THE TOY COP
Prologue
An ant's universe, magnified. If you hunker down, you will see that which had previously been beneath your notice. Move your foot and make way for the ant moving toward you. Peer closer at the tundra of the ant.
The insect progresses with a quick, herky-jerky gait as if in a speeded up silent film. This is because the firm, hard ground on which we humans tread is an endless, shifting plateau of driveway-sized gravel. To our little formic friend, twigs are fallen redwoods, pine needles are logs that roll underfoot, weeds are tubular skyscrapers.
It has just skittered up a rock the size of a grave marker but it is a modest hill to this Lilliputian soldier. Once atop the flat summit, the ant's antennae rotate lopsidedly, perhaps out of trepidation. It may be that it senses that not all is quite right in its gargantuan world.
It has now climbed down the stone, lightly skimming over the deep spongey moss, into a bed of sand particles that its six busy feet kick away. It then stops, as if uncertain how to proceed.
Abruptly, the ant's central nervous system turns on its host body. It staggers, lands on its back, the abdomen curls toward the thorax, dying on the equivalent of its shoulders. A leg or two twitches, then it is forever still.
Presently, the ant is joined by a fellow worker whose job it is to forage. Tentatively touching its dead companion with its antennae and detecting no signs of life, it immediately sets to work. Opening powerful mandibles, the forager effortlessly and gently lifts its fallen companion overhead and begins a new, near-microbial odyssey.
The extra burden on our little undertaker is discernible only by the increased jerkiness in its step. The trek will not be easy. But it makes no more difference to the quick as to the dead.
It must rely on its own taste-trail to lead it back to its hive but other, strange tastes seem to confound its sense. The tactile one that also detects vibrations is, too, confused by a rare and sudden earthquake. Countless hundreds of sand grains bombard the ant's armor. A pine needle lands on its thorax but the powerful insect simply climbs out from under it. Then, the quake is suddenly over. In an ant's universe, such a seemingly tectonic upheaval can be caused by a single falling human body.
After a moment of stillness, the ant then makes its way across the strange, silent landscape. It skitters obliviously around seemingly abandoned anthills. Indeed, it meanders through a virtual necropolis of such mounds that stand crumbling but defiant. The ant never ponders if its own hive will be similarly defunct. The atavistic instinct to go home supercedes any other imperative.
A new obstacle- an oval monolith tilted at an angle. Even at forty-five degrees, it is still much too high for the dwarfed ant to look up at and appreciate. It is an obstacle to circumvent. Nothing more.
A formic furlong away, there is yet an identical identical monolith. As with the other, it is deeply grooved, as if embossed with a gigantic alien script. Rocks, the very type on which the ant treads, are imbedded in its face.
If the beleaguered ant cared to look, it would've noted an infinite olive-drab mountain range extending behind each monolith. The enormous black cartouches block the taste trail so it simply goes around them, blindly expecting to pick up its markers.
Our ant and its dead companion are now bowled over by hurricane-force winds from above. The corpse is ripped from the living ant's jaws as if propelled and it takes many chaotic moments for the storm to die down before the drone can reacquire its charge.
Another tremor, much stronger than the first, followed by lighter ones, a swift series of aftershocks. It is the arrival of the white giants from above. The living ant is no more concerned about the white giants' task than they are of the ant's.
If you would look beyond the single-minded ant, you would see dozens, hundreds of ants, lying in their fetal death positions at the feet of their anthills. It is as if a tiny General Sherman and his Union Army had decimated their Atlanta. Focus on the black monoliths, the infinite olive-drab mountain ranges extending behind each, to the fallen soldier that is even now being probed, lifted and carried away by the white gods from above.
So much time for the dead and so little for the living.
Enjoy! Let me know what you think. My email address is Crawman2@Juno.com
(Dugway Testing Facility, Dugway, Utah, three years ago)