(no subject)
She directed my attention to the ground near my feet. I guessed, "Grass. Bugs? Twigs? Clover. More grass. Wet grass." She nodded then shook her head no. Right but wrong? Not grass? Not wet?
Not wet - bugs. Among the expected ants but not quite with them were ants of glass or something like it. I'd taken them for raindrops though the day was dry and we'd been outside nearly all of it. One slid down a blade my stop had crushed against my shoe, as elegant in descent as the three drops of dew in hasteless synchrony I'd have taken it for unadvised. Like the ghosts of three children riding one clear plastic sheet down a strangely green slide. Each child a slightly less tiny take on the one or mere nothing before it. Its wiggle as it gained my foot was an ant's, though. I needed it closer.
I took off my shoe and held it between us. She blew in its face very gently, causing it to at first freeze and then turn around to walk straight toward my face. It had no visible insides, unless that hint of a curl of infusion of uncoloured dark wasn't prismed shoe or reflected canopy. But its outline was an ant's, and as fine as an ant's, down to legs like the tail of a blink. Down to inklings of stubble like snowflake-tongues stretched to catch quarks. To dustmote-dwarfed eyegrains. It was. Yes, an ant.
I put my finger near where it would soon reach the heel but took it away before its arrival. I pictured it popping at contact and spilling itself across me in all directions like a water-drop. Or was it air, just a ripple in how things would be were it gone? Or were its the partway back from rock hardness, partway to ice cold of glass? Like a blue October day where the wind moves as one like a sky would and too much is suddenly clear to go on like you had.
It looked like how things are like each other. And looked also about to drop free.
She caught it on her own shoe, her foot still inside, kicked high to save it. A gesture unhurried but just in time. It walked across the transparent plastic visor near her toe. Quite close to the rim but never quite touching her either.
"What is it?"
"An ant. Not unlike the others, except it's a sort of chameleon. I don't know if it knows it's doing it, but its body talks incessantly of whatever's around it. Speaks things just as it finds them. And finds what they are almost without error. Well, surfaces."
She set her foot down and it rolled off the side into grass and points beneath.
"A kind of protection?" No. "Why then?" A record of all that it passes replaced every second by what's passed since. "But why that? And where is its nest?"
She gestured behind me too vaguely to mean it, to warrant my turn. But I turned nonetheless, and didn't see the type of face that spoke the rest.
"It lives apart from the others and has no nest. It eats only the thought of what it finds, or perhaps just tucks those away. Perhaps each paints itself across a layer of its skin that's then grown over. No one knows, or what it does with what it learns. I like to think it's searching for a brown or red or yellow ant to double or absorb. Some filling of the mirror or the gap. But it mostly shuns them, they it. It may be that it takes its share of everything for nothing. That there's nothing beneath the nothing that we see. It may give back the same to the same when it dies. Perhaps can no longer be seen when it ceases moving. We may wade through piles, never knowing, on every walk home."
A distance and turn in those final words must have meant she was walking away. I sought out where it might have gone in that world below. But saw only the world I was already in, where no ant could matter much. Where ants once gone can hardly be thought of at all.
Not wet - bugs. Among the expected ants but not quite with them were ants of glass or something like it. I'd taken them for raindrops though the day was dry and we'd been outside nearly all of it. One slid down a blade my stop had crushed against my shoe, as elegant in descent as the three drops of dew in hasteless synchrony I'd have taken it for unadvised. Like the ghosts of three children riding one clear plastic sheet down a strangely green slide. Each child a slightly less tiny take on the one or mere nothing before it. Its wiggle as it gained my foot was an ant's, though. I needed it closer.
I took off my shoe and held it between us. She blew in its face very gently, causing it to at first freeze and then turn around to walk straight toward my face. It had no visible insides, unless that hint of a curl of infusion of uncoloured dark wasn't prismed shoe or reflected canopy. But its outline was an ant's, and as fine as an ant's, down to legs like the tail of a blink. Down to inklings of stubble like snowflake-tongues stretched to catch quarks. To dustmote-dwarfed eyegrains. It was. Yes, an ant.
I put my finger near where it would soon reach the heel but took it away before its arrival. I pictured it popping at contact and spilling itself across me in all directions like a water-drop. Or was it air, just a ripple in how things would be were it gone? Or were its the partway back from rock hardness, partway to ice cold of glass? Like a blue October day where the wind moves as one like a sky would and too much is suddenly clear to go on like you had.
It looked like how things are like each other. And looked also about to drop free.
She caught it on her own shoe, her foot still inside, kicked high to save it. A gesture unhurried but just in time. It walked across the transparent plastic visor near her toe. Quite close to the rim but never quite touching her either.
"What is it?"
"An ant. Not unlike the others, except it's a sort of chameleon. I don't know if it knows it's doing it, but its body talks incessantly of whatever's around it. Speaks things just as it finds them. And finds what they are almost without error. Well, surfaces."
She set her foot down and it rolled off the side into grass and points beneath.
"A kind of protection?" No. "Why then?" A record of all that it passes replaced every second by what's passed since. "But why that? And where is its nest?"
She gestured behind me too vaguely to mean it, to warrant my turn. But I turned nonetheless, and didn't see the type of face that spoke the rest.
"It lives apart from the others and has no nest. It eats only the thought of what it finds, or perhaps just tucks those away. Perhaps each paints itself across a layer of its skin that's then grown over. No one knows, or what it does with what it learns. I like to think it's searching for a brown or red or yellow ant to double or absorb. Some filling of the mirror or the gap. But it mostly shuns them, they it. It may be that it takes its share of everything for nothing. That there's nothing beneath the nothing that we see. It may give back the same to the same when it dies. Perhaps can no longer be seen when it ceases moving. We may wade through piles, never knowing, on every walk home."
A distance and turn in those final words must have meant she was walking away. I sought out where it might have gone in that world below. But saw only the world I was already in, where no ant could matter much. Where ants once gone can hardly be thought of at all.