THE CARPENTER ANT It was when or because she became two kinds of mad, both a feral nail biting into a plank and a deranged screw cranking into a wood beam, the aunt—I shouldn’t say her name, went at the fullest hour of the night, the moon there like an unflowered bulb in a darkness like mud, or covered in darkness as a bulb or skull is covered in mud, the small brown aunt who, before she went mad, taught herself to carpenter and unhinged, in her madness, the walls she claimed were bugged with a tiny red-eyed device planted by the State or Satan’s agents, ghosts of atheists, her foes, or worse, the walls were full of the bugs she believed crawled from her former son-in-law’s crooked mouth, the aunt, who knows as all creatures know, you have to be rooted in something tangible as wood if you wish to dream in peace, took her hammer with its claw like a mandible
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