If the telephone didn’t ring right this fucking instant, Sugar was going to yank it from the wall and hurl it across the room.
The phone remained still and silent as ever.
Outside, the wind howled wordlessly, and the creaking floorboards overhead spoke to his old landlady skulking about, but no sound came from the phone. Its prolonged silence made Sugar itchy, and he scratched the zit behind his left nostril.
Sugar wasn’t hungry, but he needed an activity to fill the time, so he took a bite of candy bar and continued waiting for the phone to ring. Chewing hurt his jaws, the candy bar tasted unpleasant, and mashing nuts and caramel inside of his head drowned out all other sound. Grimacing at the twisting knot in his belly, Sugar spat out the mouthful of chewed-up confection into a dirty cereal bowl and set the remainder of the candy bar on the coffee table, just as the phone began to ring.
“Hi there. This is Emmet Hill, from Gingerbread Roofing. Am I speaking with—is it Spaulding Shuggert?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, Mr. Shuggert, I was just in your neighborhood and noticed—”
“I rent.”
Sugar threw the phone in its cradle as though it were a poisonous snake. How long had he talked to the roofer? Ten seconds? How many times could a phone ring in ten seconds?
As he mentally counted the rings, a different part of his brain scrambled for information on his phone account. He couldn’t recall whether or not his plan included call-waiting. Before Sugar arrived at a satisfactory answer to either question, a new thought intruded: Where did the roofing guy get his number? Was he a roofer, or an undercover?
This last rabbit-hole of self-interrogation raised hives all over his body, or at least it felt like hives. He itched the zit behind his nostril and scratched hard enough to draw blood. The sound of his own breathing seemed to syncopate with the windstorm outside, the strained gasps of withheld panic.
Sugar needed to get his shit together. Sometimes eating helped.
He grabbed the candy bar from the table, his attention still on the telephone. As he opened his mouth to nibble off a corner, his eye caught a flicker of movement.
The whole candy bar was crawling with ants.
Startled, he flung it next to the dirty cereal bowl. From the look of things, the coffee table had capriciously developed its own small colony of ants. Sugar wasn’t sure how to proceed. Exterminating ants didn’t vibe with his lifestyle.
He moved closer, trying to decide which ant to squish first.
A week back, he remembered seeing a few ants in the kitchenette, but his meals were so meager and sporadic that he had assumed the ants would vacate of their own accord. Now they would make him a killer. The thought of violence stirred the bile in his stomach, and he had to fight off dry heaves. All Sugar wanted was to leave insects alone. These ants had forced his hand. But before he could overcome his queasiness, the ants on the coffee table arranged themselves into four capital letters.
WAIT
Sugar was a month behind in rent, so, as much as he wanted to let ants boss him around and tell him what to do, his landlady had strict policies on vermin infestation. It pained him to commit such a massive act of butchery, but the ants had made themselves into easy targets.
NO SQUISH
The speed and coordination of their rearrangement impressed Sugar. He lowered his hand, granting the ants a temporary stay of execution. He would hear them out.
GIVE BAR
Once again, Sugar marveled at the dexterity and fluidity of the hive mind. Vermin Infestation Policy, though. What a shame. If only he owned an ant farm, or even a terrarium.
OWE FAVOR
What kind of favors could one expect from ants? While the candy bar held no interest for him—repulsed him, in fact—Sugar needed to eat something. Besides, if he caved in to the ants’ demands now, it would set a precedent for future food.
Ever since the ants stole his attention, the telephone had grown audibly quieter. Sugar turned away from the spelling ants and checked to make sure he’d hung up the phone properly. He picked it up, put the receiver to his ear, and heard a dial tone. When he returned it this time, he was extra careful. Obviously, it was still plugged into the wall, but he checked anyway.
The pressure was making Sugar lightheaded, so he reached for the candy wrapper on the coffee table, the ant-debacle now being the furthest thing from his mind. When he accidentally crushed the multi-colored cellophane, he realized the candy morsel inside had disappeared. A glance at the coffee table showed it free of ants as well. Either he had eaten the rest of the bar unconsciously, or the conversation with the literate ants had credence. But if that were the case, where had all the ants gone?
The sound of knocking pulled Sugar away from his off-kilter speculation. The front door to his basement apartment stood at the top of a short, wooden staircase. His visitor beat upon the door mercilessly, creating a loud ruckus. Sugar possessed sensitive hearing, so, hastening to put an end to the knocker’s percussive affront, he climbed the stairs two at a time. He only paused at the top long enough to take a deep breath before opening the door.
