Sunday, April 27, 2008

Antie Maim

I saw one ant, in the sugar bowl on the counter. No others. Just one.

One ant, in oceanic sweetness, risking drowning in As Good As It Gets.

I pinched a bit of sugar and ant together, walked out the door, and tossed it all outside, over the chain-link fence, into the weeds. Rescue or relief (for the ant, not the sugar).

The next day: ants all over the counter.

Vengeance is mine: ant traps (do they work? they seemed to after a few days; they did on the other counter, across the kitchen) and much ant death by crushing. Thumbs and other fingers squashing any ant in sight. My thumbs and fingers. Like some Character in an Old Testament chronicle. The ant crusher's ANThem? "Under My Thumb" by the Rolling Stones, of course.

Whether executing passive ant murder by chemical traps or active extinction by thumb crushing, I ain't no Buddha or Gandhi.

Except in the tiny ant eyes of SugarAnt1, wherever he or she, and the few grains of sugar, are.

4 comments:

Patti said...

I'm into ant trap usage myself these days. It's an April thing.

How about the uncles? Are they as busy as the ants?

Odat said...

I like to think that I will save all the bugs....I try to capture them and get them back to their own world...but......i suppose if I had LOTS of them...I would resort to thumb crushing and feet stomping too....sorry to say....
Peace

Michael T said...

The only insect I feel no qualms about crushing is the mosquito. War against all vampires, I say.

Then again, I have plenty of blood to spare...

To tell the truth, though, I've crushed the three ants I've seen in my apartment so far this spring.

Patti said...

When I awoke this morning I was thinking about that ant you rescued from the sugar bowl and released into the wild.
You could write a short story about his adventures once he got outside.

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