Antagonism
Fables are told using anthropomorphized animals to teach us humans a lesson. Animals, imbued with Man’s traits, are supposed to make our character defects a little more easy to swallow. “I’m not lazy, the damn grasshoppers are.” Of course, we know that Man is an animal the same as all the others, and so this distinction is quite meaningless. Perhaps all stories are fables then, or fables are a superfluous genre name. I already see the headlines: Why calling a story a “fable” is human centric hate-speech towards animals. Thank you HuffPo for your service.
Anyway, all of this is to say, that the following is a fable, despite featuring Man amongst its major characters.
Anna was living alone in a very old house, which she had inherited from her parents. Her parents had died a year ago, on a ship in a big storm. It was the sort of non-traumatic death from a fairy tale, where actually dealing with family dynamics is not part of the scope of the story, and neither is dealing with loss or grief. The author summons up a quick storm, parents are gone so our hero can take on the world all by herself. Perhaps she spends a weekend being sad offscreen, but that’s it.
So Anna was living in an old house. And in this old house there had been a problem for one hundred years. Every spring, when the weather got warm a band of ants absconded from the nearby anthill to try their luck in the outside world during swarming season. And each year, a small group of these antventurers found their way into the bathroom of this old house. Anna’s parents, by now tragically dead, were always very good sports about it. Don’t expect that they didn’t kill any ants; of course they inflicted terrifying horrors on the intruders. Enormous hands came down to flatten tens of the ants at once. Water from the showerhead washed the survivors off the walls of the tub. Once they were down the drain there was no distinction between the living and the dead. As index fingers descended onto them, breaking the feeble defenses of their exoskeletons, they were crushed between finger and porcelain to release the chemical scent signal for grave danger and death. Their olfactory screams of despair didn’t register with the humans.
But they didn’t kill all of them. About half of this group of stragglers were left alive, stunted by the PTSD from witnessing their brothers and sisters destroyed by gods.
Probably the only people who followed Article 23 of the 1899 Hague Convention, Anna’s forebears stuck to conventional weapons. They preferred to destroy part of the invading forces, and leave others alive to deliver the message. Anna’s parents liked to call it just a gentle caution: don’t come into the bathroom, you formic shits.
However, this year was different for two reasons. First of all there was Anna, who had none of the patience of her parents. Even as a child she was always felt big and powerful when she got to stomp around on them. But there were also the ants. There would be groups back at the colony who would not heed the advice of the delusional survivors . “Pfft, sure, a god crushed Roger, you all just went too hard on the sugar stores in the kitchen, you damn junkies”. And these came to face their own doom. The procedure of antnihilation would have to be repeated multiple times.
Anna had no patience for any of that. She would not hesitate to use chemical weapons at the first sign of an intrusion.
There was also a much more sinister group. With survivors of the gentle reminders forming a larger part of the colony, there was growing hatred towards the house and its inhabitants. Historically it had been a very small part of the population, so the queen could just ignore them, however, a younger queen in the colony realized that these grievances provided fertile soil for her political ambitions. Queens can live up to 30 years, so there is some real long term political shit going on in these colonies. In a textbook example of populist propaganda, the new queen was able to garner the support of enough of the anthill to overthrow the older queen.
Let us call them Antgela and Antdolf. So Antgela is sitting there, queen of the colony, but Antdolf sees her opportunity. Her campaign not only helps a disenfranchised group, but also names an enemy outside responsible for it. She probably also picks a group of ants with weird headwear to be deemed enemies. If they get rid of them, their part of the population grows as a percentage. Plus they show some muscle. So something something politics, they gain power and Antdolf is in control of the colony.
To be able to fight against both of these threats, heavy investments in military technologies were made. The best sciantists copied bullet ant genetics so their toughest soldiers would more powerful bites; a powerful mutation that enlarged their mandibles to the extent that they could no longer speak. These mutant mute ants were the feared and loathed right hand of Antdolf, and they took spook to a whole new level.
One team also cooked up some ant-meth to get the boys all riled up.
The militarist ambitions of these ants were supported by some extremely talented, but also pretty fucked up academics. C'est la vie.
You can talk about whether the initial grievances towards Man were justified or not, but the fact they seized upon them to orchestrate a populist uprising and the take-over of the anty fascists is the key here.
So we have formic fascists and a genocidal gal. Both are pretty shitty, so I understand if you have trouble picking a team to root for here. It is what it is.
A mild drizzle fell on that fateful June evening, when Anna and the ants met in the bathroom.
Anna had been in town, having dinner with a few friends, so she got home around 10 PM. The rain, though it was light, managed to soak her as she walked home. She was so cold, she was just looking forward to get in the tub and have her so called “ol’ soak”.
However, when she got home and opened the bathroom door, she was faced with a veritable military formation. Rank, file, commander, lieutenant, you name it. Anna dropped her bag and ran off. Antdolf laughed at the meekness of their antversary. Subdued so soon?
But Anna wasn’t running away. Far from it. Her aunt had warned her about the ants earlier in the year. Not to forget to expect them inside as it got warmer out.
In preparation, Anna had gone shopping. A couple of times.
First she bought a little trap, to put right in the spot the ants usually appeared.
This little glue trap was followed by the purchase of a dozen different sprays, glue strips, automatic sprayers that could sense ant movement from tremors. Finally, her most prized possession was an unassuming little trap that, when walked through, would load up each ant with a freaky fungal timebomb. Each ant that entered the trap got ten tenants - fungal spores that would poison the worker and make her an unwitting suicide bomber. After a while, the spores would produce gasses in the ant as they multiplied on the inside, and the ant would blow up and disperse thousands of spores in every direction.
