They are tiny black squishable beads on squishable legs getting everywhere and Lisa wants to kill them even though we are vegan because they are literally fucking everywhere and doesn’t anyone else care that there are sizzled ants in the power outlet and spiraling out the plughole whenever they use the fucking kitchen sink, and because really, there would be less suffering overall if we just killed them now rather than let them breed to keep being electrocuted and drowned, and do I really not care that the ants are fucking colonizing our house.
I tell her about how there used to be dead ants in the sugar jar back home—no one was sure how they got in through the screw-top lid, although if you spilt any there would be a black ant-highway formed within seconds—and about the biting ants that were about a hundred times bigger than these ones, and about how I’m pretty sure ant colonies are not the same as colonization, but she doesn’t care about the ants back home, only about the ants that are fucking everywhere, by which she means our house.
Her dad, who technically owns the house, finishes replacing the burnt-out power outlet and suggests that we can call ourselves plant-based rather than vegan, and then it would be okay to kill the ants, and Lisa starts crying.
The inside of my ear tickles and an ant crawls out, so I go to my room before anyone notices.
In the beginning, you could see them carrying things away: tiny fragments of fruit, gingernut crumbs, the sweetness we didn’t need, and we laughed and said it was lovely that they cleaned up after us, a symbiosis.
Then they started swarming over spilt berry sorbet and protein shakes, which we thought was better, because you barely notice those smears on the kitchen counter until they stick to the mail someone dumped there so that bits of color from wet circulars are imprinted on the bench-top, but when the ants arrive before the post, they leave the formica shiny and smooth.
They kept coming, and coming: long winding trains of ants, even when there was no food for them, finding their way into floorboard cracks and the stained toilet bowl, and we didn’t know what they were doing here, and Lisa and I started arguing about what to do.
I pull another ant from my earlobe and reluctantly blow it off my fingertip into the geraniums outside my window. There are so many of them that, while the crumbs and spills may have been opportunism, it is clear they’re here with purpose. They are taking things away, things we cannot see, and deep down, the real problem for Lisa is not merely that she dislikes finding dead ants in her teacup every morning but that the things they are taking away are things she does not know how to give up.
When the march of ants from my ears eases, I go back to the kitchen where Lisa’s dad is offering, in his dual capacity as parent and landlord, to take moral responsibility for the ant-murder while she sprays white vinegar on every ant-free surface, and as I lean on the doorframe she accuses me of being the one who is trying to give her the moral fucking responsibility, because if it weren’t for me making that fucking face every time she complained she’d just have killed the fucking ants already and not thought twice.
The difference between me and Lisa is that she doesn’t realize what they could do for her if she accepted them. Whatever the ants are taking, I don’t need or want it. I am a home for them, and they are making me clean again, and I welcome them.
Another soft itch spreads out of my ear canal, around the spiral of cartilage, down the side of my neck onto my shoulder. Now, my body is awash with ants and freedom.
Tehnuka (she/they) is a Tamil writer & volcanologist from Aotearoa, New Zealand. You can find some of her recent work in Mermaids Monthly, the Imagine 2200 climate fiction collection, & forthcoming in Worlds of Possibility.
