Displacement by Michael Marano Page A

their powerful jaws would snap in silent rage, dripping formic acid that smelled so slightly of maple. Then I’d bring them together in an awful embrace, their jaws clamping down on each other.
    Then I’d set them in the chalk arena, with the Rule in mind that if either one disengaged and left the Circle, I would crush it with my thumb. If their struggle took them out of the Circle, I’d knock them back in. The battles could last hours. And it pleased me no end that they fought and were in pain for reasons they couldn’t understand, under laws they couldn’t understand. Sometimes, when the struggle went too long, I’d change the odds by ripping off a leg or snipping an antenna.
    And if one ant proved itself worthy, if one ant followed my unknowable laws and killed the other, I crushed it anyway, happy to make another entity suffer as I’d known helplessness, following the oppressive rules of my parents, and receiving for it no love or acceptance or freedom or power.
    It was good to kill the victor. I’d walk away from the chalk circle feeling wonderfully clean, and no longer angry.
    Doctor Johansson packed his pipe with another bowlful of tobacco as fictional as the dreams I’d used as weapons.
    —Would you describe yourself a serial killer if it would help your defense? To cop an insanity plea?
    No, I am an avatar.
    —I wouldn’t. Besides, I’m not going to see the inside of a courthouse. I’ll see the inside of a cheap coffin, first.
    He began puffing, and my mind saw the bowl glow red. A blue-grey fog formed around him like a halo.
    —There must have been times when killing insects wasn’t enough. What did you do then? Or when there were no bugs around, in the winter?
    I was transfixed by the blue-orange will-o’-wisp glow of his pipe. I didn’t want to answer his question, even as my body answered it, with memories of blossoming pain echoing beneath my skin.
    I’m seven years old. I’ve locked myself in a bathroom, and I’m punching myself. There’s joy to venting anger and frustration, joy in damaging myself, making real and feelable the rage that stabs me from within with ghost-blades too dishonest to draw blood, or to leave scars that offer the consolation of watching them heal. I can’t remember why I’m so enraged . . . some comment from my father has roiled me into this frenzy, or some accusation of my mother’s has bewitched me with a fury that must be released somehow, even against myself. All I can recall is the passionate need to hit and hurt and
punish
someone, anyone, anything. Saints have known this pain through hair-shirt self-martyrdoms that let them feel the love of the Divine Father and see the Light of Heaven, not through rage that stains shadows the color of dying scabs.
    In my ecstasy of loathing, amid the blows I smashed against my brow and the back of my head, I looked up and saw my red, wrath-twisted face in the mirror . . . my little boy’s mouth fixed in a grimace, veins bulging at my temples, and bruises spreading like wine spilled on satin.
    I stood there, my small fists stopped in mid-blow, panting like a wolf over a steaming kill, thinking perhaps I could reach through the mirror and kill the boy who inspired such pity and contempt in me, hoping to travel through the Looking Glass to the fantasy world where a weak little boy could die by my hand as he deserved to.
    Instead of reaching through the unyielding and cruelly solid glass, I reached instead into my child’s mind and pulled forth a screaming, pleading surrogate: a thing to punish besides my own face, yet that still bore my face.
    After several minutes of pantomimed blows against another, non-existent thing that cowered in the corner where two sheets of ugly vinyl wallpaper met, my rage subsided.
    In the mirror, it seemed as if my bruises—for which I was often rewarded with extra food at dinner for sparing my parents the bother of inflicting them—faded. I washed my throbbing face with cold water and