Walter

STOMPING THE CASTLE ANTS

Benjamin had been playing in the backyard since early that beautiful Saturday morning.

He had started building castles in the sandbox with his small pail and shovel, making roads between them that ran every way across the sand. He spent an hour carefully placing twigs and leaves along the makeshift roadways.

Standing back, he stood on a corner of the sandbox and took time to admire his handiwork.

This must be a pretty good look of how things look like from up above, like the birds see things, he thought. Towers of sand for buildings and rocks for houses, twigs were trees and leaves were bushes.

He had even brought out some of his toy cars and placed them along the roads. He giggled as he carefully placed one into the side of a tower and said, "That's what ya get fer driving too fast, Mr. Race car driver."

Having looked over his city of sand and twigs, he realized something was missing. "Aha!" he exclaimed and grabbing his blue pail, ran to the side of the house were an anthill resided. "My city can't be a real city, unless I gots peoples in them."

"Today's you are people in my grand city, not ants," he said while trying to scoop as many as he could and place them into the pail. About half the ants made it into the pail as the other half either fell or decided they would crawl atop Benjamin and explore this thing removing them from their home.

After a while his pail as well as himself, was full of ants.

"He he he," he giggled. "You's are tickling me, no fair, there's more of you's then me's."

He stood and tried to shake as many as he could off himself, brushing them from his legs and arms as they tried to remain on him.

One ant didn't like the fact that this new mountain was shaking and trying to throw him off, so it bit down into the ground in an attempt to keep from being thrown off.

"Ouch," said Benjamin as he quickly swiped at the ant that had bit him.

"No biting and that goes double fer all of you's too. Or I'll pee on yur hill and yu'll have a pool in yur living room. Ewwww... A smelly pee pool yur friends will say, and they won't want to play with you neither. So there," he said as he stuck out his tongue at the anthill and grabbed his pail.

He wandered back to the sandbox and began dispersing his little ant humans about his sand city. Some ants landed on his hand when he turned the pail over to dump them.

"Oh no ya don't," he said and blew on the ants that had landed on him. A few quick breaths and all his little humans had landed in the city and were beginning to explore their new surroundings.

Standing on the corner again, he admired his now busy city. The ants scurried around the cars or explored the tracks. A few had even begun to dig out the top of one of his castles.

My grand city, he thought as the sun came out and spread his shadow across the sandbox.

Staring at his shadow, he noticed that part of it was the branches from the tree behind him. It distorted his shadow to look like one of the monsters he had seen on the TV late one night when he hadn't been able to fall asleep.

His older brothers had been watching an old black and white monster movie and told him he could stay and watch for a bit. It was ok they said, because mom and dad were out with friends and they wouldn't tell them he'd stayed up late.

It wasn't a scary movie, he had liked it when the big lizard has gotten angry and started destroying the city by spitting fire on everything. He didn't know how it ended because he'd fallen asleep on his brother's lap and had woken the next morning in his bed.