Stacy--Part Forty

Splog # 147

Forty

   Stacy thought about the ants for a moment. She had destroyed their home and they had ended up coming on her journey with her. They had seemed to be showing her the way she needed to go and, although she knew that things weren't always what they seemed, she wanted so much to think of them as tiny insect friends. She looked down at them. They had become almost completely motionless. She crouched down to take a closer look. It seemed such an unusual phenomenon. In her memory she could find no experience of ants that weren't constantly in motion in a haphazard way totaly alien to her eleven-year-old intelligence. She gently moved one finger towards them to see what the reaction would be. A thought touched her mind. Was it possible that they had all died en masse? Was there something lethally toxic about this cave? And if so, would she be succumbing to it any time soon? These ideas seemed foolish, even ridiculous, and yet she felt a strong sense of relief when the ants slowly scattered as her finger passed through their ranks and came in contact with the cool ground. She left it there for a moment as the movement of the ants around it seemed to spread throughout the whole colony. Again began the constant motion that had seemed so vital to the tiny creatures. But now the busyness seemed less frenetic and more deliberate somehow. The space around her finger expanded, but only to a certain extent and then it remained constant. It also held its form as an even circle. It seemed much too definite a geometric figure to be formed by a myriad of ants moving at random. And then she noticed two more circular spaces forming to her left. She lifted her finger and stood up. And now she found that although the aches in her knee and ankle had lessened, they were far from gone. Before she was entirely erect, her right knee gave a few pangs and when she was standing straight, her left ankle let her know, graphically, what condition it was in. She moved her weight to her right foot and gently masssaged her right kneecap as she watched the insects below her move into strange patterns. The two circles to her left had stabilized. They were smaller than the first and they weren't horizontal to each other but vertical. In front of her, the ants seemed to be moving into rows of columns. There were three lines of them stretching away from her, but not extended very far. She was having some trouble seeing them as they moved against the dark ground of the cave. She squinted her eyes a little and found she could make out movement along the three lines of ants. The far end of the first line began moving down to the near end of the second line and, at the same time, ants on the near end of the second line began moving towards the ones coming from the far end of the first. While this was occurring, three lines were extending from the third column and moving to her right. And even further to the right, she could make out a sinuous line of ants moving in a curve that made her think of a dragon she'd seen once at a Chinese New Year parade. Her eyes were not feeling too good from all the squinting she was doing. She looked at the designs on the walls and wished there were a way to get them to glow brighter. In Lane and Johnny's habitation, the light had been as bright as an average room at home but here it was dim and shadowy. Wondering if movement might increase the illumination, she waved her arms back and forth over her head. The designs of the walls did become slightly more luminescent but it didn't seem as though it would do much to bring out the insects against their dark background. When she turned back, however, she found that the ants seemed to have developed a sort of shine that made them stand out as they hadn't at first.