Editor's Note

Hole

by Brian K. Mahoney, June 25, 2008

First it was the electricity. The lights in the house flickered on and off like in a horror movie. They sputtered like the toothpaste force-squeezed out of any almost-empty tube. But only some of them. The rest of the lamps shone brilliantly, just like always. Lee Anne suggested we change the light bulbs. Then we chose to ignore it, as some of the lights still worked. What did it matter that the others, in a house with hundred-year-old wiring, blinked like neon?

Or perhaps it was the ankle that started it. I had spent the long winter in the gym, dutifully trying to stay in shape. I went to spin class at the YMCA five or six days a week; sometimes, incredibly, at six in the morning in the dark and the blue-black cold. Pedaling and pedaling, sweating and pedaling, gasping and sweating and pedaling, listening to the instructors as they barked out the next command—up! down! turn it up a notch! sprint!—on their headset microphones, perfectly poised on their stationary bikes like fitness Madonnas (the singing-and-dancing kind, not the mother-of-Jesus kind), setting the pace for the rest of us as we all spun maniacally toward nowhere like the kidnapped cyclists in The Triplets of Belleville.

When spring sprang, I didn’t have to come off the couch with an extra 20 pounds and atrophied muscles as in years past. I was probably more fit than when winter began. As a strategy, it worked fairly well. I experienced the low-key euphoria that success through discipline over time brings. This was short-lived, however. At the first practice of the season for my ultimate Frisbee team in early May—the Frisbee season being a major reason for my fitness regimen in the first place—I collided with another player during a scrimmage and twisted my ankle, subsequently missing six weeks of training.

Then there were the ants. (Or are, I should say, as they’re still with us.) The first day it was just one, scuttling across the back of the kitchen sink. I squashed it with my index finger and tried not to think about the social nature of ants, contenting myself with the illusion of a bold pioneer who had become separated from the colony and met an explorer’s fate. Two days later, there was a bubbling mass of brown, the size of penny, on the counter. It took me a minute or two to chase down the ants that wriggled out from under my thumb. Now the ants don’t travel in packs anymore. And I would need twice as many fingers to deal with them in their current profusion.