After

William Keckler
2 min readJun 17, 2024

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After poisoning the entire colony of sugar ants, you find a solitary ant foraging in your shower. What to do? Do you wait for her to find the poison and return contaminated to the necropolis that was her thriving colony, let her lay her corpse atop one of the piles of her huge, extended family in that hidden Golgotha? What a sad image, you, the mass murderer, think. You carry her outside into the night. Stupid human. She can’t join another colony, the search engine says. She can’t become a queen, the hive of knowledge mocks. You ask the search engine in the night for a sliver of hope for her, after killing all her people. It, too, is searching constantly like a colony of ants. Bringing food back to the nest. The search engine will do this for millions of years if it is allowed. Why bother evolving behind algorithms that work? Knowing anything the way you do is not really important as you think. The universe is interested in other ways of knowing. You shake the search engine up like the Magic 8 Ball by asking again. Desperate thing. This time, it give you hope. Other queens in other colonies on your front lawn are probably related to the dead queen. The scent of the sole surviving ant may not trigger the defenses of the other nest. Her scent may be close enough to their scent. She may pass unmolested into the new queendom. Reborn. These supercolonies of related queens are yet another social adaptation furthering survival. You nearly squished her in a kleenex and flushed her. You say something like a prayer for her to reach something like comfort. How strange it was to hold her in your palm. You watch something fearless run from danger. There is no such thing as a single word. There is no such thing as a single ant.

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William Keckler

Writer, visual artist. Books include Sanskrit of the Body, which won in the U.S. National Poetry Series (Penguin). https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/532348.