Ant Funeral

The progress of the friendship between Miles Dominguez and Millie Robinson was novel as it was warm, and time revealed it would pass on to become one to last forever, but none of it was as rapid as its inception. What now seemed an inseparable pair resolute in flame was not always so; in the early stages of their lives they had been divided over a most perilous subject: the subject of an ant funeral. 

In the first few days of the story, when they were young children who all went to school together, Miles was best friends with Owen Yang, and Millie enjoyed spending her time outside alone. Miles and Owen played hockey in the winter and baseball in the summer. They were eager to slide in the grit of wet and dirt, bodycheck others if size deemed possible, and stomp on the littlest flower for victory. They were ruthless and boyish, in all the ways youth could do to them. But Millie, she was the opposite by definition. If she was to see a person step on a flower, and in doing so prove they were not troubled from degrading life to such a measly importance, she would be contemptuous and unhappy. Yes, Millie was a sweet girl in every sense of the term. She read books in her spare time, up in her small room in her family’s big house, and would all day if she could. She had glasses, but after deciding it was possible to live normally without them, she now deserted them more often than not with a disdain for the discomfort it brought, at the cost of a disapproving mother. With no glasses too she could swim in the safety of the fact no one would judge her for having them. But despite Millie’s dislike of the lenses, they were needed to perceive the smallest of things, such as, for example, an ant. It was an ant that would cause the worlds of the two most unlikeliest people, Miles and Millie, to collide.

It was a typical summer day in July, hot from sun but cool by breeze, when Millie had walked outside her front door, plan in mind to return books to the local library. At this same time, Miles and Owen were returning from a baseball game victory and the adrenaline of it was still pumping their blood like a tidal wave--yahoos, high-fives, and shoulder bumps their rampant current behaviour as they walked down the sidewalk reclaiming memories of the game. They were still in their baseball caps and uniforms, gloves in their hands. Millie was wearing her glasses today. The old lady librarian at the front counter always said she looked cuter and more like herself with them, and she had liked the compliment so much it was worth wearing them every time she went to the library. This was, in fact, on her mind at the time, filling her head with a precarious daydream dizzying enough to distract her from what would inevitably come next. She could have sworn she heard the tiniest of screams when on her next step, she squished an innocent pavement ant on the sidewalk, the smell of death staling the air like a poisonous cloud. Immediately she went into a state of anxious panic. “Oh no!” she said, kneeling down before it with a swell of tears. “Oh no no no no no!”

“What’s that girl doing?” said Owen to Miles, a look of confused disgust on his face as they were nearing Millie on the ground. 

Miles looked at his friend, stumped as if been asked a riddle. “Do you know her?”

“She looks like Millie Robinson from school. Wait, I think that really is her.”

“What is she doing? Is that an ant on the ground? You can’t be serious. I think she’s crying over a dead ant she stepped on.”

“I’m going to throw up! That’s the corniest thing I’ve ever heard.”

The two of them laughed and continued to as they arrived at Millie’s location. When they did, Millie looked up at them towering over her, their shadows blocking out the sun, and she hid her face and looked away. Her skin turned red hot like an iron pan over an oven, her insides turned into a fluid river, and her teeth chattered as if she was in the Arctic. It was imperative at all costs that these two boys did not see her crying over an ant. It was embarrassing to the moon and back, it was apocalyptic, it was world-ending. Instead she focused more on her little friend on the ground, dead from her bloodstained shoe. It was now a corpse of spindly legs and mangled antennae, over a carpet of yellowish greenish liquid, laid to rest on a pavement bed. Seeing it there only made her feel worse, the guilt accumulating like the steam of a kettle, ready to burst in a fit of quiet tears anytime. She had taken a life; there was no going back. A life, a small one, but a life nonetheless like hers. This was traumatic. She needed to do something for it, it was the least she could do. Perhaps a bed of flowers and grass instead of pavement. But how could she work if the two boys were still there, who would certainly make fun of her?

“Gonna go cry about a little ant?” said Owen, faking crying himself with rotating fists. “Boo hoo!”

“Showing pity over an insect?” said Miles. “Big deal! I step on ants every day, without even meaning to! Why are you so regretful this one time? You’ve probably stepped on so many in your life.”

“Not pity. Empathy,” corrected Millie, finally finding enough courage to defiantly stare back at them. Then she looked away slowly and muttered, “You boys wouldn’t understand.” She chose this moment to calmly prepare the ant a death ceremony, gathering up surrounding dirt and grass to make a mound around it. Owen and Miles could not contain an outburst of laughter.

