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writerofweird · 11 months

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My Ant Story

Inspired by @bramblesand ‘s post about ants and circuit boards, as well as comments from @bogleech and @themunofprovidence, I wrote in the replies pieces of writing about an ant becoming human (a transformation more “successful” than the one from Animorphs mentioned in the comments) and so here is the story, slightly extended, given its own post for easier reading and finding.

(4,495 words, contains some body horror, language and implied nudity) I once met an ant who said she was a human woman.

She approached my colony as we were engaged on our usual routine collecting leaves, accompanied by another ant. From listening in on their conversation, I learned she had narrowly escaped the beak of a bird and was being brought to us to assist us.

‘I’m not an ant,’ she protested, standing on her hind two legs and gesturing to them with her front two legs.

‘You are an ant,’ replied the ant who had brought her near me.

I almost left them alone to continue with my usual work, but what caused me to drop the leaf I was carrying in my pincers and scurry over was her saying, ‘I’m human! My name is Dana and I was turned into an ant!’ Getting back on six legs, she added, ‘I need your help so I can change back!’

Ants knew all about transformations, about something becoming something else. There certainly was no way ants who had their nest invaded by a butterfly would ever forget what transformation was. If a caterpillar could become a butterfly, I thought, a human could become an ant. A human, like those I often saw during my food collections, engaged in activities I wouldn’t be able to participate in.

Ants knew all about transformations, and yet the ant who brought Dana to me said, ‘Very funny.’ She gestured to me with her head, adding, ‘You’re as bad a daydreamer as she is.’

Hearing this, she scuttled towards me, with both of us turning away from the other ant and the rest of the colony. The first thing I said to her was, ‘I believe you.’

‘Do you mean that?’ Dana replied, her antennae springing up slightly, ‘Because now I know ants have some knowledge of sarcasm.’ There were various things ants had subconsciously picked up from humans, I thought as Dana said this. There had been many overhead conversations, as well as the rare moments humans tried talking to ants, and yet, frequently I was chastised for stopping to view them.

‘No, I believe you,’ I replied, explaining to her the example of a caterpillar becoming a butterfly through an incident.

‘Wow,’ she replied, a word I had heard for the first time in my life that I figured out was an exclamation of surprise, ‘it just gets worse and worse the more I hear about it.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you’ve been like this your whole life?’ Dana looked at the ground, ceasing her scuttling for a moment. ‘I’m sorry.’

Dana crawled to me, told me her story and I - still holding out hope that there was a fairy or magical creature out there who could change someone’s species in seconds - believed her. Dana had explained how what was supposed to be a routine pizza delivery - she had to explain to me what a pizza was - ended with her force-fed a potion that caused an extra pair of limbs to burst from under her arms, that caused her bones to merge with her skin, that caused her hair to retreat, stabbing her insides like several needles. After that, she spent what felt like hours crawling through her oversized uniform before being picked up by the scientist who created the potion, thankfully slipping through their fingers before they could trap her in their ant farm.

The way she described how she now saw things - like how the furniture she used to sit on seemed to mutate into something oppressive and how she felt so much of herself had been hacked away - seemed like the type of thing that couldn’t have been made up.

What also strengthened my belief that Dana was not originally an ant was how, as we walked together while talking, she would often trip over her middle set of legs, collapsing on her thorax. One such moment happened when we were crawling together among the grass blades and two pairs of sneakers came our way, with me shoving Dana out of the way just in time, and before avoiding a drop of dew from a blade. ‘Thank you,’ I heard Dana say, though my attention wandered to who those shoes belonged to. Two women, exploring the natural world together, like Dana and I were.

That was what made me say what I had been thinking ever since I met Dana. ‘Dana,’ I said after we resumed our journey, ‘that scientist you mentioned. They turned you into an ant.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you think you can turn back into a human?’

Both of us said nothing for a few seconds before Dana said, ‘And you think you can turn into a human as well?’

