Free Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls by Alissa Nutting

and to feel like it understands you. It’s a part of your self. We could talk about this more over dinner?” But I never crossed the line into dating.
    Then one day I received a frantic call.
    “Come in immediately. Where are you right now?”
    At the moment, I was in the middle of shooting a commercial for a water company.
    “Leave the minute you hang up the phone. What we have to discuss is far more important.”
    I was very used to people feeling like they were more important than me, but less beautiful. I often felt that every transaction in my life somehow revolved around this premise.
    Defying these orders, I finished the water shoot. “Refreshing,” I said. It was my only line in the commercial, and I’d been practicing all day.
    I can tell you this: I did love how invisible the ants were. They were creatures that seemed to consider themselves neither important nor beautiful. Earlier that month, the doctor had given me a videotape of several ants feasting on the corpse of an ant that had died in my femur. This cannibalism was an aberration, he’d pointed out: ants do not normally eat other ants from their own colony. The doctor said he’d worked with an entomologist to specifically breed a contained bone ant species that would eat the dead, lay the eggs in the dead, and make the dead a part of the living.
    When I finally arrived at the doctor’s he was very upset—he’d cancelled everything and had been waiting in his office, which is covered with wall-to-wall pictures of me, for hours.
    “Your left wrist.”
    I slipped off my glove and held it out to him in a vulnerable way. My wrist was smooth and fragrant and pale and had a nicotine patch on it; the doctor had suggested I quit smoking for the health of the ants. I squeezed my eyes to look beneath my skin for them. “It’s like they’re not even there,” I muttered.
    “Grip my fingers,” he said, holding two of his own upon my pulse. It was a little difficult to do.
    “Oh,” he said. Even though his voice sounded worried, he seemed a little pleased. “Goodness.”
    He ran from the room, face flushed. And there I sat alone, or not alone truly.
    “We seem to be in crisis,” I muttered to them, and put my glove back on.
    Since the ants, I have started gloving my arms. I buy the longest gloves I can find. It feels like putting the ants to bed, the way one might place a blanket over the cage of a bird.
    “We are all certain this can be resolved.” Around the table sat several new doctors I’d never met, or maybe they were dentists. I spotted a magazine that I was in—mascara ad, page seven—lying on an end table in the conference room. Somehow this made me feel safer, more of a majority. There were two of me in the room and only one of everybody else.
    My doctor passed me a glossy picture: its subject was an engorged ant that was either eating or vomiting—I couldn’t tell which. The ant was surrounded by small piles of powder that, when magnified, looked like crumbs of bread. I gagged a bit. “Why are you showing me this?”
    “This is their queen,” he said. The doctor’s pupils had dilated to a width universally associated with insanity. “She wants you gone.” His fingertip moved from pile to pile on the glossy photo, leaving a print upon each one. “These are piles of your bone. You are being devoured by the ants that live inside you.”
    “Eaten from within.” A dull woman at the very end of the table repeated this in a parrot-like manner. She wore a large dome cap, the obvious fashion of one hosting an organism on her head. Hers appeared tall and slightly conical; I was very interested in what type of creature it might be, but it is considered rude to ask about other peoples’ organisms—they are ultimately too much of a bodily function.
    “But we feed the ants so they don’t have to eat me. I come here once a month so you can put their food inside.”
    An authoritarian doctor whispered something to my doctor, who