The Paris Review - Fall 2016

No Cops
ANDREW MARTIN
The ants had gotten in through the shattered
bottom half of Leslie’s laptop
screen. Now they crawled across her
green- and blue-tinted Word documents and websites
one or two at a time with no discernable pattern
or destination. It must have been a hell of a
place for an ant, all that glowing landscape to be
negotiated, possibly forever. It wasn’t clear whether
any ants escaped or if they all just died in there. If
they were dying, they at least had the decency to
do it over in the dark border area of the screen or
down in the keyboard, rather than within her line
of sight. She was trying to see how long she could
go without getting a new computer; the sound of
crackling glass every time she opened the screen
suggested that the reckoning was nigh.
She was on her front porch, trying to make
herself write an e-mail to her ex-boyfriend Marcus,
who was, she had just learned, due back in town in
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