‘Yes,’ I said before looking up again, up at the sky and the sun and the people who basked in it. The people who didn’t have to worry about being flattened. The people who were allowed to do more than scurry and eat.

‘Well,’ Dana said, ‘after what I’ve been through, I certainly don’t blame you. I wouldn’t wish this…well, I certainly wouldn’t wish this on you. I mean…’ She let loose a noise that I was certain was supposed to be equivalent to a human laugh. ‘…by helping me, I think you’re well on your way to becoming human already.’ Just as we were about to leave the grass, she turned to me and asked, ‘Do you have a name?’ I didn’t answer. ‘Would you like one?’

I almost stood on my hind two legs as Dana had earlier. ‘Yes, please.’ ‘Okay then,’ Dana replied, her antennae twitching as she stopped to think, ‘how about Betty then?’

So that was how I became Betty. Betty the Ant, soon to be Betty the Human.

After my naming, we left the greenery for what Dana called the pavement – what looked like someone took a river and replaced the water with mud. ‘Keep close to me,’ Dana told me as I did so, ‘seeing these buildings larger makes me feel dizzy.’ As if to punctuate this, she tripped on her legs again, right before we both scurried back in the grass as a human passed by, the clicking of his feet pounding into my brain. The pounding in my brain matched the pounding of my heart as I pondered the possibility of becoming human, and I told myself that while dodging shoes, I should remember that I was doing so to make sure such a thing would no longer be a problem. I would no longer hide from the humans, I would walk beside them. They wouldn’t grimace to see me on their food, they would smile at me as they saw me on the pavement.

Dana and I could go running through the fields together.

Both of us becoming human dominated my mind as Dana tried to lead the way towards where the scientist lived. When we were human, I thought, he wouldn’t be able to hide in a drainpipe nor would we need to. When we were human, our food sources didn’t have to come from what other humans disposed of.

As night fell, Dana perked up her head and screamed, ‘Fucker still has my car!’ Before us stood what looked like a gigantic sugar cube covered in mould, making me glad that I had recently had a snack of a discarded piece of chocolate. When we were human, I said to myself, we wouldn’t have to settle for less when it comes to food. This large building will look smaller. We could walk through doors instead of cracks in the walls.

The room we entered resembled the nest where I grew up, where the walls were taller and less colourful, with a floor that resembled a grey, frozen lake and there were what looked like the benches I saw in the parks, only lined with various glasses and metallic equipment I couldn’t name.

Again, we saw a pair of large shoes, making both of us instinctively crawl behind a table leg. Peeking around, I saw on the floor ant entrails. Dana placed her two forelegs against her pincers.

‘Well, well,’ came the voice from above, making my head throb harder than the footsteps against the pavement, ‘you weren’t very effective workers, were you?’ I scuttled closer to the feet despite Dana growling at me not to, and saw that the human in the white coat was looking down at the dead ants. ‘Guess you lost your chance to be human again,’ they added, placing a glass on top of the table Dana and I were hiding beneath. Back to Dana I went, my thorax and abdomen filled with a fierce stinging at how we had come too late to save these humans-turned-ants, alleviated by how that fate didn’t befall Dana, and the fact that I had a good idea how we were going to become human.

Both of us sat behind the table leg, watching the scientist gloat at their triumph, and as soon as they left the room, Dana walked beside me again, this time so I could guide her up the table leg. ‘Come on,’ I said to her, making sure she clung on. I was the first to climb onto the surface, and Dana suggested I bow my head down so she could grab onto my pincers with her forelegs, bringing us to the same level.

I was reminded of the picnic blankets I and my colony had passed, but there were no baskets or half-eaten meat to be found; only a pile of glass and soil, and the glass the scientist had been carrying, its label featuring what looked like severed legs arranged into a strange pattern.

‘This is it!’ cried Dana, tapping the label. ‘It says “Ant to Human”. Betty! This could work!’

I raced over to the bottle, my mind again filled with images on what I saw on a daily basis that I could finally participate in, all the new tastes I could sample, all the new places I could go. I almost leapt onto it, digging my pincers into what was jammed in the top as Dana pressed her head against the main body. As soon as the top flew off, the glass toppled over. As it contents poured onto the ground, Dana and I dove into it.

