The Ants

The ants double each day. That isn't good.

The Ants

The Ants

They didn’t bite. The ants, I mean. They never actually bit or consumed. I didn’t realise that until much later. I don’t think anybody realised.

Certainly not when there were only a few of them, scuttling across the kitchen floor as little blots of shadow. The next day they had become a slathering pool of ink, moving from place to place around my house. That is when I began to kill them, feeling chagrined that I had not simply tried to relocate them when there had only been a handful. But there’s always more, they say. The ants are like an iceberg, in that respect.

They died like normal ants, becoming actual blots rather than the appearance of them. Pastes of ink, easily wiped and discarded.

Yes, normal ants. I can’t say that there was anything unusual about the ants in their separated form. As the saga progressed I would inspect them from time to time: a personal, frustrated meeting of the minds. They were normal in all respects, insofar as I knew ants. Legs, pincers and antennae all.

But it was not the ant that became the problem. It was the ants.

I believe it was the seventh day that I identified the ants as an issue to be urgently resolved. How biblical. They climbed every surface of my home, winding their way across like a pattern of moving shadow. My own attempts to destroy them fully were doomed to failure, as they would climb into orifices and through places I could not reach. I imagined their shadowy bulk heaving the walls from within, mulching the entire structure into wet paper and dust.

“You’ve been leaving open food around,” the pest control man had indicated, with unearned confidence given that this was not the case. “That brings them in. Weird time of year for it, but these things happen. I’ll put some poison and some glue down. Steer clear of it. You have pets?”

I didn’t have pets, but by the tenth day I wouldn’t have noticed anymore if I did have them as they would have been collated into the writhing mass of black. I awoke with their skittering and crawling across my skin. That prickly feeling might never have left me. The walls burgeoned with great effort, and cracked and flaked as that great creature that was the Ants – for the many were a single demon now - bored through every part of the house’s flesh. The poison and glue had been consumed entirely by the writhing, rendered fruitless.

I still do not know when exactly the duplication happens. When the mass doubles upon itself. My mind quickly became exhausted, and it was difficult to parse the passing of time in any event.

I woke, and the Ants wore me as though they were a cloak.

I rose from my bed in a sort of fugue, and they fell from me as flakes of my own self. As a group fell discarded, they would throw themselves back into the writhing pile, which then stretched up the length of my body once more. The pale ceiling of my room was lined with them, shimming and whorling like a fractal dance.

The fugue persisted for several days. Perhaps it still persists, and that is why I am somehow able to remain somewhat sane in my current position.

It kept my fear tamped down. I had wondered if they were eating my fear, drawing it from me like blood. I imagined ripples of delight: shivers down black and roiling skin.

I was able to observe the destruction with a sense of passive lucidity. The walls of my house had become nothing as the ants had burst them apart with nothing but their sheer bulk. The cool blue sky winked at me. Somehow I had not been crushed – where had the roof gone? As if in eerie psychic response, a lattice of ants clambered their way from one half wall-remnant to the other, with startling alacrity.

The ants were no longer creatures, or even something of substance. They were a movement of reality itself.

But they were also unimpeded destruction. I walked languidly through the shattered remains of my home, and saw that the ants had spilled beyond its once-boundaries. A woman’s voice cried out from the street – which had begun to buckle and curl in a way that I did not know streets could do. The cry receded as though it were being swallowed. Perhaps she was being swallowed.

Sirens rang in the distance, but I was tired.

In response, the ants scuttled across my brow and darkened my vision so that the cool blue sky disappeared. Yes, I would sleep some more, and consider the problem tomorrow.

The next day did not rise. At least, not in the way that I had come to expect it in my life.

There was no blue sky. Only ants.

The air was ants.

The sirens in the distance had ceased: I wondered if they, too, had become silent, crawling ants.

The world was ants.

I do not know if I had slept through the strange and monstrous end of the world. It did not matter – not really. I could see nothing except creeping shadow. Occasionally the silhouette of a pincer or mandible would stream across my vision and then be replaced by the black.

They surrounded me. I was the core of their cocoon. Their thrumming heartbeat. Waves of devastation echoed distantly, as the bulk that was the Ants began to tear apart everything that there was simply through their passive quantity.

Why me?

Why was I this cocoon? What did they want with me?

The Ants were silent to this question, but they were not silent. The noises around me became a crescendo of clicking and rustling and whisper-chirps. The echo ran deep.

The effects of the Ants became known to me only as strange visions beyond the web of the black, wriggling cocoon. They had become catastrophe incarnate. The air had been squeezed out of the planet, and the oceans broiled with poisonous acidity. Thousands of miles away from me, the Ants squashed into one another. And yet even so far away, still connected to me.

I slipped in and out of sleep, though the idea of sleep was now meaningless: no other humans existed. The Ants knew this. It had not been intended, but it was natural.

Why me?

I do not think that there is a reason, other than that this would always be the way the world ended. Not with a bang, but with lots of ants.

I imagine the end of the world outside of my cocoon, but it might be real. There is no longer a delineation. It had been one hundred days, and the Ants had become a titan equal to the Earth itself. In the face of such power, the Earth simply cracked. Its burnt, exhausted atmosphere drained away like a spectral sigh. Then there was the void.

The Ants continue to accumulate. They double each day, though there are no longer days. Many will burn once we reach the Sun, but eventually the Sun will be consumed by the sheer mass in opposition to it. The Sun will be swallowed by its dark sister made of…ants.

We will keep growing. Exponentially, forever. Eventually the rate of accumulation will be greater than the speed of light. It will buckle the universe like a cracked egg. Fragments of reality will crumble into ants.

And then it will begin again. With something small.

One ant, perhaps.