I was a year old, give 

or take. Plump-cheeked and 

egg white pale with a wisp  

of red hair on top. 

I was too young to remember, 

but my mom won’t let me forget.  

It was greenhouse hot in the backyard that day.  The southern summer sun scorched the air. Pinprick sweat stung and skin singed,  

turning red and tan like animal hides around bones.  But my dad always liked that.  

He was on the cordless on the back porch  with me, his baby girl, crawling at his feet. 

It was a business call. A big deal was on the horizon.  He paced, shirtless, fingers ringed in gold, 

thrilled and sweating and grinning into the phone.  

He leaned down and set me in the grass 

so I could see it, touch it before I had words for it. 

He turned away and kept talking. 

I lifted my heavy little bowling ball head,  

and there it was—the hill. 

I can half see it in my mind. 

Somehow it’s still there, that 

hard-won pyramid of ingenuity, built  

by tiny red heads like me.  

The crawling colony moved in unison 

on the mound, jaws full of sand grains 

to strengthen the home, to please the queen. A red and grey hill, rippling 

like a shimmering stream in the bright sun.  It was beautiful. 

I couldn’t help it.  

I crawled, like they,  

crawled and touched the beautiful hill,  

the home of my red head brethren in the yard.  

They touched me, hundreds of them, crawled up my pale plump arms, into my tiny pits,

into my diaper, between toes, in nostrils, eyes and ears, inside the newly formed crevices of  my body. No part of me  

was left bare.  

I must have been beautiful for a moment, 

pale and covered by the swarm.  

They were biting every part of me at once,  jaws locked on baby skin, rising like pocks in the wake of their carnage. 

My pale body seized in shock,  

becoming a new home for them for a  moment. My screams were muffled as 

ants wound down my throat, curled through vocal cords and down into me. 

They wanted to be a part of me.  

Afterwards, I’m told I was hauled inside. 

My panicked father. 

My screaming mother.  

An ice cold bath washed the ants away. 

They floated next to my bloating body, 

all of us, belly up in the tub. 

My mother, hairsprayed and rail-thin 

shrieking, keening, grieving her 

barely-there little girl.  

That day changed my mother. 

A kind of fury caught flame in her 

in the wake of the ant swarm, dire 

with fire within her, as if her baby 

girl left her womb only for rage to fill it. 

Sometimes, in half sleep, I can still 

feel the fire ants tracing across 

my pale limbs, meandering between my peach fuzz hairs and freckles.

They were only protecting their home 

after all. In the wake of such an imposing presence, they had no choice but to  

fight back, to protect what was theirs. 

My mother stares into space sometimes,  sipping white wine on hot summer nights. Sometimes she’ll talk about my dad  

and those days with a soft, quiet rage. A low tone thrums deep in her voice when she  

speaks of him, as if the earth beneath her  is teeming with life, crawling up into her,  filling her with fire.