Written in 2017, this is another vignette from a creative project I worked on, inspired by Paradise Lost.
People are like little ants. They’re all just running about, in organized little lines, like little ants crawling from here to there on some special little strip of dirt that God must have made their home. God is great, they say, to have made us his chosen ones. For this dirt is ripe for crawling, and the grass is ripe for picking, and the bugs ‘round here are ripe for eating. God must have made this dirt for us, they say. Humans are no different than ants. Oft in life I find myself wondering why we haven’t merely sprouted little brown exoskeletons, and dropped down into the dirt like our little arthropod brethren. It is considered common knowledge in the ant community, that there are only two types of ants. Those within the colony, and those without. Of those without, some are lost, strayed away from the little marching line, where suddenly God’s sweet little earth does not seem so heavenly. Others are banished for various blasphemies. They carry the mark of Cain, that not even the spiders will take them as filling meal.
I was a little ant once, scurrying too and fro like the rest. Mindless thoughts and mindless motions were the highlights of my days, while the dark undertow of nature was the highlight of my nights. Sleep was often in those days, yet distinguishing a waking hour from a dreaming one was difficult. Under the haze of the hive mind, we all dreamed the same dreams, the Queen’s dreams, God’s dreams. They were our anesthetic, numbing away the blasphemous blood that we all swore had never run through our veins. Looking back now, I must believe that some of us had never felt the haze, but slipped through each day among us, the mind their only refuge. It still troubles me to this day, that I cannot, not for all the hours of tireless trying, understand why they chose to be nothing. As far as I was concerned, there was no middle ground between the murky depths we swam in, and the lucid universe above. Once I had broken the surface, I could not sink back below, no matter how hard I tried, and yet they breathed the open air, hundreds of meters below the surface.
What I remember most was the motion. I can’t remember a single moment from back then that I wasn’t, and those around me weren’t moving constantly, methodically. We raced in our frantic movements to stay one step ahead of the realities that haunted us the most. It was as if a deep anxiety lay lurking beneath the surface of our thoughts. Prominent enough, that stillness in either body or mind was agony. Yet so elusive that even the most learned psychiatrist could not detect more than but a scent of its lurking substance. It was in those in which it spread to ravenously, a subconscious carcinoma of those blasphemous thoughts of the men of Cain, that the haze could no longer contain. They swore at the time, those dark tumors were the a sickness of sin, as if washing one’s hands could stave off mental illness. Much has changed since I left the haze, but now as much as then, you cannot wash one’s hands of insanity.
Surrounding the balcony where I stood, a heavy rain made invisible incisions in chilling air. Though not thick enough to have a tangible body, a fog hung heavily over the streets below. The dark shadows of people were but ghosts, except for that the rain made just a barely visible change in direction as each drop disintegrated upon umbrella and jacket. The floor trembled with my fingers as a train rumbled by on the adjacent street. Upon every inch of my skin I felt the cold. Muffled roars of thunder echoed around my ear drums, thought it could have been cannon fire, as I knew not the difference. A war was always being fought, if you knew where to look. The sun would just be setting now, though through the grey little of its light managed to swim free. Under the distant freeway, little strings of red and orange danced from the fire pits of the homeless. On a clear day, you could see beyond the trees and the freeway to their camps. A little nearer, and you could smell it too. I paused from my observations to ward off their unholiness with an awkward outline of a cross through the air with my right hand. Trailing behind my hand, the dull red throb of pain lingered in the air. I would have to change the bandages. My carelessness with the rain had left the delicate bandage damp and quickly soiled.
I held my arm, and stared at it in shock. Confusion gripped hold of me, as did panic. I had no recollection of ever injuring my arm, let alone bandaging it. I let my left hand carefully slide over the wounded arm, feeling the threaded weave that sealed off the mystery trauma from my own prying eyes. Another train slipped by, this time almost unnoticed. I sifted through memory after recent memory, but my mind ran empty without yielding any results. The urge to tear the bandage off gripped my like a horrible itch. Drinking in my last drops of rational thought, I resisted clawing it to shreds, and set upon carefully unwinding the wrap. Beneath the final sheets, yellow pus ran thick upon grey skin, what I imagined the dead must look before the mortician made his careful repairs. The smell of the wound was not so subtle any longer, and I tasted bile behind my lips. In disgust I wiped away the liquid with the sleeve of my sweater. My mouth fell slightly open in surprise. Behind the heavy pain that hung upon my forearm, and the sickly liquids that oozed upon it, was a small wound no larger than a nickel. But the skin was a dark grey—almost colorless, except for tinges of yellow that assured me some sick infection was already festering within my very heart.
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