Bit-sized, cowering,
closed in the corner of a small white case, the lash-like echoes of scrabbling insects
layered around me like a shifting wind in my face– was that what this was, my face,
that saw a column of red ants pour in flanked by spiders on bowed legs like
crutches?. The box must have been set down in a garden: there was a gleam of
sky in the banks of my attackers’ eyes. Love’s
way up there but that’s no saving grace. Into a stark white angle I was pressed.
Dust and mites and grit clung to the legs of my oppressors. Maybe it was as
good a setting as I was going to get for an ending. Better than a long slow maiming,
or a stupid accident. I would give them
what I had left to give, a ceremonial defense. But then in the opening of the
box my brother’s huge pale hand appeared, the faint red hairs on his knuckles. He mouthed,
It’s just a dream. Was I the incredible shrinking human condition, overrun, unsaveable, so small? They cornered me. My antennae flattened. I
saw my brother’s sweat-flat hair. His fingertips
traced through the horde , he was feeling for me, his monstrous powerful digits
scattering the goons, but crushing me too:
he couldn’t repel them without doing me in, the tide must turn too late.
And then I was opened out on my back. The mob was on me in an instant.