Ants in my pants

Mostly, I’m a reasonable sort of guy. Hardly a ruthless mass murderer at all, so if they’d just been content to leave an occasional pile of sand on my driveway, I could’ve turned a blind eye. But then they violated my geranium pot. War followed.

Ants. They’re like uninvited relatives who come to stay. If you don’t pour boiling water on them straight away, they come back with more family members and snack on your chocolate biscuits.

Usually, ants don’t annoy me. If I see a lone one in my house, I’ll take the time to relocate him outside unharmed. That makes me feel good because God, karma and my wife, will notice I’ve saved a life and elevate me closer to sainthood. But if I see a whole bunch milling around in my pantry, I’ll kill them, because that’s how karma works. These harmless creatures obviously did something terrible in a previous life, so I’m merely balancing out the injustice of the universe.

But some of these ants are mean. They’ve grown up in the rough part of the colony and learnt to laugh in the face of death and destruction. They’re tiny, brown and have clearly undertaken extensive SAS training.

Each morning I see their defiant sand piles outside on my pavers. The battle-hardened survivors establish these forward attack camps following my ant bait offensive the day before. These ants won’t stop, even in the face of death.

While they temporarily vanish during wet weather (much like the postman), the rest of the time they relentlessly advance towards my house. And they mostly succeed in getting in. I’ve no idea how.

I’ve tried tracing their trails back from the maple syrup blob party behind my toaster, but it leads me nowhere. The trail either disappears under the sink, or leads to another blob of something that’s died in a window track.

I’ve lined the perimeter of my house with killer surface spray, scattered minefields of anti-ant granules around their likely entrance points, and poured toxic dust directly down their nest holes. They still don’t get the message. For highly intelligent, socially complex creatures, they’re rubbish at taking a hint.

To replace their deceased, they simply fly in reinforcements. Winged ants. I’ve watched a squadron descend onto my lawn. After being greeted by a ground crew of soldier ants, they are hurried off to a welcome summit being hosted under my geranium pot.

I lifted the pot for a peek. There were squillions of them forming a writhing mass of legs, eggs, wings and queens. It was a hedonistic display of ant supremacy in which they openly flaunted their abundance and exoskeleton physique.

It was disgusting and fascinating all at the same time. Still, it was my universal karmic duty to show them who wore the pants without ants around here, so I authorised their demise. I brought out my weapon of mist destruction.

Fly spray is not a particularly satisfying weapon to use. The spray just blows the little insects away. One squirt and they’re gone, puffed away in a second. It’s a bit of an anticlimax, most probably for the ants, too.

I stood surveying the battle zone for a while, pondering the meaning of an ant’s life and wondering if I’d been a little harsh in their punishment. They were outside my home, after all, and even had the decency to hide under my geranium display. Maybe I should declare the garden a neutral zone?

That’s when I felt it. A tiny nip on my ankle, followed quickly by another. One little diehard had not only survived my killer spray onslaught, but was launching a counterattack.

I flicked him off in shock and realised his mate was halfway up my other leg. Then four suicide biters attacked my arm. I quickly scanned the rest of my body. They were all over me. I’d been invaded.

I rushed inside, peeled off my clothes and shook them vigorously. I brushed myself down, but still wasn’t satisfied. I knew they had hiding places I couldn’t see, so I hit the shower and washed myself from head to toe. By the time I had emerged from the bathroom, the maple syrup group had moved to the chocolate biscuit crumbs by the kettle and, by the looks of it, the geranium massacre survivors had joined them, too. They were taunting me, but I knew my killing spree was over. I’d had enough. It was time for a new tactic.

I laid down a paper towel, dropped a dollop of honey onto its centre, and watched the ants crawl towards it. The fools. Their fate was in my hands. I could have flushed them away down the toilet in an act of sweet revenge. But I didn’t. I carefully placed the towel outside. The universe smiled upon me. Karma acknowledged my act of goodwill and God gave me a cheery slap on the back. Even my wife was pleased.

“Good! You’re cleaning up your mess in the kitchen at last,” she said. “No wonder we get ants!”

Dave Nicholson lives in Western Australia, with his wife, three kids and four million ants. When he’s not writing, he’s probably not cleaning up the mess in the kitchen either.