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bit, last fall—remember, when the folks trying to shelter here gave up, headed east? But then you came back.” He didn’t move a step but he was still inches from me again, eye to eye. “ You came back. My little prodigal daughter, crying for her fatted calf. Telling old father he’s not welcome in his own home anymore, he has to clear out.”
    Something stirred in the dust piles, the little paper trails, shifting, settling, crawling out of the center. Ants. They were actual anthills now, all around us, with tiny black dots busily heading in and darting out as they set up housekeeping at our feet.
    “You threw me out,” he said, and watched impassively as a line of ants reached the summit of his shoe. “Can’t even set a foot out of doors without getting kicked out of my own home—you can’t even imagine how long it took me to get used to it all, to make what’s mine really mine , but you don’t care. Don’t give a damn. So I’m out.” His voice was so soft, so suffocatingly soft. “All your experiments, setting up to take the Grim Reaper’s scythe away, so I can’t claim a single solitary soul until they decide when to die, how to die, all on their own. And then you have the gall to turn around and beg, sob, cry for me to come back, daddy, come baaaack—and I do, I do just that, and after all that fuss you throw me out. You want me gone that badly? Maybe I’ll just go. Forever. Not one single part of me ever to return.”
    The ants struggled over the scuffed toe of his shoe, its dirt-caked sides, in a futile search for food. His other foot reached out and nudged; a cluster of ants scattered, running frantically back and forth, their sandhill a flattened heap and the rice-grains of their eggs crushed to glassine specks of powder. He laughed.
    “Don’t,” I said. A weak little whisper. I hadn’t meant to say it.
    “My first mistake,” he said, smiling too hard and too wide, “was thinking all this was over and done. All that nasty upstart lab-ratting of years and years, grabbing at my scythe and spitting in my face, the plague took good care of all of that and all of you—” He chuckled, a smothered explosion. “And the best part is that it wasn’t my doing, it was all of yours. I just admired from a distance, laughed my head off, reaped one truly stunning man-made whirlwind. Because I was foolish enough to think that finished it, that nobody left standing would ever again defy me like that, face to face. You, though—you’re dragging all your kind right back into it, a little palace coup, dangling it in front of them knowing they can’t refuse—so!” He shrugged, let his painfully stretched-out mouth relax. “You’ll all have to suffer. Every one of you, everywhere. You could have left, you could have stopped this. You had the chance. You, Natalie. And you threw it away.”
    “I don’t believe you,” I said. Ants trekked around my toes, seeking the hiding places they’d lost. “I don’t.”
    “Of course you don’t. But that’s all right. That’s half the fun.”
    He was too far away for his arm to reach but still right there in my face, a dizzying mirror-refraction turned solid, patting my shoulder all good-kiddo with happiness dancing in his eyes. “And when you realize just how wrong you were—sorry, you just blew your last chance! You, my sweet Amy, all her funny little friends—”
    “Amy,” I said, and I was supposed to be cool and nonchalant and make him understand just how unwelcome he was but that name made tears threaten to spill all over again, ignited an angry little coal in my chest. “It’s always Amy, Amy gets presents and friends and you and why do you like her better? You help her, you rescue her, I know it’s you who sent that horrible ghost dog to guide her here and get her out of—why? Why is it never me ?”
    His hand on my shoulder tightened and from each pressing fingertip a plume of crawling unpleasantness, the sickly heat of nausea, went