Ants of Chatmet
One Sunday morning, I woke up with the sour taste of sleep still resting on my tongue. The floor creaked beneath my bare feet as I climbed out of bed, and I felt the floorboards groan as I stepped. Stepped over my toy truck, stepped over my green army men lined in battalion, stepped over my pile of dirty socks. Groan, groan, groan. I just wanted to step up to the bathroom sink, pull up a stool, and climb up to the faucet to wash away my morning breath.
But something stopped me—some sound distant and echoic, like a faraway television, or the clattering of plates of breakfast served downstairs. I quietly turned around using the balls of my feet and I surveyed the room. There was nothing under my pillow, there was nobody speaking from outside the window, and there were certainly no voices coming from my toys. It was only until I made it to my desk that I saw them. They were a loud bunch, barely visible. With the naked eye, they appeared to be nothing more than a tiny crowd of black dots congregating around what would be the circumference of a pencil eraser head.
I scrambled and tossed my toys about, searching for a magnifying glass. I heard them cheer as I grabbed it. When I raised it over them, a shadow momentarily eclipsed and then magnified the black dots. They were tiny black insects with tiny black arms, and they were waving up back at me. I smiled; it was the first time I used that magnifying glass to look at insects rather than burn them.
I started watching them every day. My desk was their world and my magnifying glass was their heaven, with a large blinking eye acting as their roving sun or God. They were a secret to me and nobody else. They danced beneath the glass. Here and there, I would watch them chewing on cookie crumbs and sugar crystals, likely spilled while stirring the morning coffee. It was an absolute jubilee. At first, they celebrated my arrival, and I would hear their cheering as I rummaged through my room, looking for my magnifying glass. They would wave at me the same way they did on the first day. What they did while I was not looking, I did not know. Whether they even existed while I was not looking, I did not know either. They only existed when I was bound to see them, and their existence to me was bound to nothing more than the scope of my glass, with a large blinking eye looming over them in mutual merriment. As I saw them, they jumped and pranced in circles, holding arms and hugging and kissing. I didn’t understand everything I saw, but I knew they were happy.
The weeks passed, and I remained committed to my morning ritual of checking in on them. My knees and ankles ached in the morning from what my doctor called ‘growing pains’. Their world rested upon my desk. The wooden grooves of its surface were their fields and valleys, my trinkets were their landmarks, and the passing of the glass was their day, with a brown sun in the middle. Much like our own world, they eventually watched the sun come and go with indifference. It was a constant and unchanging variable in their lives. Still, they danced and made their way about my desk, feasting on cookie crumbs and sugar to their heart’s desire. And I watched them with the same right eye while the other remained scrunched tight.
They say time moves faster for small creatures. The mayfly only lives for twenty-four hours; blue whales live to be one hundred. I had never seen one of them die or be born, but what had been weeks or months for me must have been generations for them. Their population grew to the diameter of about a nickel. From a distance, they still looked like a pile of black dots. They were indistinguishable from tiny flecks of black pepper.
More weeks passed, and things changed. Most of them still jumped and danced. But among the corners of their populations, I saw some of them begin to cry. They would sit on their gasters, elbows on their knees, hands covering their faces. If I listened closely enough, I would hear them weep. Where I would once search for the happy and jumpy movements, I began to first look for the lost and strayed. I worried about them. I remember wishing I could shrink down to their size and hug them, like they once did with each other. Each day, I still made sure to look at the happy ones as well; I didn’t want any of them to feel neglected and unseen.
I grew up some more by this point. Only a few months passed, but like I said, time goes by faster for the smaller beings of this world. Sadness had taken over them like a plague. The happy jumped between and around the sad ones as if they existed on different planes, with little regard for each other. Their days grew longer around this time, and their sun rotated more carefully, taking the time to shine over every single one of them. What was once born of curiosity turned into a routine of concern. I loved them all the same, strongly, blindly, indiscriminately, the way only a child could.
