A Black Dot Below

A BLACK DOT BELOW

It’s a beautiful Tuesday afternoon. I’m sitting under my favorite oak tree at Thealer Park, book in hand, with a slight breeze gliding over my body. The leaves provide me with uneven patches of shade, covering some of me, leaving other parts of me exposed to the soft sun, wrapped around pieces of my wan skin.

I look up from my book to the soccer field on the other side of the park. Young boys run around kicking the ball furiously, as if all that existed in the world were them, the ball, and the goal. Looking at them, I can taste their energy as they give all they can, as they reach out for the potential success, each one visualizing making that goal. Such naivety.

I turn back to my book, bored with another mystery novel. Another day, another nothing. I loiter around, living a silence, my head empty of words. Meaninglessness surrounds me, tickling me with apathy as I drag through time. It is me, the sun, my insignificant book, and the senselessly hopeful boys that form my universe.

I hold my book loosely in my hands and take a deep breath. I hear a noise. It’s squeaky, high-pitched, irritating my ears for a brief moment. “Hey you!” it shouts. “Hey you!” I look all around me, expecting to see a deranged three-year-old alien running toward me, but I am alone under my tree. The only others in sight are the soccer players and a few picnickers at a distance.

I hear the noise again. I look down, and there is a queen ant resting in the jagged shadow of a leaf. “No,” I whisper to myself. But lo and behold, I hear it again “Yes yes yes!” says the voice back to me. And I swear to fucking God, it is coming right from the queen ant below me.

I feel my body heat up and my heart race, the panic of being utterly insane infusing me. “Yes, it’s me talking” says the shrilling voice. “No, you’re not crazy…you are just hearing me.” I look down at the ant. No, there are no lips moving (even I know that ants have no lip). But something in her body shakes, almost vibrating, as the voice comes out of her.

“I am not hearing an ant, I am not hearing an ant” I whisper to myself. I try to move, to get up, run away from this squeaky creature, from my unhinged self. But I am frozen, bolted down by my racing heart and my bewildered state.

The ant continues to speak. “I’m sorry to bother you. I’m not supposed to talk to you, or to anyone really. But today, I had a realization. The average lifespan of an ant is sixty days. Barely two months, can you believe it? And here, I’ve been alive forty-five days….my time is running short, needless to say. So I want to talk, I want to be heard.”

“But don’t you talk to your other ants?” I respond. I feel the heat escaping me, a coolness taking over me as my body begins to relax. I accept my peculiar situation, and that I am speaking to an ant.

“Yes,” she replies, “But it’s always the same with them. All they talk about is food, food, food… ‘Smell out the area, grab it, and bring it home’ they tell me over and over again. When they’re not talking about food, it’s building. ‘Gather dirt, pebbles, and build, build, build.’ It’s all so necessary, yet so banal. I just want to run away sometimes, but food and building, for as much as I despise them, are all I know, all I am capable of. Kind of a catch 22 I suppose.”

I look down at the ant, her black skin glistening in the sun, her words pulsating from her body and shining like glitter in the air. “I know what you mean” I respond back to her. The ant and I sit in silence for a bit. “I feel the same way sometime, too, you know,” I tell the ant. “Like everyone around me, they inanely go through the steps of everyday, and for what? Why? What’s the point? But then I see myself going through those same steps, and realize that I’m no different from them.”

We sit in silence a bit longer. Then, I look down toward the ant, wanting to ask her her name. But she is no longer there. I look back at the soccer players, and collect my book. I lift myself up, brushing the dirt off my pants as I ready myself to head back to work, having far exceeded my lunch break once again. As I walk to my car, I see an ant hill lying in the thin, dying brown grass along the sidewalk. I feel a connection with the hill, with the perplexity of the ants inside of it, realizing that we are more united than I had ever believed. As I walk on I allow my shoe to slide over the ant hill, demolishing the home and all that reside in it. Some may say this is a heartless thing to do. But, I am a human, and to destroy those weaker than me, well, for as ugly as that is, it is part me.