Atlas and Alice, Issue 18
Lori Brack
The Ground, Remembering Between birth and the Siamese kitten I begged for when I was five, there were ants: an unending caravan of them plying the beveled crack in the concrete patio where I knelt, sun baking my dark hair soft. At intervals, an ant would cling to the bevel, hang over the row of insects, and use a front leg to brush the others along. This way, this way. No stalling. Don’t turn back. Transfixed for what I felt were hours, I watched ants behave as I had observed lined-up children outside the school, guarded and chivvied by their teachers from playground to school door. No. Nothing about schoolchildren. Try again. I want to be the only person watching the heron at the pond’s edge. I want to be alone when I discover the wild rose or hear spring frogs tune up. I want to recreate the moment I was born, crouched on concrete, watching a trail of ants. When I looked into that patio crack, the universe looked back, and the matter of my brain took the shape of a mind. Ants kept arriving from my right to my left. My first animals were not pets, but a lineage of insects. When I was closer to the ground—which assumes I am eyes in a head bobbing up here five feet from my feet—I lived in a ground world. Bugs seemed bigger. All the outdoor stunners were close. When I knelt on the patio, my knees picked up the pattern of concrete and shards of sand blown in from the sandpit across the street. My knees remember how I rolled my legs to feel the sharp bite of each grain. When I stood, I brushed sand out of my skin, picked stubborn particles free with my fingernail. I had a body and wanted to know what it could feel. I’m recalling a measly kind of self-harm that remains a secret of sensation, hardly pain as much as curious sharpness, malleable flesh around little bits of translucent rock that the wind blew in. Gone astray. Once more:
30
