Anticide

On Sunday morning there was a strange smell in the air outside the kitchen window. A chemical smell, but scented. An agent of some kind.

By the time I got home on Sunday evening, tiny ants had made their riverbed pathways all over the bathroom, across the hall and up my desk to a glass that had a residue of orange juice in it. They turned their little ant faces up to me as I stared at them swarming. "Hey there!" "Man, I love orange juice!" They scampered around on my desk, running blithely over my wrist. "Weeee!" The worst thing about having bugs in your house is not even that they crawl over you but that you start to feel them crawling over you even when they are not.

Fumigation from the apartment downstairs had made them forget that my apartment is a house of death for ants.

I put some more orange juice in a plastic yoghurt lid and stationed it a prime spot on the bathroom floor. They were shy at first (could they smell the ant-death on my fingers and the soles of my shoes?) but soon they were porking away, a tidy row of them, face down, sucking up the OJ. Delicious. Wholesome. Tell your friends.

Then, my friends, came the switch. I pulled the OJ lid and put down the sweet sweet ant killer instead. They were confused a for a bit. A force larger than them was at work. But it turned out not to matter: the soma sweetness was still around to be gobbled and gobble they did. Delicious. Tell your friends.

I read recently about a Buddhist priest offering a kind of apology/excuse before a major extermination in Japan. Was it rats or bugs? The priest asked forgiveness of the rats for killing them, but pointed out that it was their bad luck to be reincarnated as things so low that could offer nothing positive to the world and, indeed, brought dirt and disease with it. It finished off with pointing out to the rats that killing them only sped them on their karmic journey, which would certainly lead them to better incarnations than that of the rat.

I just want them to move on to someone else's apartment.