Standing on the other side was the skeletal vestige of his old landlady, scowling with her entire face, as she gripped her walker with one hand and continued the knocking motion with the other. Behind her, the windstorm raged, sending tree branches, newspapers and other debris high into the air. Wind shrieked at anything with functioning ears, and Sugar smelled salt from the ocean, even though they were many miles inland. The clouds racing overhead reminded him of rivers choked with spawning salmon.
Varicose veins forked like purple lightning down the vacant skin of his landlady’s arms. She usually wore a cheap, black wig. Today she had left it behind, likely to prevent the storm from stealing it off her fuzzy, gray head. Stains spotted her lavender sweatpants, and burn holes peppered the front of her lime-green sweatshirt. Any visible skin displayed liver spots and cancerous moles. She squinted through the impossibly thick lenses of her prescription glasses, which were attached by a limp cord. Chain-smoking had dyed her false teeth a yellow-corn color that seemed to darken with every successive encounter.
“You look terrible,” she told Sugar, when he opened the door. “Where’s my money?”
A stray leaf struck her, clinging to her wrinkled cheek for a moment before careening off into the storm.
“There’s ants,” Sugar said, avoiding his landlady’s squint.
“Ants?” she said, squinting harder. “The Vermin Infestation Policy states that the tenant is responsible for the removal and extermination of any and all pests, including but not limited to: rodents, cockroaches, wasps…and ants. You signed it.”
A plastic grocery bag struck his landlady, adhering to the contour of her bony hip. She plucked it off her person and let the wind carry it away.
Sugar tried to reassure her that the ant problem wouldn’t cause any trouble.
“I’m waiting for an important phone call right now,” he explained.
“An exterminator?” She arched the ghost of an eyebrow.
“That’s an option,” he agreed.
His landlady chuckled hoarsely, her whole respiratory system rattling like a tin of dried beans.
“Oh, it’s a call from your friend in the white BMW,” she said, smirking.
Newspaper, dragged by the most recent gust, slapped into his landlady, knocking her off balance. She tightened her grip on her walker and planted her feet.
“Um,” Sugar mumbled, “I should be able to get you that late rent next week. Sorry for the delay.” He scratched at his nose zit again.
“Jesus,” his landlady exclaimed, “your face is bleeding.”
More trash bounced off of her, ricocheting into the ether.
“Christ,” she gargled, “When’s the last time you bathed? You smell awful. Take a shower and change your clothes. No wonder you got ants.”
A gust of wind, endowed with a greater violence than any of its predecessors screamed its incomprehensible fury at Sugar, his landlady, and the empty street beyond. The sound of the roof being torn asunder vied for attention. Sugar looked up just in time to see a loose shingle, spinning like a frisbee, come flying down from the heavens and strike his landlady square in the shoulder. She stumbled and nearly fell, but managed to regain her footing.
“Ouch. Do you need help?” Sugar offered. “Someone from the roofing company…Gingerbread Roofing? They called earlier, but I didn’t get their number.”
His landlady’s face turned purple. She gripped the walker with her left arm—the one struck by the shingle—and clutched the injured shoulder with her other hand.
“For Chrissakes. Why I ever thought it was a good idea to take you as a tenant I’ll never know,” his landlady fumed. “I’m afraid to even speculate where you get your rent money. You sure as hell ain’t got no job. Folks say you make your money as a professional fairy, but I don’t know. What I think is you’re selling your organs off one by one; your kidneys, your spleen; definitely your testicles—Can a man survive without a spine?”
The wild mustang wind reared up on its hindlegs and kicked again. Once more, there was a ripping sound from the roof. Once more, a shingle-turned-missile flew on a collision course with Sugar’s irate landlady. This time it struck her in the temple and she went down. Sugar could still hear the raspy rattle of her ragged breathing, but the pool of blood next to her forehead made him nervous.
He placed a hand on her back and felt the outline of her ribs prodding through her sweatshirt.
“Are you okay?” he whispered, shaking her a few times, hoping the motion would revive her.
To his relief, she twisted away from him and shoved his hand back. With blood still streaming down her cheek at an alarming rate, his landlady forced herself into a sitting position. She blinked and squinted, trying to focus on Sugar’s face. Her glasses had fallen off and dangled from their cord. He reached over to help put them back on, and she swatted his hand away again.
“I’ve had enough,” she growled. “Storm or no storm, pack your shit and get the fuck outta my house. You are evicted. I evict you.”
As she pronounced these last words, her voice was drowned out by the wind and the snapping of something larger than shingles. They peered expectantly into the foul weather above.
“I evict you,” she repeated, and the next instant was struck in the head by something heavy and knocked to the ground.