This is it, I thought as I scuttled over to the potion which we had managed to spill onto the floor. The end of my old life and the beginning of a new, more exciting one.

If this scientist could turn humans into ants, they could turn ants into humans.

No more living in fear, I told myself as I dipped my pincers into the fluid as Dana was doing. No more would I have to worry about birds or mantises or anything else. Things would be simpler, things would be more fun….

Caterpillars.

As soon as I tasted the liquid it felt like caterpillars - a myriad of writhing caterpillars - had invaded my body like one had invaded the hive, thrusting against the insides of my legs and thorax, demanding escape.

More and more caterpillars spawned within me, and my body changed to accomodate them.

Yes, I said to myself as I felt my body inflate, the shelf and walls in my vision shrinking. Yes, I’m growing, no-one will ever step on me again.

I still felt the caterpillars. I felt them stretch and squirm within me, forcing my eyes to the front of my head and ripping away two of my legs. My stinger and antennae forcing themselves back in my body - feeling like a bird’s beak shoving itself into my insides - made me fall, the chill of the floor making the caterpillars more lively.

I forced my eyes open to see my abdomen shrinking and my back legs inflating to look like colossal earthworms, sprouting what looked like maggots forcing their way out. For a minute, I swore I felt my antennae return - it felt like several of them bursting from my skull. It felt like cocoons were sprouting from the side of my head, and some of the caterpillars inside me had successfully escaped through my face and my legs yet still stuck to me.

I heard, ‘It worked! You’re human!’ yet the pain failed to subside. I not only felt writhing, I felt a whole new creature inside me, readying itself to burst out.

Again, I forced myself to open my eyes to look at my feet. Feet like those that had eliminated and tormented so much of my kind, toes as large as I had been previously, a big maggot with little maggots sprouting from it that I could control. As soon as my brain told me to get back on six legs, it told me to get back on two.

I stood, towering over what had previously towered over me. I looked at a table and saw it as something to lean on and place what I could use on, but I saw it as something to crawl up and crawl under. I looked at a chair and saw it as something to sit on and to sit under.

‘Betty, you look beautiful.’

I stared at my friend right in the eyes. I stared at a human right in the eyes. As I looked at those bizarre marbles called eyes and the many long thin antennae sprouting from her head, I saw what I had been blessed with. I saw what I had and could never had.

I was staring at her right in the eyes and crawling at her feet.

For a fleeting second, I was back in my old body: an ant with six limbs and antennae crawling under grass instead of attempting to walk in a room full of test-tubes. Both realities felt wispy.

Dana had been forced to take a potion that turned her into an ant like I used to be. The only thing, I believe, that prevented me from looking for that potion was the fact Dana had called me beautiful.

Dana had found the outfit she was wearing before her first transformation, and after dressing herself, returned with clothing from a less fortunate victim of the scientist.

In her fingers, she held a pair of shoes. Shoes like those I had narrowly escaped from, shoes that seemed to bulge as Dana held them. As I took the shoes from her, there was another moment where I was back in nature, but I was still human, looking down at my tinier ant self.

Just put on the clothes, I ordered myself. One thing humans do frequently is wear clothes, so I reasoned my first article of clothing would help tether me to the world of humanity and my previous life would fade.

Dana held up a t-shirt in front of my chest, a garment I could once explore like it was a nest, now made to be draped over my body. Again I was that human that attempted to step on my previous self, quickly reasoning how to put on the shirt and jeans and shoes, though Dana assisted. It was like flying through shrinking tunnels.

Once dressed, Dana took me by the hand and guided me outside. I was closer to the sky than I had been before. I raised my hand, almost certain I could pluck off one of the stars. For a second, I felt like a god.

In another second, the sky itself became a god, seemingly furious at my transformation, coming closer to show that even in my new form, I could still be crushed.

