The Ants Came Marching One By One

Yesterday I had to walk around the entire perimeter of the house. I was looking for a sign that might be somewhere in our yard and standing an inch or so high; it'd be shaped like a billboard, of course, and circled with the same flashing lights you see on a theatre marquee. It would read:

Ants welcome! All varieties! Bring your friends!

Of course, I didn't see the sign, but I'm sure it's there. Maybe it is an ant "highway" billboard and is perhaps posted at a crossroads in one of the plethora of underground any tunnels and that's why I can't see it. But in any case, these past several weeks I've seen the evidence of it.

It wouldn't be so bad, of course, if Mister Bunny put himself to work and helped scare them away, stomp on them, eat them -- whatever it took. But he just sits there like a rodent version of Garfield the cat, lazily glancing on as the ants go marching past him.

I've got this concern that the ants are starting to burrow holes under our floor tiles and grow a colony there - Fran thinks I'm nuts. I wondered if this might just be the horror writer in me wanting to explore a fun new concept. But I've already written and published a token "bug" story. Treats was about a man who kept his dead wife's body upstairs in the spare bedroom because her biggest fear was of the "ground bugs" crawling through her dead and decomposing flesh. And anyways, apart from movies like Them ants don't frighten me the way spiders and other creepy crawly things do. At least, not yet.