Of course there is no targeting with a weapon like this. The barracks and the ant family sitting by the TV get hit just the same.
Dad fiddling with the antenna to watch the world cup game, mom cooking dinner, pretty beat up about nobody remembering her birthday, and the kids watching reruns of Frants. They hear a pop off in the distance, a couple spores come in under the door, and an hour later they go out with a bang of their own.
The spores explode, infect, explode, infect, explode, infect until they wipe out the entire colony.
Yes. Anna was prepared. Chemical weapons conventions meant zilch, there was nothing even resembling moral responsibility towards the other side, and, to be fair, there wasn’t really any law controlling human-ant warfare.
Anna remembered how her parents felt bad for the ants, because of how powerless they were. Even if they tried to bite them, their bites were harmless. How could you want to kill something so powerless? Anna’s answer was: gleefully. She could have just shut the door. She could easily have justified the use of weapons of mass destruction, been morose about the necessity for such destruction, but defended it nonetheless. Instead, she chose to be an active part of this momentous murder.
Anna appeared at the door decked out in a t-shirt and her slippers, she had 6 cans of ant spray in two fanny-packs on her sides. It was her personal hollywood movie fantasy: killing the hell out of some ants. She wanted to feel invincible. A giant who flicks the futilely fighting formics off with ease, their bites meaningless to her thick skin. She was ready for a bloody battle.
She stepped into the room and closed the door behind her. No survivors. Under her feet, soldiers of battalion 22 remained still. They remained still even as the comrade to their left was crushed to death.
Her lack of respect, clear from her lack of armor, angered Antdolf. She gave her three seconds of realisation. Three seconds to realise that not one of the ants broke file. Antdolf wanted to see fear.
Anna un-holstered two spray cans. Antdolf raised her arm, and the army prepared in anticipation of the signal. There was almost breeze blowing through the army. As the air passed the ants it entered into their spiracles - the angle just right to create a little tone as if on a flute. A giant organ, Anna’s antagonist inhaled in A sharp. Tuned and ready to play its symphony of violence. Anna took a pretty run-of-the mill human breath.
Antdolf’s arm swooped down, giving the signal for attack. As the ants swarmed her, Anna was unfortunately targeting the battalion made up of the jewish ants who managed to blend in with her gas attack. Life really is unfair sometimes.
As the ants started scaling her legs, she was looking forward to sweeping them by the hundreds from her thighs into the bathtub, where she would would drown them. With the plug in, she would collect all the ants into the basin, so she could watch the drain eat them all at once.
That was when she felt the first bite. And it hurt a lot more than she expected. Looking down at her legs, she couldn’t see skin below her knees. Surprising. She could actually feel the ants weighing her down.
Directing her weapons towards her own legs she jumped, and as she landed with a thud, half of the ants fell to the floor. She continued to spray, but there were just too many of them. As they crept higher and higher, and bit more and more, her reaction to the bites also began to kick in. It felt like her skin was burning.
She threw down the cans, largely empty, and picked out a new one. She had prepared a little mechanism for this one. With the button locked down the can could propel gas continuously, no hands.
She started it, locked it and put it onto the floor in front of her. As the can kept spraying it started to rotate in place, creating a tornado of poison. With the two new cans, she sprayed all of herself to cool her skin and repel the enemy. Anna kept stomping, slowly creating an island of carcasses beneath her.
In seemingly unending numbers, the ants kept coming. A sea of the living washing at the shores of her island of lifeless husks.
Between the pain and poison of the ant bites and the fumes of her own sprays, Anna was entering delirium. She didn’t notice that the fluffy pink bathrobe, which she was putting on as an additional piece of armor, was lined with soldiers waiting in antbush. They all bit her at the same time, bringing her to her knees. In a final moment of desperation Anna remembered the one item hidden in the robe which might save her.
Seeing the broken woman in front them the ants decided to take pity and end it. A large wave started to rise from the corner of the room. Antdolf, riding the crest, was ready to deliver the final blow.
The last ace up her sleeve, Anna took out a lighter. As she lifted her head to look Antdolf in the eye she raised the lighter in front of the can’s nuzzle. The tsunami that had formed atop the Antlantic ocean towered above her.
As the wave broke, a spark was lit. Thousands of ants went up in flames, burnt to a crisp.
The problem was that with closed doors and ten minutes of continuous spraying, the entire room was flammable. The aerosol filling the room, the coating on Anna’s skin, it all went up in flames. The entire room was engulfed in a fireball.
So what is the moral of the story you ask? They all died in a piece of senseless, fetishistic hyper violence, straight out of a Quantin Tarrantino movie. But for what? Anna and Antdolf are dead, as is the entire army of the Ant Reich. All things considered not a bad outcome. The ants left back at the colony, now freed from their tyrantical leader, are able to move on. Unfortunately a handful of survivors manage to carry the bomb back into the colony, so similarly to Anna and the army, this story ends explosively for the rest of the ants too.
The moral? Usually there is no good and evil. Hell, it’s not even about fighting for survival, this was a dick-measuring contest par excellence. So that is the moral, that we live in this kind of a world.
It’s okay, none of it matters anyway.
Artwork by Salvador Dali, "The Ants (Las Hormigas)"