down to where it’s going, then goes there. The second passes through just as easily.
At which point some time lapse would need to occur. Trail cams are designed not to constantly record, but to motion- activate. What this means is that the trail cam would have zero access to the unholy miracle taking place underground, inside that ant mound.
Before imbibing Rudolfo’s volatile blood, these ants had already been blanketing acres of land on what felt like a whim, leaving only waste and emptiness in their wake. Now, two days later, when the first of the infected ants are surging up from their mound, they’ve metastasized to a darker color, night now being their favored province, and they’re more desperate for sustenance than before, no longer following chemical trails here and there but swarming forward in a ravenous world-eating mass.
The trail cam could have snapped poorly focused shot after shot of this, but if it had been there to do that, then it also could have been lucky enough to catch snatches of Rudolfo and Gretta’s epic private battle from two days before.
At one point in it, far from the frame of the trail cam, had it been there, Rudolfo slings Gretta through the trunk of a tree and into the open mouth of a den or burrow of sorts, disturbing the lone occupant of that den or burrow.
Gretta comes to with, first, Rudolfo squatting across from her, cleaning his nails, and second, something nuzzling her backside.
She whips her foreleg around and extracts the bothersome creature, bites into its back to color herself with its blood so as to show Rudolfo what he has coming, but before she can spill that blood, he’s on her again, savaging her vulnerable belly.
She tosses the animal aside, loses herself to bloodlust once again.
Three desperate, unrecorded hours later, spent, Gretta latches her jaws on to the back of Rudolfo’s head and breathes her last, her great weight and last bite enough to keep Rudolfo there until the sun finds them both, burns them together.
Such is love.
Hours after that, though, the motion that would have activated the trail cam is that animal Gretta had only bitten, not killed. It comes to screaming, thrashing, writhing.
It’s infected with her blood, with her ferocity, with her hunger.
It cowboy-walked away, following its long nose.
It doesn’t blink, just flicks its long tongue ahead of it, and so this anteater with a werewolf heart waded into the roiling mass of vampiric ants, Rudolfo and Gretta’s love for each other raging on past their own deaths, and it doesn’t matter in the end whether there was a trail cam to document any of this or not. In three months, there aren’t any people left to watch it anyway, just an eternal battle covering the face of the globe, neither side winning but neither side quite losing either, and so life struggles on in its tooth-and-claw way—its pincer-and-tongue way—finding its own terrible balance.
The Mask, the Ride, the Bag
CHASE BURKE
The night I drove the Mask around this past spring was suffocating, the way humid nights can be in the South, and I was behind on my rent. But that name, “the Mask,” came later, with the bloggers and talking heads and their giddy speculation about his identity. At the time, to me, he was just another rider with a mediocre rating, the last in that night’s long line of drunk students. Nothing more than money, my small cut of the gig economy.
I pulled up to the curb outside the bar and flashed my lights. He was holding a large bag at his side, one of those insulated cooler bags meant for trips to warehouse stores. He was well dressed, but his clothes were dirty, like he’d been in a fight in a dive-bar bathroom. He swung the bag into the backseat, sliding in behind it. Something smelled bad. Too many fine fraternity brothers had thrown up in my car over the years, to the point that I kept barf bags in the backseat, like an airliner, so I knew the smell of puke on clothing. This was worse, sharper, like the acidic tinge of rotting oranges.
“Riverside Apartments?” I said. He had requested six stops; this was the first.
YES, he said.
I froze. I felt his voice in my head and around me, echoing, like I was listening to multiple speakers playing the same sound milliseconds apart.
GO, he said.
I drove.
I glanced at him in the rearview as I neared Riverside, the student-condo complex by the fake lake next to the football stadium. His hair hung in front of his downcast face like the ribbons of a torn curtain.
I parked near the entrance. He shifted and eased open the door.
WAIT.
He extended an arm between the front seats. He clutched a wad of crumpled bills in a hand smeared with grime. The car’s overhead light, dim as it was, took half the color out of everything.
YOU.
I hesitated. “But you’re already paying through the app.”
FOR YOU.
I had to pull the money from his half-clenched fist. He didn’t have any fingernails.
He stared at the rearview, his face hidden in shadow. I couldn’t shake the feeling that the shadow hid an empty space, blank skin, where eyes should be.
He stepped out of the car and leaned toward my window, gripping the roof where the door was open. I heard the creak of stressed plastic and metal, felt the car shift as he applied pressure.
WAIT.
He took more money from his bag, held it where I could see it in the parking-lot light. I nodded, and he walked toward Riverside. I understood.
He’d given me at least a hundred dollars. I stuffed it in one of the empty backseat barf bags, then wiped my shaking hands on a drive-thru napkin. Who was this person? I brought up his passenger profile, but it was
