Under my thumbprint
I spent this morning watching the ants crawl through the hole left by whoever installed the internet in my apartment. Last summer, they were coming in by the hundreds to slurp up the ant poison we’d put out in a pheromone-fueled conga.
Apparently, the poison works slowly.
The borax-laced sugar water will dehydrate the ant from the inside, subtly drawing moisture from its body. The worker returns full of the nefarious liquid and shares the payload with the nest, like a bird feeding its young, through a process known as trophallaxis. Ants have a second stomach known as a “social stomach” which they evolved explicitly for this purpose. From afar, it looks like they are sharing an energetic kiss.
I discovered the first ant crawling on my windowsill and quickly crushed it under my thumb before remembering that–though it felt like visceral justice–a similar approach did not resolve the problem last summer. I put out some ant bait and watched as clones slurped up borax a few inches from a fallen soldier, its two remaining legs juxtaposed like a thumb and a pinky spazzing wildly in a misguided attempt to walk. Suddenly, I imagined two of my own limbs spazzing to walk after being crushed by an unimaginably large creature, my body small enough to be squeezed into the crevices of its thumbprint. I put it out of its misery under my thumbprint.