Dana stumbled, almost sending us falling face-first into the ground. ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘guess I’m still getting reacquainted with being me. You know, I never knew what ants went through until I became one myself. I’m…’ She helped me up to my feet, even though a voice bellowed in my head that I should be standing on six limbs and not two. ‘I’m glad I helped you escape that.’

I still needed escape.

Dana directed me to what she called a “car”, what I first saw as a warped beast with two mouths and two leather tongues, its monstrous nature diminished when Dana happily leapt in, and patted one of those tongues. The car didn’t gnash or bite – though it made a noise like a roar when it started – so I made my way in, looking at a smaller version of that grey river through glass.

Dana took us back to her home – what looked like a gigantic slab that grew larger as I entered. Out I stepped into the night, with Dana wrapping her arm – what had once been a foreleg – around my form as I couldn’t help but look at my feet. What I had managed to narrowly avoid for so long now belonged to me.

One reason I dreamed of becoming human was that with larger size, as I heard, comes a longer life. A human body brings forth the possibility of seeing more change, more innovation, a far cry from an ant's repetitive life, which carried with it the looming suspicion that each night may be the last one you may witness.

That suspicion hung over me even as a human. It didn’t feel like the last night before death, but it was heralding an ending.

The next morning, to celebrate Dana’s return to humanity and my initiation into it, we decided to visit the spot where we first met.

The day began with a shower that left me shuddering as I remembered the myriad raindrops that threatened to destroy me, and a new set of clothes courtesy of Dana’s wardrobe. Again, she held me so I could walk on two legs because I was supposed to.

I was supposed to be a biped vertebrate. I was supposed to feel close to the sky and be larger than the bins and the shrubs we passed. The sunlight was supposed to feel like a tiny roasting on my skin.

I thought my mind was finally adjusting to my new body as I embraced the morning air. No more ant me. Human thoughts and human thoughts only.

Then I saw the other ants.

I looked at them and remembered when I had been among them, when I had been the same size and had been promised the same lifetime as them. ‘No,’ I whispered as I felt like I was the same size as them again.

Seeing them made my feet sting, as if they were begging me to crush them since I had the power to, as if destruction of ants were an integral part of human nature.

I saw them as potential humans.

Though I closed my eyes, I saw all of them inflating to my size, their antennae and legs and abdomen shrivelling away to make way for fingers and toes and hair and ears and noses. I saw the world through their eyes, I saw their nest and their surroundings stretch and flatten and warp. It was what I had experienced, but I had wanted this.

‘Are you okay?’

I turned to see a human, momentarily distracted from their ice cream cone. I had always wondered what it would be like to hold one of those things, to eat them without having them fall.

I saw the human as a potential ant.

I saw them transform as Dana described her own transformation, their ice cream falling to the ground as their fingers burrowed back into their arms and their hair hid away to herald the arrival of antennae.

I imagined flattening them under my foot, maybe punctuating it with ‘Now you know how it feels!’ and I wasn’t sure how I felt about the fact I laughed at that.

‘Betty, are you okay?’

Again we walked beside each other.

When I was an ant, I scurried across a discarded human object that I assumed was one of those things they wore for the sole purpose of decorating themselves. As a human, I learned it was a key.

When Dana took me back to her house, she told me she was locking the door - yet another object that seemed to stretch and shrink as I looked at it - in case the scientist responsible for our transformations found us. A key was used in tandom with a device called a lock to stop doors from opening.

When you are an ant, things just are. Birds want to fly down and eat you because they just do. You can lift heavy things because you just can. Humans find you disgusting because they just do.

In hopes of helping me adjust to my new humanity, Dana showed me a device that resembled a portable rectangular puddle. Like a puddle, I saw my reflection - I saw the being with several thin long antennae and the forward-facing eyes and as I did, the caterpillars within me squirmed all the more - but unlike puddles, I saw that locks didn’t stop doors from opening because they just did.

