by Sarah Lawrence-Sandkvist
Colony (Samsa in Antipode)
When you first started to grow, we widened the hills’ openings. We gave you more to carry and celebrated the carrion you wrestled home in ever increasing bounties. Deceased grasshoppers instead of crickets, crusts not crumbs, once a massive unbitten waffle-fry the color of the sun.
But when your size neared the Queen’s, the gratitude changed to wariness, we gave you wide berths. Even as small as we are, we did not feel it, did not believe in smallness until your body loomed over us. Know that to be an ant is to be small, to be part of The Colony is to be an ant—this is what it is to be us.
You grew bigger, only bigger, went wild with confusion, lost in your own body as you were lost to us.
When your thorax finally burst, it sloughed away to reveal dull, fragile skin, four limbs instead of six, no antenna at all. Your body flew ever larger, taking our home with it as you exploded outward. You were raw and wrong, in that second hatching of yours. And you were suddenly young, younger than where you had come from.
Left behind, the limp hide of your once-self and our thousand scrambling, scattering bodies.
You learned how to scream when you heard it and found it coming from yourself.
None of them saw you until you began to understand the rules of your new body. You shadowed those of that new shape, the ant-knowledge of line-following living in you still, and you clothed yourself in the sound, feel, smell of others.
When you ate from our sidewalk banquet as you had always done, someone explained that you should not scavenge. It became clear that the life you lived before had become dangerous to this large, strange body. Your strength frightened them but it quickly diminished, the farther you went from us. Someone else once handed you a card that simply read, “You must be born again”. Their language was messy, revelatory, sublime, a nighthawk. To an ant, nothing is ineffable because nothing is effable, our language epigenetic.
When you could no longer hear us, no longer make the speech of little things, you sought us out in new forms, looked for human hills to bury yourself in. You formed a habit of sneaking into packed auditoriums, concert halls, arenas, somewhere you could once again feel part of a whole. Sports matches in particular gifted you with a new way home. Amongst river deltas of concrete cut by spilled beer and soda, we saw how you hungered. When ripples ran through the crowd, every one of your fragile muscles tensed and ecstasy built in the back of your throat until it was your turn to rise and yell with your seat mates, a fleeting return. Like all waves, the human one ran dry of energy eventually. You would be one of the few that attempted keep it alive until everyone was sitting, looking at you, wondering why you didn’t realize the moment had passed, the collective, though still present some form, looser than it had been a moment ago because you could not read those unwritten rules.
And when you saw traps laid, it opened an ache in you, for those little bodies never to home, and then for yourself, for your large body, alone. And you examined your hurts, knowing you’d hurt just the same. You were a colony in one.
Circles are never broken, only opened.
Some nights you dreamed of returning to the body you’d been born in, but it always went bad, too often turned into something halfway between your body then and your body now.
And on the best and hardest days, you went to parks—it didn’t matter which one because we are everywhere. You laid yourself in the grass and let us walk over you. You didn’t know us one by one, but you knew us all the same. And you splayed out your limbs in welcome, hoping against hope that in time we would be strong enough to carry you home again, that we’d widen the tunnel and give you a bed in the cool, sandy earth. And you’d know, you’d know its ground, it’s ceiling and walls, you’d know what it was to be and you’d give your body back to The Colony, let us feed from you until you were known by someone again, until you weren’t one thing anymore but in the stomach of every ant and an ant once more.
From the judge, Julie Marie Wade:
This flash story is poignant and profound, driven by the desire to understand another sentient being’s experience of the world. What does a human have in common with an ant? How do their ways of knowing and longing diverge? The metamorphosis depicted here is a deliberate homage to Kafka’s classic—signaled by the title parenthetical “(Samsa in Antipode),” which is to say Gregor Samsa in reverse. While Samsa is a man transformed into a beetle or cockroach, this speaker is an ant transformed into a man. I felt as sad and riveted reading this flash as I did first reading Kafka’s much-longer story. There is such care in thinking through the language: “To an ant, nothing is ineffable because nothing is effable” and “Circles are never broken, only opened.” And the physical appearance of ants on the page, climbing over the words—further evidence of the author’s inspiring attention to detail.
Author Sarah Lawrence-Sandkvist (she/her) is a fiction writer based out of Marquette, MI. She holds a degree in English from the University of Michigan and is currently pursuing an MFA at Northern Michigan University, where she also teaches and works as a reader for Passages North. She has previously taught in Sweden and written for various educational publishers. Her work can also be found in Modern Language Studies, Stoneboat Literary Journal, Furrow Magazine, and more.
Artist Basak Devrim Andreutti is a visual storyteller and oil painter with a BA in Communication. Having lived across three continents, she brings a global, human-centered perspective to her work. Her paintings explore memory, emotion, and the unspoken, translating inner states into visual form through layered, atmospheric compositions rooted in humanist values.
Gulf Stream Magazine 