“You’re seriously giving it a funeral?” said Miles.

“Shut up!”

“Maybe she feels regretful this one time because she has her glasses on,” observed Owen. “She never has them on. Only today she could see the ant, out of the hundreds she’s probably unknowingly killed.”

“Haha, you’re right,” said Miles. Then, as one must expect from a child, he conceived a grand idea that only the most childish of children could do. With a quick and sneaky hand, he snatched Millie’s glasses from behind her and raised it in the air. He hollered, “Got your glasses! Got your glasses!”

“Yes!” said Owen excitedly. “Bet you can’t see the ant that you’ve killed now!”

“Stop it!” Her voice sounded like a tearful vulture screech, which only made the boys laugh harder as she tried to take them back. But they were more athletic than her, evading her swipes and passing them back and forth to each other like a baseball, uncaring of its fragility as they were of the dead ant. As they said, she truly could not see the ant on the ground anymore, its lifeless body now one with the blur of sidewalk she saw in her vision. Though she did not want to, Millie sobbed harder and wished more than ever to disappear from this cruel world of bullies. 

“Can you see this? Haha!” Owen kicked the mound of dirt Millie had created around the ant. “Are you going to save your little ant buddy?”

“No! Stop it!” she screamed.

This went on for a while. She would plead nonstop as Miles kept her glasses away from her and Owen would kick the mound. She could not bear it anymore. She chose a humble approach, and after she took a moment to cool down, she supplicated rather worrisomely, “You can take my glasses. Just please, leave the ant alone.”

“It’s dead,” Owen reminded her. “Why do you care so much?"

Miles stood there, staring at Millie in defeat. She had started out strong to protect her ant friend, but they had finally broken her spirit, and now she devolved into this. Her fists were shaking and she was looking down sobbing, unable to meet their faces. Something about her offer disturbed Miles enough to see what they were doing. Sacrificing her glasses for an ant? Why were they doing this to her? But it was impossible to apologize in the moment, his boyish dignity depended on it. He looked at Owen, who was still in a mocking mood until he saw Miles’s face. 

“What is wrong with us?” said Miles to his friend. “Honestly. It’s just an ant. No need to bully her. Like you said, Owen, we don’t have to care so much.”

“Whatever. You take the fun away from everything.”

Miles looked at Millie’s glasses in his hand and shoved them into hers. “Here, we’re not taking them. And you can give the ant a funeral if you want. We’re cool with it. C’mon Owen, let’s go.”

“Hey, wait up!”

The defeated girl looked up late to see the two of them walk away, her eyes and cheeks still too wet to put her glasses back on. She had failed to stay stoic, or to save her pride, but somehow it worked and something unimaginable happened with Miles, who left her with those words on his departure. She could not stop thinking about him the rest of the day.

Meanwhile, the thought of a girl having so much empathy for the smallest of lives was compelling to Miles, and, despite his unwanted thoughts, he ended up thinking about her the rest of the day as well.

Fortunately, later, Millie found that the boys had not kicked the ant deep in the centre of the mound. For the next few days, she toiled in the sun to give it a well-deserved funeral. She gathered soil and formed a hill, she picked flowers (that had already been picked, lest would she take a life herself), she decorated with grass, she even tied two small sticks together with a rubber band to make a cross to be stood at the top of the mound. While she worked, other small ants walked around the mound curiously, her careful not to step on any of them. She perceived them to be paying respects to their friend. “I’m sorry,” she choked, a tear droplet falling onto the dirt next to them. “I did this. I hope you’ll forgive me.” The ants would spend a second looking at her, then leave emotionlessly, but she imagined that they were as saddened as she was. She reminded them to attend the funeral once they would leave. By her decree, this ant would have a good funeral and journey into the afterlife for ants. She declared it so, and she insisted. She was a dedicated citizen of life, this was her duty, legal and moral. She was guilty for ant-slaughter and was sentenced to feel the pain for the rest of her life.

In these days Miles’s life continued on as normal. He played baseball with Owen and his team, walked home with him cheery from a win or disappointed from a loss, and tried not to think about Millie too much. And while the ability of a child to forget is great, it did not help that Millie’s house was on the path home from the baseball field, which made it impossible to keep her off his mind. He could plainly see the mound she was building for the ant every time. Some days she would not be out, which was a relief, but other days she would be, working on the funeral, and he had to walk by awkwardly as she stared at him. Some days Owen would not be with him, and it would be a quiet passing by, but other days he would be and they would have another interaction with her, with Owen leading the mockery and Miles reluctantly playing along.

