Week 5 Storytelling: The Life of an Ant

One hot summer day, Chase ran outside his house. It was the summer break of his freshman year of high school and he had a lot of time to spare. He brought his basketball outside with him to shoot some hoops. He saw a black ant scurrying alongside the sidewalk carrying a cracker crumb on its back. Chase hated ants.

Just as Chase lifted his worn-out Converse to smash the ant, he heard a little voice calling him.

"HEY!"

Chase looked around. No one was there. He looked around to his left and his right. There was not a person in sight.

"HEY!", that little voice called to Chase again.

This time he looked at the ground. Sure enough, it was the black ant who was trying to catch his attention. He couldn't believe it.

"An ant talking to me? Am I dreaming?," Chase thought.

"Yeah, I'm talking to you!", the ant yelled.

 "What do you want? Nothing?," Chase laughed.

"I...I...I," the ant trailed off.

"Now where was I? Ohhhhhhh....that's right! Back to killing you!," Chase exclaimed.

Chase once again lifted his Converse to smash the ant.

"This will teach him," the ant said as he quickly dodged Chase's shoe and bit his leg instead.

"OWWWWW!", Chase yelled.  

Chase felt his whole body tingling. This was so strange. He didn't know what was happening. He looked around himself as the trees, his house, and the whole world around him seemed to be growing in size.

Was he shrinking?

All of a sudden, he was the size of that ant!

Chase turned towards the ant.

"Why did you do this to me?", Chase yelled.

"To teach you a lesson."

"About what?"

"That every creature is important no matter how big or small. Now follow me," the ant said.

Chase followed the ant through some grass to an ant colony. The ant went right inside and ushered Chase in.

Chase looked around him to see a least five hundred ants around him working hard to keep the colony in tip-top shape.

"Over on your right you'll see the scavenger ants, they constantly draw new maps of the best places to get food outside the colony. Over on your left you'll see the architect ants. They constantly make new designs of ways to improve the colony's longevity. And straight in front of you, you'll see the queen ant's office. Her assistants do all of her work for her. We never see he come out of her office.," the ant said.

Chase was in awe. He couldn't believe what he was seeing! All of these ants were working so hard. They all had important jobs.

Chase suddenly felt badly for wanting to kill the ant earlier.

"I want you to meet my family," the ant said.

Chase followed the ant down a long path in the colony to a small hole in the wall. The ant crawled in and Chase did the same.

"Kids, I'm home!", the ant exclaimed.

Two small ants came out of the back room and ran into their dad's arms.

Chase smiled.

"Oh honey, I'm so glad you're finally back home," the ant's wife said as she emerged from the back room after the kids.

"Oh yeah, everyone this is Chase. I brought him home because I wanted him to meet you all," the ant said.

Chase was surprised that none of the ants looked at him weird or were afraid of him.

"Umm...hi," Chase said.

"Now let's all eat dinner. Chase, you are more than welcome to join us of course," the wife said.

The ant took the cracker crumb he had found outside of Chase's house and brought it to the table. He divided it amongst the five of them.

The wife passed a pitcher of water around the table.

Chase was having such a great time with the ant and his family. They were telling stories and laughing. Chase oddly even considered them his friends now.

All of a sudden at the dinner table, Chase began to feel very full and sluggish. He didn't want to be disrespectful to the ant and his family, but he was fighting to keep his eyes open.

The ant and his family seemed to become really fuzzy as Chase gently set his head down on the table.

When Chase woke up, he was right back where he was earlier that day: outside his house with a basketball in his hand. He stared down at the same ant traveling along the sidewalk with a cracker crumb on its back.

"Every creature is important no matter how big or small," a voice inside his head said.

He smiled and walked away and began to shoot some hoops.

("An ant carrying a leaf on a branch" Source: Freestockphotos)

Author's Note: I based this story off of The Elephant and the Ants from the Folklore of Santal Parganas by Cecil Henry Bompas (1909). In The Elephant and the Ants, an elephant looks down at some ants and says that he bets that he can beat them in a race just because he is bigger than them. The ants agree and the elephant keeps running, but every time he stop running he saw ants on the ground. He kept running and ended up dropping dead from running himself to death. The ants that he decided to race never ended up moving, but the moral of the story is to treat every creature with importance no matter their size. I also based this story off of Alice in Wonderland, because like Alice drinking the potion and shrinking, the ant bit Chase and he shrank. I also based this off of Marvel's Ant-Man because Chase gets to see that ants are friendly just like Ant-Man does. I also based the quote I repeated throughout the story "every creature is important no matter how big or small" off of Dr. Seuss's famous quote "a person's a person no matter how small." I thought it would be fun if I changed the main character to be a person. I also hope my story inspires more people to look at ants differently.