degausser - something completely different

The first thing you need to remember is that what does not kill you only makes you stronger. The second thing you need to remember is that death comes for everything, and that it may or may not reflect how strong you were, are, or could be.
When on Saturday mornings your daughter Gabrielle bursts into your garage-turned-office, shooting across the room like a lightning bolt being chased by the hounds of hell, she will scramble into your lap to minimize the space between the two of you, and through her muffled chokings you can make out one phrase: “ants in my bed.” It’s difficult not to laugh when you think of all the times your own mother commented on your youthful behavior as being akin to having ants in your pants, but you desperately want to make sure Gabrielle knows you’re on her side, so you softly stroke her hair and level your voice. It’s hard to sound soothing; your vocal chords are harsh after years of barking at Dennis and his insipid, stupid dogs, but you try anyway. She quivers in your arms, the creepy-crawlies have taken over her body, and you decide it’s time for you to take action against the insect soldiers that have infested your house. They have frightened your daughter, and she is the only happy remains of an otherwise unhappy family.
Step one: Kill the queen. This is the offensive mode. You can’t find the queen. You don’t know how to begin to look for the queen. Frustration bubbles in your throat. You can hear Dennis sneer in your head, see the face he always made when he came up with a solution before you did – the arched left eyebrow, the slight wrinkle of the nose. “Maybe some sort of tracking device, like on Star Trek,” he’d say with a sarcastic laugh. “You know, identify the source of power and control, and destroy it.” Those old television episodes with the grainy color and one dimensional sound, they always stuck in your head despite your aversion to the kitschy science fiction genre and now you can’t get them out; but you sat through it anyway, for him, didn’t you?
Shake it off. There’s no such thing as a tracking device. This knowledge is useless due to its lack of existence. Move onto step two.
Step two: Kill the scouts, the ants that fly solo, found trooping in and out and under and over any given surface in your kitchen, your bathrooms, your daughter’s bedroom, the corners where the dogs used to sleep. But remember that what does not kill the nest only makes it stronger. You consider eliminating the nest by killing one ant at a time. After killing seventeen of them individually over the course of a week, you realize you cannot kill the nest by killing one ant at a time. Move onto step three.
Step three: Mercilessly clean your house. This is where you move into defensive mode. Clorox, Lysol, bleach, Windex; brooms, mops, rags, vacuums, and sweaty palms. Get those crumbs out of the corner, scrub the cherry soda off the counter that Dennis was drinking the day before he said he was leaving. The sticky patch was from when you slapped him across the face and his glass wavered, splashing his drink. Wipe away all vestiges of the sweet and the oily, because that’s what the ants are drawn to, attracted to - that’s what they smell through the pain and despair that hovers over those old stains. Gabrielle tries to help but only smears the old messes into bigger, thinner remnants of the original; you are able to forgive her because she is four, still has trouble getting more than half her food into her mouth and not onto her smock, and asks every day when Daddy’s coming back.
You are cleaning obsessively. You take the vacuum to the kitchen pantry and pitilessly suck up any ant you can find scurrying behind cereal boxes and soup cans, pulling crumbs and dust and ants with frantic legs into the black tube. You welcome the gratification from eradicating the dust on the baseboards, from pulverizing clumps of dried chocolate pudding on the end tables in the living room. That pudding, it takes nearly an hour of soaking the residue in 409 and pressure scrubbing with the scratchy side of a sponge til it disappears. Dennis was such a sloppy housemate. Why in the world did you let it sit there for so long, becoming crusty, hardening, forming into a physical part of the table top? Why didn’t you care earlier to clean it? What kept you blinded from the muck?
You find the pudding cup underneath a couch cushion.
The house is clean. The ants are still there. Dennis has been gone for three weeks.
