Hello! I thought I'd treat you Wattpadders (is that the right term?) to a freebie from my currently available short story collection 'The Dimension Scales and Other Stories'.
This story is called 'Black Swarm' and has hints of Kafka (you'll see why!). The full collection can be found on Amazon (and all the other major eBook retailer sites). If you visit my profile, you should see the links there, or just search for the title and my name (Garry Abbott).
I hope you enjoy! Would love to hear any feedback.
Black Swarm
Mark and Steve surveyed the scene. Besides the refrigerator, wedged between the plywood partition, a mountain of displaced earth rose up and back to an unseen peak, and, at its base, black forms scurried.
‘That’s mental,’ said Steve as he kneeled down to get a closer look. ‘It could be massive.’
Having ants in the house was nothing new for Mark. Most days during late spring he would come downstairs to find them carrying away breadcrumbs, sugar grains and anything else they could lay their mandibles on. They never swarmed the kitchen counter; there would just be a few, scouting, gathering, circling. He killed them, of course. It was necessary. He usually let at least one get away, hoping it would leave a chemical trail behind, warning about the dangers of coming ‘topside’.
The displaced earth wasn’t unusual either. A fine dust would creep out onto the red tiles from somewhere below the fridge, like a collapsed sand dune at his feet. It was easily swept away or vacuumed up. He just presumed that however they were getting in, they brought some of the earth with them.
A smell had alerted him to the problem. One of those ‘something left in the fridge too long’ smells, like shoes after carrying bare feet on a hot day, with added notes of rotten milk. A smell that at a distance almost reminds you of food, a blue cheese perhaps, but as you get closer it twists and congeals within your receptors. It was also a phantasm of an odour. He had checked the fridge several times, taking care to clear out anything suspicious. He found an old plum behind the microwave and carefully picked it up, fearing maggoty contents. It was misshapen, like a squashed ping-pong ball, but it was solid, and didn’t reek. Eventually, in a desperate plea to locate the miasma, he resorted to checking behind the white goods, and that’s when he found it.
He’d barely moved the fridge a few centimetres, shuffling it awkwardly out of the fitted cubby hole, when he saw the mountain. By moving the fridge he had exposed one side of the structure which kept its coherency and revealed a cross-section of the thin mound. It had been compacted between the fridge and partition, and ants emerged from it. Not many, just a few scouts to figure out what the hell was going on, but Mark soon replaced the fridge, fearing a retaliation should the nest crumble. The unsavoury stench moved down his priority list.
‘Yeah. I mean, they don’t seem to come out of there much anymore, but there it is,’ Mark replied. He stood in the narrow galley kitchen, hands on hips, happy to be sharing his dilemma with his friend Steve.
‘How far back does it go? It could go under the house. This might just be an annex,’ said Steve, who had returned to his full height.
‘No idea. But in my mind, we pull out the fridge, get the Dyson, suck it up and spray the little bastards as they pour out.’
Mark shared the house with his girlfriend Susan who was away for the weekend visiting relatives in darkest Durham. Mark had used the opportunity to invite Steve for some ‘man-time’ as he and Susan used to call it. Left to his own devices, Mark would have spent the weekend alone playing games, watching films, but Susan had been firm with him, responsible as she felt for his lack of social life.
