Ant Mill

If one assumes, as Aria does, that she only falls down Wikipedia rabbit holes when she’s hit rock bottom, she has hit rock bottom seven times in the past two weeks alone.

As searching up the word death had become rather boring, she has instead looked up odd death rituals. This has led her to something called an “ant mill,” a bleak phenomenon in which army ants march themselves to the point of exhaustion.

“Like that Stephen King book,” Johnny says. He’s used to her brief fixations by now, acting as her sole audience member every time she gets a little too invested in thought experiments, paradoxes, and niche manifestos.

“Which Stephen King book?” Aria asks. “He must have thousands of them by now.”

“Not thousands. Maybe hundreds. I can’t remember the title of the one I’m thinking of.”

Aria wouldn’t have been familiar with the book anyhow. She doesn’t see a point in reading horror stories when she can look up and see a million horrors with her own two eyes.

“Don’t you think,” she says slowly, “we’re just like those ants?”

Johnny shoots her a look. “Okay. How high are you?”

“I’m serious.” She drops her arm to her side, her phone slipping out of her hand. “The whole reason they create that ‘mill’ is because they lost their pheromone track, right?”

A pause.

“I don’t know,” he says. “Am I supposed to answer that?”

“So,” she continues, picking her phone back up, “instead of following the scent back to the nest, they instead follow each other. It’s a literal spiral of death.”

Turning her phone around, she shows him the image of ants eddying around an invisible eye of a storm.

“Gross,” Johnny says. “Looks like raisins in oatmeal.”

She turns her head, her lips pursed. She hasn’t had oatmeal since college. It was the instant kind. All she had to do was add water, and sometimes even that felt like too much work.

“‘Spiral of death,’” Johnny says. “That would be a good band name.”

“I’m sure it’s taken.”

He grabs his phone, his eyes narrowed. A few seconds later, he gets to his feet and heads for the kitchen. Without stopping, or even slowing, he says, “I hate when you’re right.”

Then, before she can gloat, he asks, “You want a drink?”

She says the same thing she always does. The same thing he says when she’s the one to ask.

“Sure,” she replies. “Anything but a smoothie.”

* * *

She neglected to tell her parents she was moving in with a boy until the deposit had been paid and the movers had been hired. She told herself she hadn’t been avoiding the topic, exactly; she hadn’t been speaking with her parents all that frequently anyhow.

She insisted on calling. Johnny encouraged her to do it over video chat, at least, but she stood her ground. Audio only. She also demanded, rather snottily, that he be nowhere around when the phone call occurred.

Okay, he said.

He made things so easy.

Who the hell is Johnny? her father asked when she broke the news. His tone was brusque. Raw. For a moment, she could almost believe he cared. She was an adult by then, and had been for years, but any mention of a boy still ruffled his feathers.

She didn’t feel he had earned the right to feel ruffled.

He’s a friend, she told her father.

A “special friend”? her mother asked.

I’m not answering that.

That means yes, her mother stage-whispered to her father.

It means no, Aria snapped, realizing, too late, that with just three words, she had shattered her façade. Had shown them she cared enough to issue the correction.

Though not special in the way her mother imagined, Johnny was undoubtedly exceptional. He and Aria had met in their freshman year, bonding over their shared hatred of late-night shifts at the on-campus Smoothie Shark.

It’s hard to believe they ever liked those smoothies, but they did. They loved them. That’s why they worked there. While Aria alternated between Beach Peach and Strawnanas Foster, Johnny always ordered the Honeydew You Love Me.

Honeydew? she said. Really?

Mostly ’cause of the name.

Her mouth quirked. You’re joking.

He raised a hand. Swear to God.

She wondered how much an oath like that meant to him. His expression was solemn. His hair was shaggy. She could make out the bottom of a tattoo, black curves peeking out from under his sleeve.

Her mother would have asked about that tattoo as soon as she spotted it. Aria, on the other hand, tried to figure it out herself. Every time they worked together, their penchant for smoothies waning by the day, she would steal a few looks over the course of their shift. By the time he asked if she wanted to spend time together outside of work — when we’re not dying slow, overripe-fruit-smelling deaths, as he put it — she knew what it was: a butterfly the size of her palm, its wings twisted, as if made of barbed wire.

Her parents would hate him, she kept thinking. He may have turned out to be the kindest person she had ever known, but he looked like trouble, and her parents had never been the type to stick around to see through the tarnish to the gold. As soon as they made up their minds, they would not reevaluate.

This, she supposes, is why they hardly speak now. Once she failed to live up to their lofty expectations, staying at Smoothie Shark instead of working at the law library, they decided she was hopeless. She lacked the necessary drive.

Drive to what? Johnny asked once.

Be like them, she replied.

It could be argued that her latest crash out is in part due to the upcoming holidays. She and Johnny will be flying out to spend time with their respective families, and though Johnny has offered to let her stay at his place, she knows she can’t avoid her parents forever.

