At 3:19am, I try sleeping with the fan on, but the white noise fills my small bedroom too much and all I can do is toss and turn.

At 4:27am, I try drinking a glass of water, but only manage to spill half of it down my chin and chest, further waking me up and keeping me from any kind of sleep.

At 5:31am, I’m just about to drift when the first inklings of sunlight pour in through the easterly windows and drown my room in day.

“Christ,” I mutter to myself, and smash my pillow over my face. “Not today.”

At 5:59am, I try dropping the blinds, but my alarm goes off.

I turn off my alarm, but a garbage truck rumbles and rattles down the street, causing the usual amount of racket right outside my window. Then, it’s the birds.

At 6:33am, they think it’s the perfect time for a concert. I start to think maybe learning to hunt wouldn’t be so bad, but my neighbor’s sprinklers come on and douse the thought of avian vengeance.

Not today, at any rate.

So much for restful and dream-filled.

So much for her.

I sling my legs out of bed and lower my feet to the floor, rubbing my face and smacking my lips as I try to shake off the unfulfilled tired sitting on my brain like a dreary anvil. I’m staring at the floor when I see something move out of the corner of my eye. I stand up and walk over to the bedroom door, where I saw the movement, and find a colony of ants skittering up the reddish-brown of the mahogany door frame. From a distance, it looks like the wood is moving, wavy and ebbing, like a drug-induced hallucination.

I crouch down closer to get a better look when something tickles the toes of my feet. I look down and there’s a single ant crawling up my right leg. I brush it off immediately, stomp on it for good measure. That’ll teach it.

Gross.

I laugh and wipe my hands of the situation.

“There’s only one thing left to do,” I announce to nobody, and trudge on into the kitchen toward the cabinet under the sink. That’s where I keep all the chemicals they say we should never use but can’t clean our toilet bowls without.

At 7:14am, I fling open the cabinet, looking for the Raid, when I see something else move out of the corner of my eye. I lean in through the cabinet door, toward the back of the storage space, with my hand bracing my entire body, and feel a small tickle on the back of my hand.

It’s an ant.

There are hundreds of them, wriggling and squirming and scuttling about. Thousands.

At 7:21am, I take the can of Raid next to the OFF and the Clorox Bleach and spray it into the back of the cabinet, using my shirt as a makeshift mask. The ants hurry and scurry into the nooks and cracks of the cabinet, apparently unfazed.

At 7:49am, I stand up and survey the scene. It’s not even 8:00am and I’ve already accomplished more than I wanted to all day.

I slam the cabinet door shut and stand back with a contented sigh. Here I am, a bachelor with no girlfriend and a shit job, but I can still take care of ants when they try and ransack my house at seven in the morning.

It makes me feel independent.

It makes me feel like I can live on my own.

At 8:01am, I stand back and notice how empty the cold metallic face of my refrigerator is; how barren the walls and end tables are; how unused the balcony has been; the empty room down the hall. I pick my phone up off the kitchen counter next to the fridge and scroll through my text messages until I get to the one she left me and now all I can think about is her and how she wants me to get restful, dream-filled sleep. That’s how she worded it.

But, I can’t sleep. I can’t even begin to relax. There’s something eating at me today, a feeling I woke up with, like wading through frozen peanut butter. It makes me want to pull my tongue out of my face and wag it until it tells me what I want to say. But life doesn’t work that way.

We spray ant killer and hope it does its job.

We fall asleep and hope we wake up.

We wake up and hope it isn’t too late or too early, for whatever it is we’ve planned.

At 8:22am, I walk back into the bedroom, feet dragging behind me, and plop down on the bed. I hardly notice the give of the mattress or the softness of the bed spread. All I can concentrate on is this feeling swimming in my head like sharks, and it smarts, so I rub my temples, but it does nothing. I let out a guttural moan, a sound like a rusty gate opening, and smack myself across the face.

There’s a gun in the closet next to a box of bullets.

There’s a tarp in the garage next to the ShopVac.

I smack my face again and then bury my face in my palms. I spread my fingers, allowing just enough space to see the floor, and watch as two tiny ants make their way across the hardwood.

At 8:43am, I raise my right leg and bring it down on the two ants as hard as I can.

One gets instantly crushed.

The other survives.

I watch the crushed ant convulse as its final fleeting moments on earth come and go like a strong, sudden breeze.

At 9:05am, I raise my leg to crush the one that lived, tears streaming down my face, all the unfairness and cruelty of the world welled up in the back of my throat, and let out a single sob that quickly turns into a moan and a series of pitiful whimpers. I think about that painting with all the melted clocks and the ants that are always in the corners of the prints and how all those ants, frozen in acrylic, stand for something beyond what we think we know.

It makes me hope for tomorrow: a dream we don’t need to sleep to live.

At 9:25am, the ant finds its way out of the room and back into the hallway toward the kitchen cabinet under the sink. Following closely behind, I reach the cabinet before the ant can and fling open the doors for the can of Raid but stop when I see even more ants in the picture.

A dream I tell myself.

This life is all a dream.

I look at the clock on the wall to find its hands have melted and the hour is stuck at 3:19am. The glass face and bronze back are melting to the ground, where the liquid condenses into tiny, little creatures, ants. They speed across the floor toward the kitchen cabinet, which is now just a pulsing mass of bugs.

I cry out, eyes welling and threatening to spill over, and pound on the wall next to me, unhitching the clock and sending it tumbling, in a puddle, to the floor, where it collects in a multicolored soup the ants use to swim.

Chad W. Lutz is a non-binary writer born in Akron, Ohio. They graduated from Mills College in Oakland, California, with their MFA in Creative Writing in 2018. Their first book, For the Time Being, is available through J. New Books.