Too Koi
Antonia
by Lex Brenner
by Oskar Gambony Steding
A
ntonio wanted to train an animal to do something to which it has no natural inclination, and he did. Then he died. Now there is an ape (whom he named Antonia) in Hector's living room suckling at the plastic valve which drains the air-conditioning's absorbed humidity. Antonia the ape communicates through equations of pictures in magnetic frames and stays up all night weeping. This morning on the refrigerator she had posted, “(clasped hands) = (angry, flailing mob) x (rolling casino dice).” Hector stands groggy in the kitchen debating translation. He mouths, “prayer is violent hope” and “God is a vicious gambler” silently, weighing their densities between his lips. Humidity licks at the kitchen windows. Skyscrapers bloom out of the dust and sway gently in the breeze. Connecting them, thin black power lines sag under the weight of tennis shoes hanging from their knotted laces. It doesn’t mean anything from the window. The apartment is a dotted red line on the floor’s evacuation plan. There’s a gun in Hector’s pocket. He’s halfway through writing Antonia’s equation in a notebook. Each letter bleeds black onto the next page. Yellow sticky notes bend like peeling wallpaper from every surface of Antonio’s old room. The lettering of the first equations twists across them like lines of busy ants spiraling down the walls. He’d written them all down: the addition and subtraction of illustrations torn from children’s books; the square-roots of glossy, outof-focus magazine exposés; the multiplication of Polaroids Antonia took herself with the camera Antonio had convinced Hector to buy. “Imagine,” Antonio had said, on the living room floor, feeding the ape spoonfuls of applesauce, “if, every time before you spoke, you quietly invented the alphabet.” He turned his head to face Hec72
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