Stupid to be Sorry
I like ants.
When I was thirteen my mother died. I was sent to Sydney to live with my Aunty and Uncle. It was awkward and hard for me there. I was sent to a high school but was a year younger than my classmates because I had been put up a class when I was younger. I was lonely but it could have been worse.
So I got as used to it as I could. Every afternoon I would get back from school and walk down the driveway to the house. My Uncle had a white speedboat sitting there. At the end of the driveway, right up against the house and sitting on the cement was an icecream container full of oil. It had something to do with the boat. The container was white.
One day I came home and there were large black ants crawling across the cement in front of the icecream container. I knew these ants. We called them Green Ants. They had a shiny bum that was a sort of green but also like oil on water with rainbow colours…but mostly green. If they bit you it hurt and caused a large itchy swollen patch wherever you were bitten.
I sat down this day and watched the ants crawl along doing their thing. I picked one up carefully by his back and deposited the poor little fellow in the oil container. I sat there and watched him struggle for a while until, finally the ant went under and I watched it slowly sink to its death, struggling all the way. I felt nothing for this little creature.
From that day on, I would stop every now and again and drown another little ant in that oil. I don’t know how many times I did it over the course of a year. Maybe twenty or more. Never felt a thing.
A lot has happened since that boy did those things. I feel as though I’ve grown up backwards. I have become in my age what I should have been in my youth. Now I go out of my way to step over small creatures on the footpath. Sometimes I find those cocoons. You know those cocoons that hang from the ends of tree branches or, sometimes right off the bark ? I pick them up and put them where I think they’ll be safe.
It’s probably really stupid to be sorry for hurting ants.