The Lot on South Congress

The lot has a chain-link fence with one panel unhooked and a ring of orange cones around a trench. At the back a billboard stands facing away from you. From here it is gray plywood and a catwalk. Fire ants have made their mounds along the fence line, and past them the trench wall is red clay, in shade all day.

The tunnels in the clay are the width of a pencil lead. They branch and join and branch again all the way down the wall, and where most of them meet there is a hollow an inch on a side, squared off.

A man sits on an overturned bucket by the cones with a jar of termites on his knee. He is looking at the clay. He does not say anything.

You hold the cube over the hollow, and it goes in to the edges. You lay your palm over it, fingertips on the clay around it. The cube is warm. The clay is cool. You count to ten, and neither changes.