It’s also winter. Winter’s hard. It always has been. When she discovered the darker days soured her mood, she considered transferring back home, where the days felt more bearable.

You could, her mother said, but wouldn’t that be a waste?

It took Aria a moment to recover enough to respond.

Of what? she asked at last.

Everything, her father replied.

Money. Resources. Her chance to become her own person.

She knew all of this.

She just thought her happiness was more important.

She stayed where she was. Nestled deeper into the cold. By the time spring break came around, she claimed she was too comfortable to even consider flying home.

She spent the whole week alone in her dorm, doing nothing. Staring at nothing. Waiting for an asteroid. She couldn’t even take comfort in a cup of Beach Peach or Strawnanas Foster. She had been working at Smoothie Shark for a couple of months by then, and she and Johnny agreed they would rather put their hands in a commercial blender than drink a smoothie ever again.

She missed Johnny the way she should have missed her parents. The only time she could be bothered to do much of anything was when he texted, and even then, her thumbs felt as though they weighed ten pounds.

The day he returned, she said, We should move in together.

She stared at his arm, not at his face, afraid she would find pity there.

Cool, he replied. You got a place in mind?

They weren’t in love, exactly. They weren’t not in love either. They loved each other but were not dating. Did not define the relationship.

There had been a kiss once.

They never spoke of it again.

* * *

She’s standing in the kitchen, deciding between an apple and a banana, when Johnny says, “Here,” and shoves his phone into her hand.

She nearly drops the device, the toes of her left foot twitching in anticipation of an unceremonious crushing. After tossing him an unamused look, she asks, “What am I looking at?”

Shaking his head, as if he’s too awed to speak, he presses the play button in the center of the screen. A video begins, the pleasant voice of a vaguely British narrator paired with uncomfortably high-resolution footage of scores upon scores of amber ants. All around them, greenish-brown water rises like panic.

“It seems,” the narrator says, a faint note of sadness in his tone, “the creatures have no choice but to succumb to the elements.”

Aria’s eyes flick up to Johnny’s face. “Why are you showing me this?”

“Just watch,” he insists.

Frowning, she refocuses on the scene unfolding before her.

“They now begin building a raft of their own bodies.”

Her skin crawls. She never needed to see ants in such great detail. The tops of their heads are impossibly shiny, reminding her of mancala marbles. She played mancala once, with her cousins, then never again.

“These ants are coated in fine hairs perfect for trapping air, which then creates a cloud-like cushion. The entire colony, therefore, becomes a formic raft.”

“I hate the sounds,” she mutters, grimacing at the amplified clicking coming from the ants’ buoyant bodies.

“I know,” Johnny says. “Nightmare ASMR.”

Her eyes flick up to his face.

How many times, after hitting what she thought was rock bottom, has she asked him to talk to her until she falls asleep?

To his credit, he barely even questioned it, muttering Am I your white-noise machine now? only once before acquiescing every time after.

Not her special friend.

Indispensable nonetheless.

“Hey,” he says, nudging her gently with his shoulder. “You’re missing the good part.”

“There’s a good part?”

He leans forward, one brow lifted. “Watch, and you’ll find out for yourself.”

She focuses on the screen as the ant raft drifts across the water. She wonders, for a moment, if anyone else in the world is doing what they are now.

Perhaps. There are a lot of people out there. She just hopes that person, wherever they are, is as lucky as she is. That they have the honor of watching this video with their own version of a life raft.

When a fish with a bad underbite rams its head against the raft, dislodging a few ants who then must crawl back, Aria lets out an embarrassingly dramatic gasp. Johnny grabs her hand, as if to steady her.

After a few more bumps from below, the ants approach land. They spread out, creating a bridge to solid ground.

“The ants,” the narrator continues, “promptly begin unloading the pupae, ensuring the next generation lives another day. Once the queen has landed safely, the colony breathes out a collective sigh of relief. They have made it. They are safe. What a beautiful victory.”

The video ends. A white looping icon suggests they play it again. Again and again and again, until they believe it. Until they realize everything around them was built to survive.

“See?” Johnny says. “Ants aren’t always doomed.”

Her eyes flick up to his, an objection on her tongue. The video’s title clearly states that the raft-building creatures are fire ants. The ones who create death spirals are army ants, an entirely separate species.

Granted, her understanding of ant mills is as shallow as most of her relationships. She therefore can’t be sure if army ants can do what fire ants do. They may well be as different from fire ants as they are from butterflies, forced to watch the others bob along the water or take to the sky, all while they do nothing but sink deeper into themselves.

She will never look it up. She doesn’t want a definitive answer.

She swallows. Licks her lips. Asks, “Want a drink?”

Johnny smiles. His face is the most familiar thing in the world.

“Sure,” he says, already reaching for a glass. “Anything but a smoothie.”

She smiles back. Bumps his hip. Feels herself start to float.