One night, Miles had a dream where he was in a lush jungle along with many other people of various ages. The people had their hands together and were praying at unknown yet massive entities in the sky. Miles looked up to see them himself. Without even a glance but instead a serious feeling within the bones, he could tell--no, feel--that these beings were god-like in nature, super intelligent, enlightened with infinite wisdom beyond his human comprehension. They were cosmic entities that held no physical presence, no, instead they reverberated in his body, they bellowed deep universal groans, they heaved arms and legs heavier than entire existences. Yet they were observable, for Miles could see that their faces were blended with the sky, their legs were merged with the clouds, their feet were hidden in fog. They moved so anciently and slowly that they constructed a powerful aura, their every breath changing the humidity of the air, their every step creating earthquakes, their every word from the mouth affecting the rains and the storms and the winds and weather all together. Like the size of a tanker, like the sound of its horn, like the speed at which one moves. Colossal behemoths? An inaccurate description. These beings were so superior in intelligence, wisdom, size, metabolism, that they demanded a far more suiting title. One even greater than gods, one even greater than cosmic deities. And without a word Miles understood, as if the information was being flow-fed to his brain, that these beings razed the villages of lesser creatures without a first thought. They fattened them up and ate them in farms. They destroyed their homes for resources at their command. They did all this without even registering in their minds the creatures existing. How could they, when they were so superior and above them, and these creatures would never have such a complex understanding of the universe anyway? These beings would step on humans without even knowing.

All at once it happened like a manifestation, and Miles saw the beings begin to move in the sky. For such large creatures they moved incredibly fast, with the appearance of looking slow. They carried their feet over entire continents in mere seconds. “Run!” yelled some people around him, others drawing out the word longer and louder for everyone to hear. “They’re coming for us! They’re going to step on us!”

Miles’s heart pounded like the bass of a concert drum, the hairs on his skin straightening, his forehead moist to the touch. Dread creeped into all of his joints as if to actively fight against his movement. He was struggling to lift himself while a large elephant was on his chest. He was wading in a tub of tar, every fibre in his muscles against the flow. He was fighting a strong water current, klicks and klicks beneath the surface, under pascals and pascals of ocean depth pressure. As one does in a dream, he believed wholeheartedly that his life was on the line. The beings were on the move and were starting to crush people around him by the dozen. This onset of shameless murder was on its way to reaching him. As he ran, he looked to his left. A man screamed as a foot bigger than a planet stomped him into the ground. He looked to his right. A woman holding her child’s hand, about his age, embraced each other as they silently accepted their fate and were turned into meaty dust. All around him people were being stepped on. He believed he was next, so he ran all he could, his life in his hands. 

But these beings with no regard for human life were in a sense uncorrupted by tainted ethics, they merely sauntered on with a tasteless sentiment not for atonement but for stoically continuing their business, business of who knew what these god-like beings did. Miles cleared tree and fern on his path very much the same way these beings cleared fields and distances to reach their destination, without heed to the underlings of life beneath their feet. When Miles saw one of them in front of him, seemingly staring down at him, he accepted his own death. There was nothing he could do in the presence of a vast, indifferent entity, one of which had a mental capacity far beyond his own. There was no possible way to plead his case of being a life worth sparing, to prove his life was one worth living, to show he deserved mercy. This being was much too powerful and omniscient to care about his life. In front of him was a vague, humanoid shape coloured the black sky of space, dotted with the red, blue, and white stars of the cosmos. Upon further inspection the entity turned smaller until it could be seen in its entirety, and it also shifted and moulded itself until it turned into a little girl. Confused, Miles squinted at the entity like a bright light was at his face until he recognized it to be, to his own surprise, Millie Robinson. His salvation! He raised his arms to the sky in her direction, laughing in joyful glee. “I’m saved!” he exclaimed like a prophet to a messiah. But the giant Millie was not even looking at him. She was staring ahead at a path she was to take, and he was in her way. With one look Miles was filled with the correct fear that she would not avoid stepping on him. She was as heartless as the others, devoid of empathy for the tiny creatures unknowledgeable of the greater things of the universe their inferior intellect could never understand. Her race of cosmic beings had achievements worthy of the universe, what did Miles have? A puny life in this jungle with all these other puny people, all of whose lives mattered nothing in the grand scheme of these beings’ agenda. The giant Millie raised her foot over him, completely unaware of his presence, her eyes staring blankly ahead, emotionless. Slowly, but surely, she was going to step on him and he was going to die. “No!” shouted Miles at the top of his lungs, his arms still raised at her. “Please! Let me live! Show me mercy! I have a brother, a sister, a mother, a father, a family! Friends! A baseball team with a game next Tuesday! I can’t die today. I have a life!”

