Liz woke up that morning a bit later than usual. The early Autumn sun was already shining on her face in a broken pattern through the slits of the Venitian shutter. She stretched her arms and let out a muffled yawn. Though weary, she still looked pretty even as she strained her puffy eyes open. She had wept a lot the previous night. She licked her lips, moistening them, and felt something grainy and sweet rolling between her tongue and lower lip. A tiny crystal of sugar. How odd, she thought. This wasn't the first time it was happening.
The glass wind-chime on her tall French-window swayed in a gentle breeze that swept in, filling the room with a familiar tingling, that had for quite some time now, ceased to be the music that it once had been to her ears. But still there was that certain soothing quality to it that had comforted her during these days of loneliness and worrying. It always brought back to her the memories of better days; and better days, there were many. The days when David woke her up with minty fresh kisses right after he had brushed his teeth and had his cup of morning coffee. There was always a faint minty sweet undertone to his morning kisses and she had reached a point where she could no longer wake up without them.
Then it happened. She could have sworn that he was in his study. He always used to lock himself up in that cluttered insect-house of his that he called his study and would stay in there lost in his research for hours on end. So, whenever he was not seen for long hours, she took it for granted that he was somewhere in that study, clad in that long lab-coat of his, arching over the old microscope perhaps, lost in one of his microscopic worlds.
But on that particular day however, she knew that something was wrong when there was no sign of him way past dinner-time. They always made it a point to dine together, and in their three years of married life, they had never missed out on it; save on the very few occasions when one of them had been out of town. She did not want to disturb his work for she knew of the ardent love he had for his subject - Entomology. In fact so popular was his passion that his fellow-scientists called him the insect-man.
The grandfather-clock in their expansive dining hall struck, announcing the passing of the day, and Liz could wait no more.
She knocked at his door, gently first, and then harder, as there was no answer. She sighed and rested her palm on the handle and the door creaked open a bit. She peered in.
"David?... Helloooo?"
Her eyes wandered about in the cluttered room filled with glass boxes and jars in which he kept all sorts insects, termite colonies, and ant colonies. She had gotten used to the insects by now and they no longer freaked her out. She even assisted him once in a while to rearrange the settings inside his study and to move the heavy racks with the glass boxes from one corner of the room to another. Sometimes for subjecting them to more sunlight and sometimes just to make space for more jars and boxes. She used to tell him that she would be alright as long as there aren't any of his creepy-crawlies running about freely and taking a plunge into her soup.
"David? Darling, are you there?"
There was no answer. He was nowhere to be seen. The window was wide open and there was broken glass, from a beaker perhaps, all over the floor and some sort of gooey cobalt blue substance which was spilt everywhere.
It had been a week now since that horrid night. She had called up his friends, relatives, and reported to the police - not necessarily in that order - over the span of the next few hours after David's disappearance. No information regarding his whereabouts had presented itself. The Gendarmerie had searched his study thoroughly, but could not find anything significant. They had sent samples of the blue substance to Paris for analysis and the lab report that followed said that the substance was nothing but a compound of cobalt and chlorine that is commonly found "as an indicator of dryness in silica gel beads used as a desiccant."
Liz and David loved each other deeply. On the previous night, Liz had cried herself to sleep, worried sick about her husband. And on this day, as she lay in bed inspecting the grain of sugar that she found on her lower lip, she missed his minty-sweet morning kisses more than ever.
The phone rang, startling her out of her trip down memory lane. She picked it up and said hello. The voice on the other end was coarse and heavily accented
"May I speak to Mrs. Elizabeth Laroche?"
"Yes. That would be me", she said.
"This is inspector Anthony Chevalier from the police headquarters", said the coarse voice on the other end.
"Is there any news of my husband?" Liz asked, her heart pounding hard.
"I am afraid not, madame" said Inspector Chavalier in a tone that sounded genuinely remorseful for having to disappoint Mrs. Laroche. "At least not anything of great significance. However, we have tracked your husband's online activities on the days prior to his disappearance and we seem to have found something that you may find interesting."
Liz did not say anything but waited for the inspector to continue.
"Was your husband planning on writing fiction?", asked the inspector.
"No... not that I know of" Liz said with a pause in between.
"Le Science fiction, perhaps?"
