I noticed two things about the new neighbourhood when I first arrived there. Firstly, the whole place had a quiet, calm, charming atmosphere. The ants were the second thing. They were everywhere - crawling in the sidewalk cracks, climbing up street lamps, climbing up your car wheels. Other than that, the neighbourhood seemed great. A quiet, peaceful community, up in the mountains. I needed somewhere quiet to live, somewhere where I could focus on life.
My wife, Beth, was happy to move here, though. She’s been sick for a while, and the mountain air is supposed to be good for that. The neighbours greeted us happily. One of them, an elderly, stout woman, even baked us a pie. She greeted me at the doorstop of our new red-brick bungalow with it in her hands. “Welcome to the neighbourhood!” She announced. “I made this pie for you.” “Thank you!” I responded. I had never liked pie much, but I did want to be polite.
“So, do you have any questions about the neighbourhood?” “Well, I do have one.” I admitted. “It’s about… the ants.” “Oh?” She asked. “What about them?” “Well, there are a lot of them. And it’s winter. Shouldn’t they all be gone by now?” She laughed. “Oh, no. Not here. They’re a year-long phenomenon. I actually wanted to tell you something about them.” “What is it?” I asked. She leaned in. “You have to feed them. Every night at 10:00 PM, you need to put something on your doormat.” I was a little confused. Feeding ants? “Why do we have to feed them?” “If you don’t, they start to forage for food. And nobody wants that.”
“Isn’t that what ants are supposed to do?” I asked. I wasn’t some ant expert, but I’d never heard of leaving out food for ants before. I could tell that she was getting uncomfortable. “Well… The ants here can be a bit… aggressive in their foraging.” I was still a bit confused, but I decided to play along. The last thing I wanted was to anger the neighbours on our first day here. “What do I feed them, then?” She looked at me in an odd way. “Well, what did you think the pie was for?”
The next day, I forgot to put out anything. Why should I have? It was ridiculous. Who had ever heard of feeding ants? And what were they doing out here in the middle of winter? It was around 9:30 when I heard a knock at my door. I opened it to see the same old woman there. “Hello.” She said, sounding uneasy. “I couldn’t see anything on your doormat. You did remember to make something, did you?” “No.” I admitted. I could see her getting frantic. “You better make something, and fast. The feasting will start soon, and if you don’t have anything for them they’ll have to forage.”
I sighed. I didn’t want to have to deal with this. “Okay, fine. I’ll get something. What do they like?” She seemed relieved. “Something sweet, usually. Cookies, cake, something like that. But anything will do in a pinch.” I closed the door. I went into the kitchen, got out some packaged cookies we had, and placed them on my doormat. I didn’t want to do that - but if I had to obey these customs, so be it. At the end of the day, it wasn’t that big a deal.
As the time passed, the weather got colder and colder. Beth wasn’t getting any better. The mountain air didn’t seem to be doing anything good for her. She rarely got out of bed, and I was mostly alone for the start of winter. Then it happened. It got really, REALLY cold. A massive blizzard hit the whole town. The roads out of the community froze, and we couldn’t get groceries. The power went out, and what little food we had on-hand started to spoil.
We could barely feed ourselves. And one night, at around 9:00 PM, I opened the cupboard to barely anything. At that point, I made a decision. I didn’t care how much it mattered to everyone else - I was not going to waste our last morsels of food just to feed some ants. Why was everyone so scared of them, anyway? To be secure, I set up some ant traps. I sat down, and tried reading a few books. After a while, I looked up at the clock. 10:00.
Cautiously, I opened the cupboard. To my surprise, it was empty. No ants. Then I heard a noise. It was kind of a scratching noise, as if something was digging through my walls. I tried to go to the source of the sound, but I couldn’t find it. It started to be joined by more and more noises just like it. Then, all of a sudden, it stopped. I went to the cupboard again, but there were still no ants. However, I did hear a sound coming from the bedroom. It sounded like screaming - but muffled, accompanied with the endless grind of hundreds of ant’s mandibles.
There wasn’t much left by the time I made it to the bedroom, even though it only took me a few seconds. All of the skin was gone, and the majority of everything else was torn apart. I could barely see any of it through the thick cloud of ants, swarming over everything. My God - they took it all. Even the bones. I tried to swat them away, but they bit me. It was the greatest pain I’ve ever experienced in my entire life - I felt like my hand was about to fall off. It swelled to nearly the size of a tennis ball. That was just from one bite?
She was already gone by the time I got over the pain. A few of them were carrying a fragment of bone, and squeezed it through the hole. The cold wind whistled through it. The neighbours were apologetic when they found out, but they just seemed sad. “It’s happened to too many people. You should’ve taken it more seriously.” I leave the offerings on my doormat every day now, like clockwork. I’m planning to move out the first chance I get. I still see those ants, wandering the streets. Hungry. For more of us.