"Are you…man?" The ant asks me. 

I’m not sure how to reply. I mean, the answer is obviously yes, but I get the hint that I’m not hearing exactly what she’s asking. The ant had said the last word with such emphasis, such reverence.

"Yes," I say respectfully, regally…or at least, as close to those as I could. Pretty sure I looked silly.

The ant lowers her head, feeling the ground with her antennae. I’m pretty sure that’s how ants use their sense of smell, though admittedly, I don’t know much about ants.

“I’m…sorry, but…have you always been able to talk?” I ask. The full absurdity of crouching down to talk to a thing that could fit on one of my fingernails hasn’t quite registered with me.

“I think so. We just…never to you,” She replies.

Her voice is quiet and small, like a sleepy child murmuring words they barely know before bedtime when the lights are already out. Still, she enunciates clearly enough, so if I listen closely, I can pick out the words.

“By we, you mean…your hive? Your colony?” I ask, pointing to the budding ant pile forming near my garage. The ant jumps back in instinctual fear and shakes a little, then looks to her tiny home. Her sisters busily bring in little scraps of anything they can get their hands on: plants, other insects, crumbs of fast food, and a dozen other things I can’t identify.

She scurries toward the front left wheel of my lawn mower, raising her front and middle legs to investigate it.

“It smells like the red ones,” She says, a note of quavering terror in her voice.

“Friends of yours?” I ask.

“I don’t know that word, ‘friends.’ They take food we claim. We fight them for it.”

“So they’re enemies. You hate them, and I did you a favor.”

“Don’t know those words. Hate. Favor. Enemy. There is colony, and there is not-colony. There is food, and there is not-food. There is live, and there is die.”

This was either profound ant psychology or her overly simple view of the world. It was hard to say which.

“They’re dead either way,” I say with a shrug.

She turns this way and that, climbing down to take a few steps back to her hill, then feels the wheel again with her antennae, and finally moves closer to me.

“Will you make us dead? Make colony die?”

I had been planning to come back out with a bottle of Ortho and soak the pile of little insects where they were. Now that I was talking to one, though…I wasn’t sure.

“I’m just trying to mow the grass,” I say, pointing to the mower, trying to avoid the awkward question.

“You shrink our world. Less food. Birds see us, eat my sisters,” She replies. Her words sound…odd. Simultaneously fearful, angry and curious…or perhaps none of these things. Do ants even have emotions? Am I just projecting humanity onto this one because she’s talking to me?

“Uhh…look, I need some water. You can uh…you can follow me if you want, I guess?” I say. She turns back to gaze at her colony, not moving for several seconds. She twists left and right, but keeps her head focused on her home, her…family?

Again, I don’t understand ants.

“Only for moments. Then I work again. Colony needs food, and many more other colonies in my life than in lives before mine,” She says.

After trying briefly to understand what her jumble of words meant, I give up, shrug and head toward my open garage. She follows behind as quickly as her six legs can carry her.

******

Though the ground quakes with the human’s every footstep, she does not feel fear. Fear, as a human would feel it, was not a useful evolution for an ant, so it died millions of years ago.

A quirk in her brain has led her to do what no ant of her species had done before. She ventures away from her scavenging work in the field and seeks out the giant that had slaughtered so many competing colonies, only passing over her and her family by sheer, fortunate accident.

She doesn’t know that most humans hate insects. She doesn’t know hate. Millions of years of natural selection have honed her for her niche: a small powerhouse, barely an individual, but nonetheless indispensable, just like every one of her sisters.

She is a perfect worker, with no regard for herself, only the hardwired instinct to provide. Even now, far outside what she knows how to handle, her instincts demand she make use of her position, even at the risk of her own life.

And she will obey, because she is an ant.

******

“You uhh…” I drawl tiredly, pointing the water bottle toward the ant and tipping it a little, as if to offer it to her. She jumps back when she sees it.

“No. Drown,” The ant says. I am offended at first - strangely enough - before realizing I had basically offered her an Olympic-sized swimming pool to drink.

This already feels too awkward. She is following me to…what? Ask me not to destroy her hill? Negotiate with me? Threaten me? How does a parlay with an ant even work?

“Um…” I say, looking at the ant, as though she would offer some kind of support for her petition. She simply wiggles her antennae and turns sporadically. Perhaps she is uncomfortable being so far from her colony…but how can I be sure? I’m no entomologist. I’m just a guy, mowing his tiny lawn on an afternoon far too hot for this kind of work, and only getting hotter as the morning turns to afternoon.