I figured there must be something I could do, so I searched for any crumbs I could find in the kitchen. I picked up the crumbs from the bottom of the cookie jar; the breadcrumbs left on the toaster’s mouth; a few pinches from the sugar bowl. I’d cup my hand and take the food upstairs, sprinkling them over my desk, hoping they’d eat and become happy and start dancing, singing, jumping once again.
I woke up feeling anxious, running over to the trunk in the corner of my room. Groan, groan, groan—a little faster now. I pulled out my magnifying glass and approached them, the smell of rotting wood blocking me away like an invisible barrier. It was only until I pinched my nose with two fingers that I managed to get close. In their world, it rained for the first time that day. And the sunbeams warped with the dropping and welling of my teardrops, landing on the glass. There I saw them laying. Some prone and dead, others catatonic and despondent. Their day ended early that morning. I went to the bathroom and washed the tears from my face.
I was young then, and the tips of my fingers and toes were still soft and pink. I can still remember how they shriveled up like raisins after spending too much time washing myself with warm water that morning. I hugged my mother that morning too. There were no tears in my eyes, but the acrid scent still followed me. She held me in her arms while one hand brushed the tussled hairs on my head, and I told her everything. I told her about them and how they showed up one day, seemingly out of nowhere. I told her how they danced, and I told her how they were dying. I could never confirm their existence beyond my morning visits. But that morning, as I spoke about them with my mother, they were out of my sight and real as ever. I finished telling my story, and she held me closely. There was silence between us as she rocked me, and I eventually sat up on her lap.
“What should I do?” I asked. And she placed a tender hand over my cheek.
“Honey,” she said, “those are things in life that we call Ants. Ants of Chatmet.”
“Ants of Chatmet?”
“Yes, we all have them. I had them once too. They’re a part of our lives, just like being happy and sad. They’re very special.”
I was unhappy with the answer, and I looked up at her.
“But what should I do? I want them to be happy again.”
“Honey, I can’t tell you what to do. But all I can say is that no matter how hard you try, it won’t get any better. That’s just how lie goes sometimes.”
They experienced many days of nighttime after that. It was spring outside but winter upon the world of my desk. The odor went away, but I no longer approached them with even my naked eye. My knees and ankles still ached, and the floor still groaned beneath my small feet when I got up in the morning. I played outside those days and experienced the sun myself. The heavens were always above me, shining, with no eyes looking down at me like my own. God’s were bright and dazzling; by day it was the sun, by night it was the stars in their infinite glimmer.
It was a long time before I checked up on them again. To see how they were doing was no longer a question, but a correspondence with myself to verify their existence. The floor groaned beneath me as I checked my treasure chest for the magnifying glass, and I heard no cheering. I approached the desk, and I felt no smell. Their sun rose and found nothing. The soot and powder remained plastered on the woodwork as it did on that last morning. Only white outlines of what once were my own ‘Ants of Chatmet’ remained. It would have been the longest day they’d ever seen. The sun eclipsed and encompassed every corner of the desk, shining around the grooves and between the wooden fibers three times over. I cleaned my desk that day for the first time since their unknown Genesis. Would it still be called the sun, if there were no people left to feel its warmth? Would there still be any night if there was no one to feel its absence? These answers I would never know.
On certain nights, when the wooden floor was quiet, and no sound came from outside or downstairs, I could feel the faint cheering of the Ants from the first day. My heart would pang with their bittersweet memory. But I never bothered to look, not even long after my knees and ankles stopped aching, not even today. I remember once reading in an obituary: “What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls the butterfly.” And a soothing feeling ran over me like warm water from the shower.
It was in the metamorphosis that I found life and death. I found love and acceptance. I found sadness and indifference. I will always think about how my mother was always right about these things. She had a wisdom that proved itself, much like the devil’s own wisdom that was born from experience and not birthright. I will always remember my Ants of Chatmet. I will always wonder what happened to them; what made them change. I will always hope some of them survived, making a happy home somewhere on another kid’s desk. But I will never check on them again. That’s not for me to know.
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