The ant hills where I am here are just mounds of dirt, not the traditional cones with a hole at the top so naturally I’ve been kicking them open to take a peek inside and this morning I kept my foot on the mound too long and got my foot attacked. Only a few got my leg as the rest did their bite-sting move (they dig their jaws in and shove their butts in you for double injection) on my sock and shoe.
I killed only the ones on my skin. For the rest – I let them collect on my shoe until there was a substantial amount. Then I took the shoe off and ran… I ran into the woods, far far away from their colony…and I put the shoe in the branches of a tree…
Why?
Because these ants are blind. They carry their duties by scent of the ant in front of them. They require proximity to the masses. Without it… they are lost. Doomed to wander the earth, alone and without purpose. They will keep attacking my shoe for awhile, like a Japanese soldier stationed on a remote island in the Pacific who kept fighting WW2 years after it had ended because he just didn’t know, but most of them will relent and go to move on. But move on to what? a hostile world of loneliness and defeat. They may stumble on to hostile territory and get killed and become food for another colony or they may just wander the earth frantically until they die of starvation. Either way I have given them not a violent punishment for daring to strike at me, but a fate far worse.
A life sentence of misery. A life without purpose as these random cogs are separated from their machines and rendered useless, with nothing they can do but wait to die. and it will be a long wait.
They will die, not heroes in battle, but with a pathetic whimper far from their Queen, alone and confused…
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