Stories From the Plague Years by Michael Marano

caught. They’d never visit their son in a place like this.
    —Can your resentment toward them ever be resolved?
    A pressure on my shackled feet, a living weight. As if something heavy rested on them, with flesh like the brow of a feverish child. The thing squirmed as if to get comfortable. The hairs on my legs rose, and chills coursed under my skin like spilled mercury. My heart felt full of spun glass, and my genitals drew up inside me. The thing across my feet breathed with a shifting of its weight, as if its lungs didn’t draw air, but thick fluid.
    —What’s wrong, Dean?
    —Just a bad feeling, like someone walking over my grave.
    A little laugh. Like a bark. (Can’t he hear it?) And the weight heaved itself off my feet. I can relax now. But it has never
touched
me before; it has never been real to me, save in the blood-lit world that had retreated from our stage.
    Doctor Johansson frowned, sensing, because he’s no fool, I lied to him.
    —How did you deal with your anger when you were young?
    —Before I started killing people?
    —Yes.
    —I killed things.
    In his furrowed brow, I read where his thoughts traveled. I was angry with myself for goading him by accident, for letting that which had dared to touch me fluster me so that I set his clinical alarms ringing.
    —I killed
insects
, Doctor. Just bugs. I never hurt anything higher on the evolutionary scale than a spider.
    The glassy-clear reality that had burned away the dusk-red shadows . . . I sensed now what it was: the hard light of my fellow actor’s clinical training imposing itself on the poetry that had given me strength, power, and the will to use them. I spoke, as if to crack that reality, to free myself from its oppression, lest it take all trace of that power from me.
    —I never killed
vertebrates
. And I didn’t wet the bed or start fires, as the literature says all serial killers must. I could never enjoy killing animals.
    Oh, but I
did
taste rapture killing insects. I enjoyed compensating for powerlessness. And hopelessness. I still savour the child’s thrill of hurling a black beetle atop a hill of red ants, watching them churn like angry breakers over the larger beast, rending past the thing’s armour. Its huge jaws clamped, unable to close on the small foes that so efficiently killed it. And there were the centipedes I poured hot candle wax over, entombing them, force-feeding them the paralysis and claustrophobia that had been life in my parents’ house.
    But what I loved to kill most were the great, black carpenter ants. They were tough bastards, true warriors. It pleased me that despite their strength and fury, I could kill them without a thought.
    Though I did
think
about killing them, always writing new scenarios, new premises, with which to punish them for being so insolently strong and pure. I thought of needles to drive through their heads (there was such pleasure when the point pressed against their chitinous shells, and the shells
yielded
with a faint pop as the metal shaft went through . . . they lived through that, for a while). I thought of matches, vivisections to be done with the scissors of my pocketknife, and drops of fine motor oil that suffocated them so very quickly.
    What I especially loved were the Games, the gladiatorial contests I arranged that so beautifully expressed the feelings that defined my little life. The Games were fictions for which I was creator and audience, a semi-divine reaper of lives who found peace in witnessing death. I took up Godlike power, because God didn’t bother to do the job, having abandoned the world in which I’d been abandoned.
    Behind my house near the rear porch, I’d draw a chalk circle on the summer-hot concrete. Two carpenter ants from different colonies would be thrown into this ring. If they did not notice each other, I grabbed one in each hand, their powerful jaws would snap in silent rage, dripping formic acid that smelled so slightly of maple. Then I’d bring them