Step four: Barricade your house. This is when the defense becomes both literal and dangerous. The barricade is deadly for the living creatures. The cornmeal you leave in corners expands inside the ant, destroying its insides (you can’t decide whether or not ants have real internal organs or if they are more like robots) and leaving a shell of black exoskeleton. You can’t help but think that those black dots were once propelled by something, some life force or energy and now you are snuffing it away for the sake of Gabrielle’s sanity; you feel like God and you can’t decide if that’s a helping or hurting matter. But the cornmeal stays, and the ants keep coming. You ask Gabrielle to take care in her steps, to not scatter the powder substance from its lying-in-wait, and the next step is to affix traps of peanut butter laced with borax. The ants like the oily and sweet, and the peanut butter is both. You have always been disgusted by peanut butter, by its gummy texture and as a child you never were able to flush the image of quilted peanuts jutting up and out of a slimy yellow stick of butter. It clung to your tongue, the roof of your mouth, the backs of your teeth, and when you chewed it you felt like it was just strung from upper lip to bottom lip with each labored movement of your jaw, like spider webs. The only reason that there is peanut butter in the pantry is because Dennis made s’mores for him and Gabrielle for her birthday and insisted that a peanut butter spread would make them a million times better. That was the beginning of May, almost five weeks ago, and the jar is half empty.
Mix the peanut butter with borax to kill the ants. The borax draws all the moisture from their robot bodies and soon enough there’s more dead husks of soldiers getting swept up by the broom. For a while the problem seems resolved and you revel in your victory, deciding playing God was good in this instance, because now you can worry about the more important things like if this divorce is actually real, and how much the child support payments will end up totaling, and if everything that he had said to you was just a lie until he left – but wait, here is another morning, this time a Sunday, where Gabrielle tugs on your pajama pant leg at the kitchen table with a look of despair sunk into her eyes and says “I saw another one in the bathroom this morning, Mama.”
Step five: Time to get ruthless. You vow to find the nest. A voice inward questions the necessity of this venture. You don’t listen. Instead, you visualize what will happen when you find it. A small column of vertical sand, like a mini volcano, spitting black ants endlessly, and you’ll step above it like an ominous cloud of the Lord, and you’ll splash a pot of sizzling, boiling water onto it; the heat will be like a reverse volcano, going in instead of spewing out, the ants will fry, and you’ll feel sort of like God when he “took care of” Sodom and Gomorrah, but you’ll do it without blinking but an eyelash for the wicked.
And you used to be so nice.
It’s three o’clock on Monday afternoon when he calls for the first time in four weeks. Hey, he says. Um, hi, is your tentative response. He wants to know if there’s an extra bag of dog food down in the basement. Let me check, you say, even though you know full well that you threw it out during Step three. You jostle the phone receiver in your hand a little, wondering if he’ll believe the muffled noises to be her walking downstairs, moving things around. Mostly you want to jostle the phone in half, your fingers are clenched so hard. Ease up, ease up, you think. Keep quiet. Keep cool.
When your knuckles regain some feeling you put the speaker to your ear. No, no dog food, Dennis. Sorry.
He asks about Gabrielle, and it sort of feels like the time you accidently leaned onto the hot stovetop burner, except this time it’s in your chest and not on your forearm.
“Well, she asks about you every day. And I can’t really give her an answer, and it sucks, Dennis, it really does, that I can’t give her an answer. What is going on? Are you coming back? Are you going? Are you gone for good?” You choke while saying these words. You hate that you are choking.
He says he doesn’t know. He says he needs to think.
Think fast, you want to say. You don’t. Instead you say “Well, Gabrielle would really like to see you.”
Silence.
“Really, Dennis. You should come by and see her.”
Okay, he says. How does Thursday afternoon sound?
The way Thursday sounds is awful, you have grocery shopping to do and you’re supposed to take Gabrielle to lunch with your sister and her new baby, and the carpet cleaners are scheduled to come that afternoon to continue Step three, because the ants are still there, but instead of all these things you say “Thursday sounds fine. Let me know what time you are planning on stopping by.”
Okay, he says. He pauses. “How are you, Brianne?”
You reply, “I guess I’m okay.” But what you are really thinking is, you have a stovetop burn in your chest, peanut butter stuck to your tongue and you just found some dog hair kicked up in a corner, like tumbleweeds in a desert. You are anything but okay.
Dennis can sense this. “Are you sure?” he says.
Sure, you reply. I’m killing ants.
“Oh, are the ants bad this year?” You can hear his left eyebrow elevating. “You know what you should try, peanut butter and borax. That’s what my mom always used to do in the summers when the ants got bad.”
Thanks, you say. But I’m going to try and find the nest.