story 6/16

i noticed them one day, one of countless days, riding bikes from our house to japanese school. en route, my sister and i always had to slowly pump the peddles of our bikes up the sloping, red dirt path, through the field of wedelia, on the way to the concrete bridge across the irrigation canal. i guess going slow-mo up the toughest part of the hill, that's when i spotted it.

it was an ant graveyard.

ants were common on the path. even when we weren't really looking, we'd spot a line or two, or sometimes even individual ants who had strayed and were lost. but i had never seen (or rather, i had never noticed) a graveyard.

it was located not far away from an actual ant hole. it was a small area, but probably for ants, it was like an arlington national cemetary. the corpses of countless ants littered the area, looking like some indistinct brown moss or fur on the ground. in fact, that's what i thought it was, at first, until closer inspection revealed insect limbs or antennae, pointing lifelessly up to the sky.

i pointed it out to my sister. "look," i said. "an ant graveyard."

my sister wasn't squeamish about things like that. she got off her bike, and crouched down beside me to take a closer look.

"why do they make that?" she asked, after a few moments.

"i don't know," i muttered. "i didn't even know they did stuff like this until now."

there were other questions i had, and i'm sure my sister had some too. and it would have been cool to catch some living ants carrying a fallen comrade over to the graveyard, or perhaps even visiting it- i could imagine ants touching their antennae together like priests doing a gassho. but i suddenly felt the pull of our schedule. we had to be at the portables on the far end of the high school campus where japanese school was held by 3, and we had a ways to go still. so i got on my bike, and urged my sister to do the same.

but the ants remained on my mind.

i thought idly how much we- my sister and i- were like ants. i was not a leader or explorer by any means. i just followed a route that had been established by my brother long ago, when he had guided me from school to home to japanese school and back. and now, i was guiding my sister along that same route. instead of the chemical trails that ants used, we followed well-worn paths, carved out from the treads of our bicycles, and the bicycles of maybe a dozen or so kids besides us. and we ran on these paths, day in and day out, in a fixed and endless pattern.

we never strayed (at least not yet). we had a schedule to keep, after all.

but the ant graveyard gave me pause. was that a place of rest, earned after following paths throughout a life of hard labor? i wasn't sure if that thought gave me comfort or dread.

one thing was certain: if an ant strayed or got lost, then it probably just died somewhere alone. probably hidden away, but in any case, obscure. a kid like me could probably spot an ant graveyard, but no one would ever notice the end of an individual ant, lost upon some untracked and untold adventure.