The weathercock, which usually sat atop the gable of her house, flew down from the sky and embedded it itself in the top of her skull. Sugar didn’t take her pulse, or ask if she was okay. She was dead, dead and getting deader by the second.
Sugar stepped away from his door, out into the storm. He looked up and down the street, inspected the neighbors’ curtains, and watched the parked cars to see if any headlights turned on. Satisfied that nobody else had witnessed his landlady’s demise, he returned to her body to decide the best course of action.
He didn’t want to call the cops. Maybe later, but not until after receiving his phone call. Sugar’s friend who drove the white BMW hated cops. Likely he wasn’t overfond of decomposing old crones either. Whatever happened, the first thing was to get the body inside before his neighbors saw anything.
The weathercock dislodged itself when Sugar picked up his landlady’s body. Without the weight of the iron implement, her body was shockingly light. Sugar cradled the body against his chest. Once he stepped back into his apartment, he braced it against the stairway railing so he could shut and lock his door. Then, choosing his steps carefully, he carried the body down the stairs, over to the couch, where he placed it with as much reverence as he could muster. Sugar rarely exerted this much energy for anything. He was suddenly exhausted and still needed to solve the problem of the corpse on his couch.
In his periphery, the phone continued its silent vigil. Sugar prayed that he figured this mess out before the phone rang. Hopefully, whatever he ended up doing, he could still answer it in time. How did one get rid of a body?
All the classic movie methods flashed through his mind. He could cut it into pieces in the bathtub. Or he could try to burn it in the fireplace, which he didn’t have. Or else he could bury it under the cement floor of his apartment. Feed it to pigs. Dissolve it with chemicals. Embalm it and put it on display. Cram it into a trunk and forget about it. Every idea he came up with was worse than the last.
So, he decided to go with the first idea and cut up his landlady’s body in the bathtub. Though messy, at least he would already be in the bathroom, with a shower nozzle at his full disposal. Feeling the grip of urgency, Sugar hastened the body into the bathtub and returned to his living room to look for a saw. The closest thing he could find was a serrated bread knife—not exactly the equivalent of a surgical bone-saw, but it might work in a pinch.
However, when he knelt down on the linoleum next to the tub, his hand trembled so hard he almost dropped the knife. Committing such a gruesome act as hacking off someone’s limbs went against his very being. Even contemplating it made him gag, the taste of bile creeping up his throat. He took a couple shallow breaths to reorient himself. The room felt like it was rocking back and forth. Sugar closed his eyes.
When he opened them, he still felt bothered, but the room had steadied as had his grip. Sugar seized his landlady’s forearm and set the blade to the crook of her elbow. He sucked in as much air as he could fit into his lungs and pulled on the serrated knife as hard as he could manage.
The sawing made a wet scraping sound, blood oozed from the gash, and Sugar promptly fainted.
The first thing he noticed was the quiet. After blustering all day, the windstorm had finally abated.
Then he opened his eyes and saw the ants.
The body in the bathtub shimmered with the motion of hundreds—maybe thousands—of tiny, ant bodies scurrying over blood-drenched polyester, parading through corridors of wrinkled skin and exploring the nostrils, earholes, and any other crevice at their disposal. The bathtub itself was lousy with ants. They crawled over each other and up the walls. There were ants on the ceiling that dropped into his hair and onto his bare arms. Sugar knew for a fact the bathroom had been free of ants before he fainted. How long had he been out?
While he puzzled over the length of his unconsciousness, he watched the ants on the rim of the bathtub rearrange themselves into words.
HELP YOU
A simple statement but unambiguous and to the point. The ants were offering to dispose of the body. Feeding a corpse to ants was essentially the same thing as feeding it to hogs. Yet the image of ants gnawing at the flesh of his landlady made Sugar cringe. Pigs had intelligence, were mammalian, could sympathize with the struggles of another creature. Ants, on the other hand, represented a primeval destructive force, older than reason. Sure, these ants were capable of spelling words in English, but that didn’t change the fact they were insects, hive mind, and mechanistic. Sugar didn’t trust them one bit.
OWE FAVOR
True. The ants did owe him a favor. That was their agreement in exchange for his candy bar. This particular scenario benefited both parties. Sugar could close the door on his corpse problem. In turn, the body would provide the ants considerably more sustenance than his unfinished candy. Sugar recognized the futility of his position. He was in a bind, and the ants were willing to assist.
“Okay,” he said, first looking at the ants on the rim of the tub, then swirling his head around at all the other ants in the room, looking for some response.
“Okay. Yes, please. I accept your help. You help me because you owe me a favor. I get it.”
But the ants remained in place without wavering.
