The 10 Scariest Sentences in This New York Times Story About Ants
Via Jess Zimmerman, a tale of modern grief and horror. There’s a truly harrowing photo up top if you choose to click through, and if you don’t, here are the highlights:
1. “Outside, dead ants began pooling around the base of the house in heaps so high that they looked like discarded coffee grounds.”
2. “(It’s common in Texas these days for a person who is shown one of these heaps of dead ants to take several seconds to realize that the solid surface he or she is scanning for ants actually is the ants.)”
3. “Mike laid out poison, generating more heaps of dead ants. But new ants merely used those dead ants as a bridge over the poison and kept streaming inside.”
4. “With crazy ants, so many will stream inside a device that they form a single, squirming mass that completes a circuit and shorts it.”
5. “Edward LeBrun, an ecologist at the University of Texas at Austin who has been studying the area, believes a single “supercolony” of crazy ants occupies as many as 4,200 acres in Iowa Colony and is spreading 200 meters a year in all directions.”
6. “Dead ants puddled under the doorframe and behind the tires of Melvin’s Camry — thick, tapering drifts of them, two or three feet across, like sawdust or snow.”
7. “Wherever they pointed, there were ants: under the door of a microwave oven, crawling out of the electrical outlets, heaped in the flower beds where I mistook them for fresh topsoil.”
8. “Insects, Kolnai wrote, unsettle us, existentially speaking, because they ‘arouse generally the impression of life caught up in a senseless, formless surging.’”
9. “’There were literally billions of them,’ he said.”
10. “I kept instinctively taking a step back from some distressing concentration of ants, only to remember that I was standing in the center of an exponentially larger concentration of ants.”