Homesick

A giant leafcutter ant scuttles into my laboratory, a decaying leaf held in its mandibles, and muscles through my pack of lab assistants, asking where he can set down his leaf, for, he says, he’s been carrying it for many days and the leaf’s needed at the colony, his thousands of colony brothers awaiting the restock of the leaf pile, the resultant fungus that feeds them all, but he’s lost his way, the scent trail vanished, and he asks for my help, but it’s been a long time since I’ve been a good guy, as one ex remarked as she left me, and it’s true, I once was an okay boyfriend, working my way through grad school at UC Riverside, night shifting in a pharmaceutical lab, producing tramadol and codeine, until I started stealing pills for myself, for friends, for sale, not caring who bought them or ODed on the streets, and I made some good money and stopped attending classes, feeling I didn’t need a master’s or a girlfriend, but instead a wasp-yellow Mustang and beers with the boys and drives to Las Vegas strip clubs with stays at Aria and the Wynn, soon losing all that money, then stealing more pills to make up for it all, finally getting caught with baggies of Oxy, arrested for grand larceny, but I made bail and skipped the country, ending up here in Nicaragua, after jaunts in Costa Rica and Panama, to fall in with the Reñazcos and run their lab, purifying the cocaine, packing it inside fake dumbbells and plates, ready to be hauled up to Mexico, then the US, back to my old haunts in Southern California, where steroided gym managers distribute the coke via WhatsApp—Bro, how much do you wanna bench?—and I’m under pressure now to get the next shipment out, maybe even take it myself, visit some old friends, that girl, go to In-N-Out, say a proper goodbye to my mom; yet this giant leafcutter ant is still pestering me about getting the leaf to the colony, his dark red exoskeleton taking up half my lab, his stinger scraping on the tiled floor, scaring my lab assistants, and so I grab an old vial of pheromones and create a trail out of the lab, back into the surrounding forest to the mounds of dirt, pouring the last few drops down into the nests, and I call out for the leafcutter ant, watch him charge through the trees, leafless, somehow larger than ever, and he pincers me between his mandibles, carries me down into the network of tunnels and feeding chambers that he calls home.

Christopher Linforth is the author of The Distortions (Orison Books, 2022). He has recent stories in the Oxford Review of Books, the Barcelona Review, Scaffold, Centaur, and BULL.

Published January 15 2025