my sole attempt at facing my ant-paranoia head-on and making something creatively productive out of it. first time i've had the courage to actually make it public. hope you like it.
[disclaimer-if you actually do enjoy what follows, we recommend you get professional help, because man you got problems............]
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
WAKING UP
There is a line of red ants climbing up the kitchen wall. They are tiny, each of them, but with a venomous intensity in the way they stay close to each other, each pair of sharp pincers reinforcing every other one, that makes her come to a standstill and watch their progress with a fascinated revulsion that curiously enough precludes her from wreaking havoc with a pesticide spray and wiping the tiny dead, red little bodies of the wall and into oblivion, or at least the dustbin.
She is not really that scared. Neither does she have an insect fetish. She is a very normal, cheerful, teenage girl, extroverted, lots of friends, hardworking but not too bright, firmly convinced that she is pretty, very optimistic most of the time. That’s why she never told anyone about the dreams.
During the day she is very – what’s the word – lively. As night draws nearer, gradually she becomes unhappily restless and starts to fidget. Her parents could never understand, why, even as a child, she had an inexplicable fear of going to sleep. Sometimes she can’t remember herself, why the little voices in the hidden, dusty corners of her mind start rustling frantically whenever her eyelids droop. That is because they fear the dreams almost as much as she does.
The dreams are very strange by anyone’s standards, but even more so from a bubbly seventeen-year-old’s point of view. In these dreams, she is lying on her bed, in the same position when she went to sleep, and now she can hear a surge of rustling from the floor of her room, and then the red ants rise in a tidal wave of tiny torture on every side of the bed, and she squeezes her eyes shut but she can still feel a rapidly thickening stream of ants scurrying up her arms, scrabbling around on her skin until they give a final little twist of their bodies before sinking their pincers into her flesh. It is a unbearably frightening pain, like a million tiny live needles piercing her, burrowing beneath the skin, trying to tunnel into her blood.
In these dreams, she tries to scream for help, but as soon she opens her mouth, the ants move towards her face and pour inside her mouth, biting at the insides of her cheeks, anchoring themselves on her tongue, piercing savagely until her head almost explodes with the pain, even advancing to the trachea, surging into her lungs, nibbling at her veins and arteries, mixing with her bloodstream, setting her insides on needles of fire.
In the end she can’t breathe, because the red ants have now moved up her nostrils and mouth, she can’t hear anything except the endless scurrying in her earlobes, she can’t see because they are swarming over her eyelids and pupils. She lies there on her bed, a human feasting-ground for the red ants that live inside our walls, under our carpets, in our gardens, and she cannot fight them, she is too weak, too frightened.
Eventually the sunlight wakes her up, and sometimes she cannot believe that her organs were not devoured in muted rustling in the night. This is why she is always so happy during the day, because she understands the value of reclaiming life and normality. She is only seventeen but inside her head is the knowledge of a thousand torturous deaths, each of which she has survived. She was frightened, but she lived. She was tortured, but she endured. She was eaten, but she is alive. She knows that life exists outside of stifled terror of the ravages of a million tiny flesh-eating red ants. When she grows up, she wants to be a lawyer.
The ants are a part of her now. The pain they inflict validates her happiness. She has never been able to bring herself to kill a single red ant, however. Possibly she has the instinctual knowledge that the day she does kill one of those red ants that infest her sleep, she will go to sleep that night and never wake up from her dream of being trapped in endless terror.
Trisha Ray
6/4/2008
