Obnoxious Creation

• Myoorra Ratnasingham, Grade 10
• Short Story
• 2008

The sun rose traffic-light yellow, a testament to the excruciatingly slow day that was to follow. I mulled over whether or not I should get up, and decided on the latter before being herded out of my sleeping quarters by my obstinate lump of a mother. Purgatory – the one thing in the world I hate as much as, if not more than, Homo sapiens. The indignity of it all is what I can’t comprehend. How they can literally walk all over us when we are intellectually superior, I will probably never know. I could do anything I wanted to you know, be anything I wanted to be, if it weren’t for the deterrent of being an ant. I’m not joking you know – I am an ant, really and truly.

Anyway, to continue the unfolding of events in this lackadaisical snail of a day, I began my job of finding food. Now, to my human readers, this may all seem like a cute and fuzzy joke, but believe me when I say it isn’t. First, we have to divide ourselves and position our sections into potential picnic areas or other areas of interest. Then, avoiding the clumsiness of one of your kind (if you’re a human that is) we have to station ourselves sentry near the most appealing items and make a beeline (or rather ant-line) for the food as soon as it is laid down. Lately in the colony, there has been a dearth of edibles, which as you can imagine, is quite distressing.

After scouring the horizon to no avail, I sat, pensive and wilted, injected with ennui. I mean, really, what was the point of living? Between avoiding colossal, blundering human feet, and searching for food, what was to enjoy? What was the meaning of life??
I sighed overcome with intense exhaustion…the sweltering day was really getting to me. I can deal with hot, and cold – but not when they both mingle to form humid. There it was again – Purgatory. Oh, how I loathe that word.

After an hour or so of constructively colour coding flower petals, I was again aimlessly stirring my jumbled pot of thoughts…I came back to “what was the meaning of life?” and sorely regretted not buying a dictionary at the jumble sale last weekend. I chewed my antennae thoughtfully, as I always do when I’m nervous and not in sight of food. I heard a rumbling sound, which I thought was my stomach until it dawned on me that it was a much more magnified sound.

Then, out of the blue appeared this huge, yellow, elephantine beast of a thing, and I braced myself for my doom, knowing that the Grim Reaper had finally come for me. And then, I laughed in relief (an ant laughing, you don’t hear that everyday) when I realised it was a piece of grated cheese. I bit it, cautiously…Not half bad. That was all it took. My spirits lifted. I skipped homeward bound, enjoying this useless existence.