Breadcrumb Trail
After her cousin peels away from her body, as soon as he leaves her room, Greta notices a single carpenter ant sniffing a solo trek along seam of wall and eave. She rises on her knees in bed, pulls her nightgown down to cover herself. Eye level to the ant, she begins singing. It pauses, feelers erect to sniff her song. Together—one with pheromones, another with vibrations—they inscribe a trail from exterior to interior wall. She follows it into the hall, heel-toeing slowly through the second floor of the farmhouse. Oxytocin ebbs through her body on this shared trajectory toward the bathroom with its moldy tile, crumbling plaster, and flaking bathtub finish.
Greta had always been a member of the insect choir. She hummed with honeybees in the hives, droned to mantids that hid among the purple irises, twanged along with marmorated stink bugs whose hard-shelled landings strummed the metal strings of window screens in early fall. She can’t quite figure out why this new song, the one she shares with her cousin, feels different.
In the apple orchard earlier this summer Saturday evening, she’d sung with cicadas. Small, sparse fruit bristled across the boughs of the adolescent trees like a teenage boy’s moustache (fruit everyone had trouble seeing a future in). She heard them before she saw their bodies. Rolling buzzes stacked one atop the next, ruh-ruh-ruh like her father’s Farmall tractor on cold mornings, like the song that thrummed toward crescendo between her legs every Saturday night now. She had turned toward the cranking of it. There: lacy bridal veil wings trailed long past the shield on its back, past its abdomen. It chanted a melismatic invocation for the next generation: eggs deposited into the slit of a twig, nymphs in free fall toward sweet and sticky earth, the burrowing pull toward the sweet juice of roots, the eventual claw up through darkness toward an orchard thick with fruits. Greta felt the song rattle in her own chest. She leaned in, head rolling in figure eights, mirroring its dance, mimicking its stridulations in her own throat. It was the snake charmer, she the snake, their song an eternity.
It had startled her, the cicada barreling straight from apple trunk to her chest. The heft of its armor made her stumble, trip on a root. Fall. It broke the spell, rearranged the rhythm of Greta’s heart until it molted into a new song, a new skeleton that would harden over the course of months. Instinctively, she had flicked the insect away, thumb and middle finger primed in a primordial reflex.
Now, floorboards creaking beneath her feet as she sings to a foraging ant, Greta is plagued by the flick. It was something her mother might do, with a little shriek. But not Greta! She feels wrong, somehow, and for a brief moment, anger swells within her. If only the cicada had not thrust itself upon her. If only it had not broken the spell. But as soon as she thinks these thoughts, her anger turns to herself. No, it was her fault for flicking it away.
For the first time, Greta considers that the songs she sings are perhaps not human. There is noise, to be sure, a spectrum of sounds ranging from the whine of door hinges, the creeping creak of bare pine floorboards, the low groans of grandfathers with dementia in corners with their trousers down, flaccid pale asses the dripping reflection of a Harvest moon. There is a sound like a mother’s shriek mocked. There is the voiceless glottal fricative of a teenage boy cousin too close to her own age asked to babysit every Saturday. Greta sings these sounds to the ant as it journeys toward her parents’ stark, empty bedroom. She sings, but her voice breaks, squeaks like wrought-iron bed frame when she mounts it. She follows the ant’s ascent up the steep pitch of ceiling beyond her reach, a strange panic winging through her chest as the housecats join her. They look to her eyes, watching where she watches, joining the song, chattering and chittering as they track the ant. They summon Greta’s flicking instinct, hoping for the reflex that will make ants drop like apples from the boughs of the room. They gather around her on the bed, hungry in their desire, their song drowning out Greta’s own. The ant is so close, so close, just out of reach, and Greta has lost the tune.
Whistle the Dogs
The dogs of Hamelin run in packs through the streets of the town, pale white ropes of roundworms swinging from their asses. The children of Hamelin take turns chasing them through the streets while their peers cheer in singsong verse from the sidewalks of High Street as if in a parade:
Run, run, run, ‘til you’re hot and sweaty!
Run ‘til the dogs start swinging their spaghetti.
The headlines of Hamelin’s morning newspaper are equally inventive, if less lyrical.
Mayor Gives Vaccination Non-Compliance Fee another Shot.
Pandemic Unleashed: Dogs at Root of Hamelin’s Latest Scourge.
Illegal Fecal Examination Leaves Neighbors in Logjam.