“Uhh…look. I…I can wait until later…to…” I begin.

To do what? Annihilate her whole colony? It would be just one of half a dozen I’d hit with the bug spray; my yard was full of them. They’d all be easier to reach when the grass was shorter. The spray would be more likely to…

That train of thought is depressing. I brush my hand - cool and wet from holding the plastic bottle - across my forehead, savoring the brief feeling of relief.

She is still there, inches away from my foot, awaiting my answer. Feeling a bit more lucid after cooling down, I almost squish her with my foot when I recognize what she is, barely checking my instinct to keep her kind out of my home. It’s…problematic.

I sigh. This isn’t going to get any easier, and I really need to get back out there if I want to finish this without having a heat stroke.

“I won’t run over your hill right now. I do need to mow, though. The HOA is already sending me letters, so I can’t put it-” I pause when I remember who I’m talking to. An ant doesn’t care about a bunch of nosy small-time bureaucrats cruising the neighborhood looking for yards with a handful of weeds growing in the wrong place.

“Best I can do,” I say, hands out to my side. She doesn’t respond, except to wave her antennae at me, then turn to leave the garage and continue her work.

******

I had wanted to sit in the front driveway with a beer this evening, but the heat wouldn’t drop below the 90s until 1AM, so I lounge in my living room instead.

“Are you…man?” I repeat the ant’s words, wondering if I hallucinated them.

It had been such a simple, yet odd conversation. She had wanted to confirm who I was, then stop me from destroying her colony. Nothing more. The only other things she said were about words she didn’t know, as if to limit the conversation to only what she could comprehend.

The more I reflected, the more I couldn’t help but see it as a missed opportunity for her and her colony. I could have answered so many questions. I’m not a genius by any means, but I could have told her about the history of her lineage, explained why the big fiery thing in the sky always disappeared, or just let her know how many ants there were in the world. So many ants. Even just talking to me about ant things - like where to find more food, where the safest place was to build their colony, best dances to do with six legs - would have dramatically expanded her world, just by hearing the new words that came up in the conversation.

I try to think what it would be like to have our roles reversed. I imagine myself as a tireless worker, utterly devoted to queen and colony. My whole life would happen in half a year, and I would spend it in service.

And then I randomly meet a creature thousands of times bigger than me, with the power to reshape my whole world. I get the chance to ask this immense being a question. It stops to talk to me, and I ask it…

…not to kill me and everyone I love. Err…everyone that I’m bonded to. My siblings.

I’m not sure how I’d feel about that. I mean I get it, it makes perfect sense, but…damn. That’s gotta be like suddenly gaining one-way access to the ear of someone that doesn’t know they’re a god. All that knowledge and ability to look across spaces far too vast to ever traverse. That immense creature would be an amazing thing, if it didn’t dispassionately create poison rain at the sight of me.

A cold nose presses into my knees. I give my dog a pat, mumbling some kind of baby talk to her that even I don’t understand. With some amusement, I remark how odd it is that I sought out this animal, while there are others I’ll destroy remorselessly if they get too close to my territory.

The dog whines; she’s ready for her last potty time of the day.

“Alright, come on,” I say, slurring the words. She bounces and gives an open-mouthed canine smile, beating me to the back door by several seconds. As soon as the tiniest sliver of outside air comes through the gap, she presses her body into it and squeezes through like toothpaste from a tube. I groan and roll my eyes in half-hearted frustration, silently jealous of the dog’s ability to enjoy these simple pleasures.

As she bounds around the yard like an antelope, not even pretending to find a spot to do her business, I look up to the sky. With the full moon and the city’s ambient light, only the brightest stars are visible.

“Are you…a god?” I imagine myself saying, knowing the words won’t reach the ears of the ten-kilometer person I’m envisioning. That’s just too far for any human voice to travel, and anyways, they’re probably worried about the thing ten thousand times larger than them. I can’t help but wonder how far that chain of ignorant immensity stretches out.

Or maybe the things bigger than me are not worried. Maybe they’re…I don’t know. Maybe they feel something ten thousand times more complex than human emotions.

The dog pants as she comes to sit at my feet and stare up at me. She’s ready for bed.

“Me too, girl. Me too,” I say as I reach down to give her a scratch on the neck.

As we head back inside, I remember that I ran out of Ortho the last time I mowed the lawn.

I decide that’s a problem for another weekend.