Chapter 1 - Jeremy

There's something strange about that antfarm.

Jeremy Lyon was seven years old, and he was bored.  Even at such a young age, he understood precisely the grim dullness that came with lonely Saturdays, alone in the house save for the bugs in the walls and the ants in the antfarm.

 One of those gray days when Jeremy couldn't see his shadow, and the world outside the window seemed foggy and translucent. His parents left eleven hours and six minutes ago, an endeavor to trade green paper for new food, new furniture, new pets, new televisions, new condoms. Through the foggy translucency, no new car beaming new headlights up the new driveway. No parents back yet.

Jeremy turned away from the window, and trailed one hand along the wall as he quietly toed his way back down to his room. A rare sigh echoed only once through the gray dwelling. He wondered if he was bright for his age, to be so aware that he was bored. Briefly, the prospect of fresh rain burrowed into Jeremy's head, a means of slaying his gray foggy boredom. He used this hope to throw open the door to the basement with more alacrity than ordinary. Descended the stairs. But not like usual when he would hop over the bottom two, and bounce onto his caustically orange bedsheets and begin drawing. No, this time he entered his room with more solid purpose.

Jeremy found his antfarm in a dusty corner of his basement, which was decidedly not where he had left it in last night's dream. He found that questioning the antfarm's location was irrelevant to his task. Had to get that antfarm before the rain started. Leaving soft fingerprints on the plastic walls of his sandy antworld, Jeremy hauled his subjects up his new stairs and out of his new basement. He looked deftly ahead, and strode playfully, majestically. Did the ants know he was their benevolent monarch? One of them might have wiggled an antenna in salute.

Returned to the same kitchen window, depicting that same gray foggy world. But now that gray also had a taste, the impossibly kind smell of rain. Jeremy smiled, and as he gazed through his antfarm, through his window, through his two worlds, he forgot about his parents, about his gray childhood. He looked down at his busy ants, blind black blurs in tunnels in gray sand in a gray world in a gray world.

The rain came down outside, and made dots on the window glass. Jeremy's ants tunneled as usual, but they could have their break soon. He would award them their own rain. Approached the kitchen sink and washed his hands. Dried them on his pants. Jeremy spent one last long hard gaze at his ants. They looked boreder than ever. Bored of tunneling, and tired and thirsty.

He twisted on the faucet and once more made it rain in the kitchen sink. He looked once more out at that blurry gray world through the cascading rainwater over the glass. He took hold of his antworld and poured it, ants and sand and all, down the gurgling kitchen drain.