The doors were prevented from opening due to parts as small as I used to be. As privileged as I felt to learn what few - if any other - ants had no idea of, I found myself looking at an open door in Dana’s home, leading to a small room with tall sticks.

Dana was a human who became an ant and became a human again and she can become an ant again. All there was outside were people who had the potential to be crushed and ants who had the potential to do the crushing. Even if I turned back into an ant, what I learnt would remain and my nest would grow and shrink and expand and compress. I would imagine the other ants as humans ready to kill me, and myself as a human ready to kill them.

I wondered if it would be better if I locked myself in that small room and did nothing but imagine what I thought being human would be like until I died of starvation.

It wasn’t until then I noticed I was in Dana’s kitchen, a place many ants had been in before, a place that seemed entirely made of shimmering white water.

‘Betty,’ Dana cried, grabbing a bottle of water – resembling the glass that induced my transformation in the first place - from the cupboard, ‘drink this; you’ll feel better.’

I held the bottle in my hand, its contents just enough to soothe my dehydration.

I held the house I was in in my hand, my finger just barely fitting through the door I could once walk easily through.

I held the country in my hand, trees flattening in my grip.

I held the sky in my hand, the stars scattered across my palm like sugar.

I felt more like a human being than ever before.

With the many times I momentarily felt like I had transformed back into an ant, I was long overdue to feel like the human I had become. The human I was. I was human. The rooms I stood in and the furniture they contained were made for me. The sofa was where I could sit or sleep. The tables were where I could place food.

When I accidentally spilled biscuits on the floor, I had no desire to nibble at it.

When I looked at a window and the sunlight piercing it, it reminded me nothing of another glass held by a sadistic child.

I was human. Dana was human and so was I. When she held me, it was not to allow me to crawl across her palm nor was it to reduce me to entrails between her fingers. When she held me, she pressed her palms against my shoulders and elbows, making my stomach settle when it needed settling.

I was human. Dana believed I was worthy of knowledge that only humans were privy to.

‘Welcome to Dana’s human lessons,’ Dana had said to me after I held that bottle, holding up a sheet of paper with “HUMAN LESSONS” written on it. I know that because she pointed at each letter and sounded them out, my first step to deciphering what were once odd markings.

There were many objects in Dana’s home, and like the lock and the key, I learned how they worked, and they were not “just because”. Every object had a story, and each story featured Dana. She not only explained the contents of the kitchen, but what she had made with them. There was more to be done with food than just take it, scuttle away and eat it.

And there was more to devour than just food. Every room, everything contained in those rooms, they had Dana’s stories that could be my stories as well. No ants knew about internet or ibuprofen, but explanations of those and what they did now rested in my enlarged brain.

Then she showed me, in her own words: ‘something I liked as a kid but comes off a bit differently now.’Ants. Ants as seen by humans. Ants like I was once as seen by humans like I am now.

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Ants. Ants as seen by humans. Ants like I was once as seen by humans like I am now.

We did look around woods like those for food, and we even surprised ourselves in how much we managed to carry away, but we were nowhere near as jovial about it as the cartoon - as Dana called it - portrayed.

The ants there looked less like ants than they did how I imagine I looked during my transformation.

That’s when I realised why I was so eager to learn about the human world.

I was a human. I was an ant.

Dana was a human. Dana was an ant.

Both of us had crawled beneath the roots of trees and brushed our fingers against their highest branches. Both of us had seen the sky clearly and obscured by blades of grass.

I didn’t feel like I had become an ant again, yet I found myself hungering for that form, but only for a moment. A moment where I could return to my colony and share stories of everything I had learned, everything they willingly ignored and mocked.

The humans would see me transform again, I thought, they would believe that Dana was briefly an ant and so would believe her stories of what it was like.

The days of ants being villified, mocked, flattened and roasted would come to an end. I saw ants as potential humans and humans as potential ants because I saw them learning more about each other.

And there were other animals out there too. What would it be like to fly like a bird, to be even closer to the sky? What would it be like to be a dog, larger than the grass yet smaller than the bins?

We had to pay another visit to the scientist.

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