I was tired, stressed out, behind on a half-dozen deadlines, and I didn’t particularly care that the first frost had sweetened the kale. Alisa was a sphinx, and if there was any reason that I should whip up something special in the kitchen, I wasn’t aware of it. So we had potatoes. Lots and lots of potatoes. Some time ago I had passed through a phase of having trouble imagining a day without them; now I ate them out of dull habit. Of potatoes I had had enough, thank you.

“We need to get some wheat or I’m going to go out of my fucking mind,” I said across twin breakfast plates of eggs and hash browns.

“We have wheat,” Alisa reminded gently; she had stepped carefully around me since my return from Kamloops, where my language had taken a turn for the worse. She was right, of course. We had the tub that contained the 10-to-one blend of wheat berries and mouse shit. Hadn’t dipped into that in awhile.

Mid-afternoon, the autumn sun already angling low through the windows, I peeled back the blue plastic lid of the bin and scooped up a cup of the pale brown grains, then poured them onto a cutting board for the ritual separation of wheat from chaff. Clearing a cup of wheat could take more than half an hour, and I sat down with a woe-betide-me sigh. Seeds left, chaff right; seeds left, chaff right. I uncovered a rat turd the size of an olive pit and carried it directly to the garbage. Pulling up again to the cutting board, I was confronted by a curious still life. At the peak of the pile of wheat beans stood an insect, head lifted to the breeze like a mountain sheep on a backlit skyline ridge. Then he–or she–turned from the summit and began to descend the slope.

“If you want to see a weevil, there’s one walking across the cutting board right now,” I called to Alisa in her bedroom garret. We had only ever known weevils from novels of the Deep South, in which the insects endlessly invaded the cotton fields of struggling families, with tragic results.

“Does this mean we’re infested?” she cried from behind her closed door.

“It’s only one,” I said. “He might have been in there a long time. Come and look. He’s kind of cute.” It was true: the weevil was small and round, beetling now across the kitchen table, a dark ruddy brow arcing over his snout. He looked both professorial and gossipy, like a television pundit.

“I don’t want to look,” Alisa shouted.

I tossed the weevil out the window into the parking lot, a cruel enough place that I wished him godspeed. Then it was back to seeds left, chaff right; seeds left, chaff right.

Another weevil.

“There’s more,” I called out, and Alisa appeared at my shoulder. By then I had counted eight or nine. I reached out to touch one and it folded its legs and tipped over. “Playing dead,” I said. Then I saw something else: specks moving across the board, as hard to track with the eye as a satellite across the night sky. Exactly these tiny bugs had been appearing more and more often in the house for weeks–the size of creature that might comfortably set up a colony in your ear. Suddenly we knew where they were coming from. Our infestation came in two sizes, large and small.

“The crop is ruined,” Alisa moaned. “It’s like Little House on the Prairie.”

“It’s just a few bugs,” I grumbled. “There are worse things in this wheat.” Hadn’t I read somewhere that old-time sailors used to drop their hardtack on the cook’s stove to chase out the weevils before they ate?

Seeds left, chaff right. Alisa muttered her way back to her desk.

But there was a problem. The weevils seemed to be disappearing. I had been certain there were more than a handful. Now I could see one, two, three, four. Can weevils fly? Another possibility came to mind and I slowly lifted a grain and turned it in my fingers. Yes. A hole. And nothing visible but the proboscis.

“Oh,” I said, this time mainly to myself but loud enough for Alisa to hear. “They hide inside the grains.”

“I’m not eating it!” she said from her room. “What if the big ones hide inside the grains, too?” She thought I meant only the tiny bugs hide in the kernels.

“It is a big one,” I said.

“I’m not eating it!” she shouted. I could hear that she was out of her chair and standing at her closed door.

“We have to have something to serve my brother,” I shouted, my sudden anger surprising me. He would arrive in just a few days, his first visit in almost a decade.

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