[First place winner of the Synapse Storytelling Contest Fiction category.]
Phoebe, panting hard, let the door slam behind her and set down a gallon of milk, a cabbage, and a sweating frozen chicken. She had lost her waitressing job the first day of lockdown and had replaced the restaurant food she once pilfered for us with leftovers from her shifts at the neighborhood food pantry.
“The fridge is gone,” I said. A man pertaining to our landlord had carried it away that morning. I had asked when we’d get a new one. “These days, who knows,” he’d said, looking philosophically into the empty fridge. “Could be any amount of time, really.”
We gazed at the chicken, which sat in its own puddle on the floor.
“We could give it to Gloria, maybe?”
“We should cook it first.”
We worshipped Gloria, our octogenarian downstairs neighbor. She swam on a senior synchronized swim team, shaped her white Afro like a jewel, and matched her lipstick to her red-framed glasses.
The cabbage, the chicken, and the milk suggested to us a peasant like stew, which we stirred at arm’s length in our homemade masks. Phoebe poured the stew into a Pyrex dish, and I sprayed the outside with disinfectant.
“Gloria!” Phoebe bellowed into the stairwell. “We’re leaving something outside your door!” I ran down the stairs holding my breath, set the dish down in the usual spot, and ran back up.
The dish was still outside Gloria’s door, attracting an orderly stream of ants, when I left the house the next morning. I cycled, dreamlike, over the Williamsburg bridge and up a silent First Avenue to the hospital. I had been reassigned to take the temperatures of patients arriving in the ambulance bay. Only after my first cup of coffee that morning, taken in the parking lot, did it occur to me to worry about Gloria. The repetition of the job put me in a sort of fugue state, through which thoughts only surfaced occasionally.
Stew in the stairwell. Ants on the stew. The scale of New York made it easy to empathize with ants. I tried to imagine navigating the sidewalks by pheromone.
That evening, I met Phoebe coming out to the trash cans as I was coming in. She wore plastic bags over her hands and held the Pyrex dish at arm’s length. Ants dripped from it.
“I knocked and knocked,” she said, her voice shaking. “I banged on the floor. I went outside and threw sticks at the window.”
We disposed of the stew and returned to Gloria’s landing. Her lock was a keypad. Phoebe began typing four-digit numbers. 0000. 1234. 4321. 1976.
“1976?”
“She has that thing for Jimmy Carter.”
The keypad flashed red, mute.
“Can we call someone?”
We had never heard Gloria mention relatives, and her relationship with the landlord was one of primal loathing on both sides. I called 311 to ask for a wellness check. As I waited for an operator, I thought of more reasons to worry. On Sunday mornings, Gloria customarily blasted Robbie Williams’s “Love My Life” at a volume that seemed to raise our floorboards. I couldn’t remember hearing it the weekend past.
I could hear the operator’s kids and a barking dog in the background. She told me the Department of Aging was backed up and suggested I call the landlord. I called the landlord, who told me I never gave him peace – “and that too in a pandemic, a global pandemic” – and eventually agreed to send his son by with a key the next day.
Night fell. Phoebe and I tried to distract ourselves by watching What’s Eating Gilbert Grape on the living room futon. As the credits rolled, a horn sounded in the street outside.
“I’m going out with Gary,” she said. Gary was tall, with gold teeth and a quality that struck me as gamey. She dressed in less than a minute, emerging from her room in a black velvet mini-dress. I watched from the window as she flew out the door, wrapped a hand around Gary’s waist, and settled onto the back of his motorcycle.
Somehow, we had both developed the unspoken belief that it was safer to do things, to see people, at night. I felt hollow as I watched them speed away, her blond curls bouncing. There had been four of us in the apartment before lockdown, and it now felt cavernous and eerie. Overhead, the helicopters wheeled. I made a few more attempts on Gloria’s door, gave up, and went to bed.
I woke to Phoebe’s voice outside my bedroom door. “Hey, if you’re awake, could you come out –” shuffling and a muffled thump. I rolled over and feigned sleep, but a few minutes later, she knocked again. “There are, um, a lot of ants. Kind of a sea of ants.”
I climbed down the ladder from my loft bed, aching, and opened the door. Phoebe shone with sweat in the harsh hallway light, leaning on a broom. The wall in front of me was black and moving. The sea of ants ebbed and flowed at our feet.
“I don’t really know what to do here,” Phoebe said. She gently pushed a path through the ants with her broom. Immediately, more ants surged to fill their place. “It’s four in the morning.”
I agreed. It was four in the morning.
“I think – ” I said, “I think we maybe leave them and hope they go away. There’s nothing for them to eat.”
Phoebe nodded, resigned, and trudged up the stairs to bed. I returned to bed, too, and lay awake listening to her swear occasionally each time she discovered a new ant.
Dawn was stunning. I squinted into the orange brilliance that reflected off of Manhattan’s skyscrapers as I crossed the bridge again, breathing cold, clear air into my lungs. We were busy. Other hospitals had filled to capacity and begun diverting to ours.
I returned from another precious coffee break, gowned, and pulled on a face shield. It was used and broken. I was still struggling to straighten it when the next stretcher arrived.
“Eighty-two-year-old woman found down at home,” said a man. I pointed my infrared thermometer at the patient’s head, and there, grey-faced, meeting my eyes through crooked glasses, was Gloria. An ant crawled across her pillow.