He woke up from the nightmare at five in the morning, a cold sweat but a new understanding. The ant had a life too.

The next afternoon, after baseball practice, Miles hurried to grab his things and find Millie. “Hey, what’s the rush?” said Owen. “Hey, wait up! Aren’t we walking together?”

“She was right, Owen,” said Miles. “About giving that ant a funeral. She was right!” Then he sprinted off.

“Hey!”

He ran on the sidewalk, this time mindful to not step on any ants. He was terribly afraid of facing her, but also thrilled. His thoughts raced in his head in laps and laps, they curved and drifted and smoked the air, they bumbled into his feelings, they flourished into the words he was going to say to her, they fumbled into the apology he would confess. 

When he arrived she was there, on her knees in front of the mound, glasses on. She looked at him in surprise as he hastily got down to join her, patting down the dirt and fixing the cross and making it neat. She was dazed.

“I’m sorry,” said Miles, unable to hold eye contact. “I had a dream. I was tiny, like an ant, and, and, you were right. It hurt when I saw you didn’t care about stepping on me.”

She exhaled. “No, you don’t have to pretend to apologize. I realized you were right, a funeral for an ant is kind of dumb.”

“No no!” He finally looked up at her. “Trust me, you’re right. We need to give a funeral for all the ants.”

“Why?”

He paused. “If we consider ourselves above ants because we are smarter than them, the least we can do is throw a funeral whenever one of them dies. They might not understand it, but we do.”

She was amazed. “Well. Miles Dominguez, you surprise me. Caring about ants all of a sudden.”

He smiled a goofy smile. “Don’t make this embarrassing for me, Millie Robinson.”

Millie laughed but kept it quiet and short, as if trying to contain herself and appear reserved in front of Miles. But Miles did not want her to fear him so he awkwardly laughed as well, which lead her to laugh even more. Now the both of them were laughing. The boy realized, if a giant creature larger than the cosmos were to step on him and kill him, well, he’d want that giant creature to cry and throw a funeral for him, too. He helped her fix and pat down the mound for the rest of the afternoon, the two of them smiling, joking, and laughing as they did it together.

Our ability to measure and distribute empathy is one of the greatest strengths of mankind. With greater intelligence comes a responsibility to uphold empathy to the highest degree whenever possible. There are the sick, the poor, the helpless. Pain and fear is relentless in the world, and it is the one constant in our lives. But its greatest enemy is empathy. After that day, when Owen found out Miles had sympathized with Millie, he laughed and ridiculed his friend while Miles defended her. For a long time, the two stopped talking. A rift churned between them. But it did not last forever. During one baseball game, while the two were next to each other on the bench, they watched the pitcher throw a ball that knocked the batter on the helmet, taking him down. They laughed, and it was the first time they did together in a long time, signalling the start of their repaired friendship. The ant funeral may have caused a rift between them, but they remained good friends in spite of it.

Miles and Millie would grow to become best friends. Over time, Miles would learn the value of empathy from Millie and would realize how amazing she was as a person. He learned to love reading because of her. When it rained, he would go to her house and they’d read novels together up in her room. Millie would learn bravery and how to make friends from Miles, finally leaving her lonely and secluded life behind. She learned to love sports because of him. When it was sunny, they would go play catch in the field together. She joined a hockey league and baseball league. Miles would cheer her on from behind the stands when it was her turn to bat. She did the same for him. They rarely missed each other’s games.

It is not easy to know someone from a vastly different world. Whether it be between two children or two species. But it is all the same, and apprehend this with importance, to understand one another. Through complex differences and unsubtle contrasts may one find it impossible to generate empathy for another, but life suits some no more than others, and it is not reserved for the smartest or the strongest. It is a gift granted regardless of circumstance, it is a flame that burns despite environment, it is an idea that persists in the dead and indifferent void of the universe; life is for a caterpillar as it is for a butterfly, it is for a shrimp as it is for an elephant, it is for a boy named Miles as it is for a girl named Millie; it carries burdens and tasks all the same, it carries hope and vigour for all its creatures all the same. We all share it, no matter what creature, no matter who we are. Look no further than here, Miles and Millie, who found a friend in each other, ignoring the presence of their timelessly classic differences. It is what has allowed them to live in harmony for the rest of their beautiful lives.

Oh, and I should say. Ever since then, whenever they stepped on an ant, they gave it a funeral.

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