THE FIRE ANTS KNOW
(Original image by Oktavianus Mulyadi)
My wife and I slept like shit.
The neighbors were to blame, bumping music until 3am, and then screaming up and down the landing at each other. Thankfully, Alex can sleep through a hurricane, but Mandi and I couldn’t fall asleep until around 5am. And as I lay there in bed listening to the racket outside, a man and a woman shouting for the other to fuck off, I began to fantasize that they all be carried away by a colony of red fire ants. It seemed appropriate at the time, enough to make me chuckle.
The sudden inclement weather would be reason enough for the little red bastards to come crawling through the pipes and begin Iurking through the dirty, neglected carpet in search of food. But here, serendipitously, they would find a cluster of people drinking fruit juice cocktails, dancing to incessant, bass–heavy, bongo–throbbing nonsense, and singing horribly at the top of their lungs some semblance of a pop song that’s been humped so dry, the original intent had been lost entirely.
And the commander ant says to the lieutenant, let’s go, and the lieutenant nods, and the battalion begins to swarm as if out of nowhere, rounding the toes, the calves, moving up the legs to the hips, the back, then to the neck, the eyes, the hair. Suddenly the singing becomes screaming, a net zero, and the big noisy fuckers fall to their feet, stunned and confused, as they begin to move against their will out the door, down the stairs, and out back towards the ant pile that seems to open like a ravenous mouth in the low light.
Help us! Help us, they would shout. Hehehe. Only this time, nobody would be listening. You see, we had all put our headphones in hours ago when you decided that your brief, immature thrust at meaning meant more than our sleep. So fuck you very much, fuck you to the core.
The next morning, as the old neighbor lady walks her dog through the winter fog, the ant hill appears several feet higher than before, surely some biproduct of nearby construction, and so she continues on none the wiser. But the fire ants know, and I know, and the cats and the birds pecking at the pile know, there’s a fresh bag of bones resting right beneath the surface.
The cops would eventually arrive, dig them out, ask some questions. And the neighbors would all say those goddamn people were jerks and good riddance, and I would say that even Nature had her limits, and one of the two cops would laugh and tell me about another ant attack across the way, some political guy that quit his job after the election and spent his evenings screaming apocalypse out the window for all his indifferent neighbors to hear. You know, the ones with the jobs and the families to take care of, both young and old, the ones that work so hard they don’t have the time or the energy to bother themselves with all that media, propaganda bullshit.
Well, the ants got that guy too, dragged him down in similar fashion to the hill just outside his building, and there was another bag of bones by morning.
It was all a wonderful, glorious fantasy that lasted long into morning, and even now this evening as I sit at my typer, facing down another workweek dead as a dog thanks to my magnanimous neighbors. But at least I’ll have a smile on my face when the first red fire ant comes crawling up my walls. I’ll be sure to point him in the right direction.