OWE FAVOR
Did they mean he would owe them a favor? This was exactly why he never trusted ants, or any other insect for that matter. Just once removed from the primordial sludge. No sense of honor. Well, Sugar needed help—badly—but he wasn’t about to negotiate with a bunch of greedy ants.
He hurried to his feet, setting the serrated knife on the edge of the sink, having held onto it through the entirety of his latest conversation with the ants. The sink was slick with something not water, and the knife wobbled, searching for balance.
Impulsively, Sugar raised his eyes to the bathroom mirror and caught sight of his reflection. His eyes had sunk so far into his skull he looked like a raccoon. Besides the scabbed blood behind his nostril, he discovered at least ten other similar scabs across his face. His skin had turned yellow with pink blotches. His hair was one brown greasy knot. And there were ants crawling everywhere on his person.
On the mirror they spelled out a new message.
GIVE HOUSE
Suddenly the quiet overwhelmed Sugar, and the silence inverted. Sounds in his imagination amplified until they almost deafened him.
The mute phone seemed to hum impatiently, jealous that Sugar had been so long absent.
Atop the steps, his door—shut, locked and latched—untouched by either gust of wind or human hand–beckoned fiercely to Sugar. Within the confines of his skull echoed a fierce knocking, growing increasingly louder in tandem with the phantom ringing.
The silent floorboards above him creaked noisily in his mind.
Somewhere in the walls, voices whispered, “Spaulding, Spaulding, Spaulding…”
Ants climbing on the serrated knife skewed its balance, sending it clattering into the bathroom sink.
Sugar screamed and jumped ten feet into the air.
“Fine,” he yelled. “You want the fucking house? It’s yours. I don’t care what you eat, or where you wanna live, just so long as that fucking body disappears.”
He scratched a new zit that had swollen up behind his right ear and was rewarded with a fingernail full of puss.
“I’m expecting an important phone call, and I need that body gone,” he said, looking resolutely in the mirror, meeting his own wild stare and flaring his nostrils like a horse.
As if by magic, the phone in the living room started ringing. The ants on the mirror had dissolved the letters back into a writhing static mass. The covenant complete, Sugar didn’t want to stick around for the execution. He moved hastily to the living room and the ringing phone.
The sight that greeted him upon exiting the bathroom made Sugar blink. He shut his eyes and counted to three as the phone continued to ring. What did he agree to when he signed the house over to the ants? He opened his eyes again and they were still there. Ants.
Every surface in his apartment was coated in a thick living layer of ants. Wall to ceiling to wall to floor, the ants pulsed with life. His carpet was a foot deep river of ants. Already he could feel them crawling up the inside of his pants, all over his legs. And still the phone rang on.
Sugar waded through the biomass sea, crunching and squishing ants by the thousands as he tromped over to his couch. He plopped down in the middle of a blanket of ants, draped over the couch cushions. After brushing off as many ants as possible, Sugar finally answered his phone.
“Sugar?” the voice on the other end crooned.
“Yeah,” Sugar replied. “I’m here.”
“That’s great,” the voice on the phone murmured silkily. “I’m glad to hear it. Do you still need me to stop by?”
Ants from the floor had absorbed Sugar’s lower torso into their roiling nebula, while ants from the couch made holy pilgrimage up his trunk and along his arms.
“Yeah,” Sugar confirmed. “I’d like that very much.”
With ants from the ceiling steadily raining into his eyes, it was becoming harder to see, but what little of his apartment was visible, no longer resembled furniture or dirty dishes or candy wrappers. Looking at his apartment was like staring into the electric snowstorm of a broken television. The ants bathed Sugar and everything else in their immaculate fecundity, frothing like a ravenous soap, foretelling an imminent cleansing.
“I have a couple other engagements,” the voice on the phone uttered serenely, “but I’ll see what I can do. Shouldn’t be more than—”
Sugar couldn’t hear the rest of the sentence. The ants had hijacked the earpiece of his phone. They were in his ears, clogging them worse than any ear wax. Every time he opened his mouth to speak, a horde of them rushed through the gap. All he could taste was ants. All he could smell was ants (they crowded his nasal cavities as well). Finally, the ant depth in his apartment crested his head, and Sugar lost sight of the world.
Jabez AB Richard (all pronouns) lives in Bellingham, Washington with his partner and two kiddos. His fiction and poetry, inspired by the cold, dark beauty that permeates the Pacific Northwest, have appeared in Jeopardy Magazine, Writers Corner Anthology 2024 and Whatcom Writes 2025. On those days when his literary muse is resting, he takes solace in spinning deep-cut funk records and cuddling his pupper doggems.