My sister entered her first year of kindergarten. That was until school started again in August.
I remember, when she wanted to talk to me about it, telling her to shut the fuck up, get the fuck away from me. I thought we were in it together, that we shared a fascination with pain the same way we shared a room.Īs we grew older, and as my anxiety grew worse, she was the one who witnessed my sleeplessness, my crying every night, my shakiness every morning. We would lay there at night, staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars pasted on our ceiling, and joke about how many ants we must have killed. Our twin beds, parallel to each other, like two halves of an equal sign. My sister and I shared a bedroom our entire childhoods. We would let the ant grieve, then kill that one too. The second ant would touch its antennae to its brother’s body, a strange kiss, and run in circles around the corpse. Sometimes, when we killed an ant, another would find its body. We killed ants in the evenings, when we wrapped our sopping hair in identical twisting towels. We killed ants in the morning before school, standing side-by-side, brushing our teeth. So as children, we killed ants to kill time together. My sister: who has always been more than capable of handling life on her own-more capable of handling life than I am-still chooses again and again to follow me. My sister: who is younger than me, but always insists on driving us everywhere. My sister: who is unafraid of stages and spotlights. I did not know how it could have possibly survived, but because it did, I let it live.Īnd yet my sister still managed to be my opposite. Slowly, the ant untangled its legs, unfurled its body, and limped away. I crushed it with my fingertip and stared at the corpse: a mangled black teardrop against the granite. I remember brushing my teeth and seeing an ant scuttle across the countertop. I knew I would not enjoy dying as much as I enjoyed the fantasy of my own death, so I just watched other things die instead. Girls die tragically, and their tragedy is beautiful, and I wanted to be one of them. When I couldn’t sleep, I would think about drowning in shallow water, and it would tire me out. I found a lot of peace in picturing my own death. What I had enjoyed was imagining myself as the ant being killed. A little girl who loved a little violence. I had nightmares about Night Marchers and doppelgangers. I was bad at sports and bad at speaking in class. I think of how I was then, at seven years old: large front teeth, big eyes, crooked bangs, which my mother cut in the bathroom once a month. When I told a friend I was writing about the way I used to kill ants, I prefaced it by saying, “I swear I’m not a psychopath.” He asked, “Are you ashamed of how much you liked it?” And I said yes.īut that was not the reason I enjoyed killing them. It is tempting to say I killed ants because it made me feel powerful.
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