The most recent – Pistols vs Pipers: Bipartisan Parasitism Divides Hamelin – follow an impromptu riot. A mob of Hamelin citizens storm Town Hall, rally at the steps of the brick and mortar building with fists on their hips, tucking back one or both sides of their fur and leather vests, presenting a clear sight line to occupied gun belts and scabbards. Outside the mayor’s office window, they chant blasphemies, obscenities, and oaths that eventually congeal into a single chant: Kill the Dogs!
“We have to show strength,” the Mayor called from the window. “We have to stay strong.”
With those words, and without consensus or decree (for Hamelin was a pioneer town, settled by thieves, rascals, and Lutherans), the rioters leave Town Hall and begin executing dogs. Vigilante shots reverberate off the aluminum water tower, a cymbal crash to the noon siren’s trumpet call. The village roads are veined in drag lines, blood, and fur, a game trail leading to a fire in the field behind the old schoolhouse where the corpses are burned. The village women curse laundry hung out on lines, perfumed with smoldering dog flesh. Each night, children pull aside their bedroom curtains, mesmerized by the smoky glow at the edge of town. The Mayor stretches in his bed, his faith renewed in a problem’s ability to solve itself.
The citizens of Hamelin who are not called to violence whistle their dogs inside and draw their curtains tight. The dogs rub their asses against the carpet, scooting in ceremonial patterns to alleviate the incessant itching. Their owners pull leather gloves from the walls of their workshops, gather buckets from basements and under sinks. They grab their dogs by their haunches and yank at the parasites. The round wormy bodies break off in their fingers, crumble into the buckets as dried confetti, evidence of a party gotten way out of hand. The worms wait, dry and innocuous in household buckets, for the children to carry them off to the river. Some children dump their buckets and run; others throw fistfuls of worms at each other.
At night, under the round white moon, the round white worms shudder in a clump on the riverbank and reconstitute themselves. They congregate in wait for the next host, bending their ears to hear the latest gossip. Writhing together in satisfaction, they begin whistling sweet, soft notes. One by one, the remaining dogs of Hamelin—those who have escaped, those who felt the fear of their owners sliding around in their intestines and peeking out from the pink pucker of their anuses—are lured by the song. They converge around the pulsing mass, pawing at the stringy ball between them. Jaws snapping, they eat the worms, their throaty growls muffled by the slippery swallow of parasites. Sated, they make their way down the road east of town, running in and out of ditches, stopping to eat animal carcasses, rabbits and rodents that lead like a crumb trail out of Hamelin.
The children are saddened to find their beloved pets missing. During afternoon recess, they gather amongst the bones and charred fur of the murdered dogs. Small feet slide from shoes and sandals into ash, soft and fine. They smear the powder on each other’s faces, pink hungry tongues licking the silvery edges of their lips. Some children dig shapes in the ash with scapula; others assemble ribcage playhouses along the perimeter of the burn circle and fill them with cuneiform messages scribed with smaller bones. They play checkers with vertebrae, make necklaces of teeth and claws. One child licks the marrow clean from the center of a femur and carves a flute from the bone. When she puts it to her lips and blows, the other children stop what they are doing and begin dancing round the boneyard. The ground turns to dusty, shimmery ashpack beneath their feet.
Shoeless and silver, and trailing bits of sinew behind them, the children dance down the street toward their family homes. Their parents open their doors and follow, drawn by an ethereal, nostalgic vision of a perfect Hamelin Made Great Again that rides the notes of the whistling flute. The music speaks to each of them personally, their unconscious desires riding the melancholy of the low notes toward the penetrating brilliance of the upper registers. Even the mayor follows, a stupid smile on his face.
They move in one writhing clump toward the river. The dogs, having heard the music through channels known only to themselves (though we may call it the Scent on the Wind), join the procession. The worms, once again swinging wildly from their rumps, harmonize with the flute in a metallic binaural frequency. The children rejoice to see their old companions returned, and, upon reaching the river, climb upon the backs of the dogs, who ferry them across. Behind them, the song fading, their parents grasp for the pale golden ropes of roundworms before the river rolls them over.
K Anand-Gall (she/they) is a former academic who is completing training to become a trauma-informed clinical social worker who works with children and families. Holding degrees in Creative Writing from Miami University and San Francisco State University, K’s writing has appeared recently in Apple in the Dark, MUTHA, Glassworks, voidspace, Thin Air Magazine, The Journal, and Rooted 2: The Best New Arboreal Nonfiction. They are the 2023 Academy of American Poets Betty Jane Abrahams Memorial Poetry Prize winner. Find K on the socials @kanandgall or at kanandgall.com.