Micro-fiction: Among The Ants

An itchy horror for springtime.

Apr 19, 2025

brown and black ant on white surface — Photo by Marco Neri on Unsplash

Hi, it’s time for your weekly scare infestation!

A special welcome to new readers who found me after reading ‘I Could Just Gobble You Up’, and thanks for everyone who has read, liked, commented, and shared it. Particular thanks to Simon K. Jones for his very kind words about that story in his ‘Write More’ newsletter. You can read what he had to say here.

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Among The Ants

To whoever finds this,

You’re probably wondering why I did it.

In some species of ants, when they get into a fight there are medic ants that carry the injured back to the nest for treatment. If the injured ant doesn’t think it’ll recover, it emits an odour that pushes the medics away to treat others. Sometimes that ant will limp to the nest’s composting pile, ready for its body to serve others. This is a fact. Another fact is that no ant has ever sent an invoice for medical costs. They’re kinder than us.

When I was a kid, around nine years old I guess, my family took me to a Centre Parcs village. If you don’t know them, they’re family holiday places where you can rent a cheap breeze-block bungalow set in woodland. There are sports facilities and everyone cycles everywhere. If you’ve grown up in London, it’s weird, but nice.

It’s probably also some obscure property scam to charge rental for what would otherwise be forest, because heaven forbid anything could just be left as untouched, unprofitable nature.

I was walking apart from my family, off the trail, black trainers with velcro straps crunching through shreds of fallen pine bark. I hadn’t realised how far I’d strayed from my parents. The sun was shining, dappling the ground through the needled-canopy. The air was still and fresher than anything I’d ever tasted before. A blackbird tweeted its latest jazz. Idyllic. Sweat prickled my skin, making me itch. I scratched, and grit caught under my fingernails.

My shoes rippled.

The grit had twitching legs. It was an ant, trapped under my cuticle, half-dead but fighting for life. Another scuttled over the back of my hand. They were bigger and fleshier than the ants that scavenged the concrete streets at home.

Why were my shoes rippling?

I brushed the ant away, only revealing more on my other arm.

A flood of glistening black bodes swarmed my shoes, up my legs, onto my chest, racing up my bare neck and down my skinny arms. I had walked onto an ant nest.

I yelled, ran, flapping my hands, falling and landing face down, probably throwing off dozens of ants and picking up a hundred more. They carpeted the forest floor. Pushing myself up, their legs gripped and ripped at the skin on my fingers, every motion I made seemed to add more.

I spun and fell, tripped and ran, smashing at my body like I was possessed.

The collective brain cells of a colony of forty thousand ants is at least equal to a human’s grey matter. At that age, with my kid brain, I could feel they were outthinking me.

Did you ever meet something inhuman? Like, did you ever look into the eye of a dolphin in an aquarium and see its intelligence? You’ve probably done it with a dog or a cat. How about a frog? Or a snake? Go further sideways along that evolutionary tree, and the feeling of connection—of commonality—gets colder until it freezes your bones. There are smart, adaptable living things, and we are just food or furniture to them. Their intelligence is not ours. Ants have existed for one hundred million years. Their intelligence is ancient. We are infants beside them.

I escaped that day. I wailed, snot and tears streaming from me. I didn’t go back into the woodland. I stayed on the paths.

But the memory stuck with me, and the fear transformed. I didn’t have words for what it became until I went to Stonehenge. I felt the same thing there: reverence. Even though we don’t know what it was for or how it was used, and the beliefs of the builders are forgotten and erased, there is holiness to it. When I think about the ants that covered me, their unified mind, their wholeness, I feel the same thing. They are sanctified.

I’m trying to get that feeling again. I’ve been building up to it.

There are twenty quadrillion ants in the world, and that might be a low-ball estimate. That’s millions of ants per human. Remember how a colony of forty thousand ants have the brain matter of one person? Imagine the combined intelligence of millions. Their megacolonies think and work together. They are beyond us in every sense.

I laid in my garden, waiting for them to come, for the itch of their legs, tripping the hairs on my skin. At first I had to fight the urge to scratch, but then I grew to enjoy it. It became like air passing through a bird’s feathers or a current of water against a fish’s scales. It was Nature touching me, learning my body.

Even with that, it took over a year to control the urge dig them out when they entered my ears. I heard them, feet and mandibles frantically moving through the canals, a tickle inside my skull, feeling like they were crawling into my brain. I got used to it. I learned their music, their scrapes and chirps.

My nostrils were the hardest part. Letting them come truly inside me took every ounce of control I had. They scrabbled into the shades of my nasal passages, into the cavity of my skull, crawling through the moisture and mucus to find nourishment for their family. I let processions of them enter and leave me, trails of shining bodies flowing from their nest to the feast I willingly presented. They took parts of me away with them: skin, wax, fluids, and tiny bites of flesh.

I think I’ve always known what I truly wanted, what I’d feared except in the most fevered, beautiful dreams. When they took those fragments, it was only the first stage. I offered myself as the communion wafer, and they accepted.

Now I’m ready. I’ve found the perfect, enormous, beautiful colony. It thrums with life. I hear their whistling words, whispering in the woodland. Their mind senses me. It viewed my approach when I scouted the site, before I wrote this, and it has accepted my ritual.

With years of training, I have subsumed all urges to fight. I am ready for apotheosis, exaltation, subsummation into their god-mind. I am ready for communion. I will lay naked upon their nest and allow their bodies to fill me. I will open my mouth so they can scavenge my throat, explore my lungs, fill me with their skittering mass, devour and absorb my mind into theirs, make me one with them by burrowing beneath my fingernails, into my eyes, and through every orifice both existing and newly created. Their heads and bodies with delve beneath my skin. My organs will overflow with gods.

After reading this, you know this is an option for you, too. You could come to lay with us.

Join me in the woods. I will be there, everywhere, among the ants.

The end

Micro-fiction: Among The Ants

An itchy horror for springtime.

Among The Ants

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