"He had never said anything along those lines. He usually tells me everything. At least, that is what I believe."
"We have found a secret blog of your husband", continued the inspector, "which he seems to have started recently. I don't think he had any intention to make the blog public. In this blog, he had written just one chapter of what seems to us like a ...roman de science fiction... science fiction novel. We thought you might want to read it too"
"Yes!... Yes of course", Liz exclaimed.
"You might want to write this down. The URL is lafourmiliere.blogspot.com"
Liz quickly grabbed a pen and started writing on the back cover of a magazine that lay next to the phone
"L-A-F-O-U-R-M-I-L-I-E-R-E", the officer spelt it out for her "It means... 'ant hill'"
"The blog was created using his official e-mail id, which is why we could track it so easily, but we had no choice left but to hack into it. The password is 'forever_liz'. You will have to type it in to be able to read the blog"
The inspector thought he heard a whimper at the other end when he said this.
A few minutes later, Liz was seated at her desk and on the screen of her computer was her husband's blog-page. The title read 'La Fourmiliere - The ant-hill diaries.'
Liz remembered that during the recent years, David was getting increasingly interested in Myrmecology, the branch of Entomology that dealt with the scientific study of ants. Come to think of it, she thought, he was always interested in ants. His favorite bedtime story as a child had been 'The Ant and the Grasshopper".
She also remembered him telling her, during one of their tea-time conversations, his cup of camomile on his right hand. "You know something, Liz. Ants have the most ideal form of society. The solutions to almost every known human problem can be sought out by studying them. And what could be more fortunate than being a male ant? They have nothing to do in life except eat and mate"
"You are kidding me, right honey?", Liz said giggling "Isn't it the males that do all the foraging and food-collecting?"
"No, no, no, ma chère", David said. "The life of an ant starts from an egg. If the egg has been fertilized, the progeny will be female; if not, it will be male. A fairly large ant colony consists mostly of sterile wingless females that act as workers and soldiers. There are only very few fertile males in a colony and we call them drones. Then there are one or, contrary to what most people believe, more fertile females that we call queens."
This, however, was news to Liz.
David went on. "The winged drones emerge from their pupae along with the breeding females and their only duties in the colony are staying well fed and having a lot of sex", he said with a broad grin, flaunting that dimple on his left cheek that Liz had been in love with from the day they first met.
Elizabeth Laroche stayed lost in memories before her computer screen for a minute or two, and she hadn't noticed that she was smiling. Then she suddenly snapped back to reality. She had to know what was in her husband's blog.
The 'About me' section of the author said 'David Laroche - Entomologist and a very dedicated husband'
There was just one blog entry and it was made on the night before his mysterious disappearance.
Day-1 with the Leaf-cutters
I hadn't yet fully gotten accustomed to my newly acquired parts and the senses that came with them. I find especially the twin antennae to be a pair of fairly complicated contraptions. I had never before in my life had to rely so much on my sense of smell. My antennae helped me sense not only the intensity of scents, but also the direction of them - two parameters I would have to depend heavily on during my life as a leaf-cutter ant.
The pheromone communication, however, came naturally to me. I doubt if ants have much of a free will when it comes to this as most of these chemicals are produced instinctively. It is as though there was only one solution to the problem at hand and that known solution was always one pheromone or another. So, everytime the problem presented itself, the respective gland would produce the respective pheromone automatically. Just the way you close your eyes when someone sprinkles water on your face. It is my pheromone glands that i will have to be thankful to for helping me get through the inspection phase and pass myself off as a fellow-ant.
As soon as I was spotted in the vicinity of the colony, two of the guards came running to me, which I should confess here, quite scared the life out of me. It is quite an intimidating experience when you yourself are just about the size of an ant. I could now distinctively tell one ant from another. It helps when they have faces as large as your own. There was this stout, tough looking guard who immediately started tapping me all over my face with her(let me remind you that all worker and soldier ants are sterile females) antennae while her scrawny side-kick was pacing all around me and touching me at places I would rather she hadn't.
In that moment of horror, i felt all my senses getting suspended and myself going numb, all prepared to get shredded alive. I had no idea what to do, but in that very moment of horror, to my relief, my glands knew exactly which pheromones to produce. The chemicals that I secreted made two inspectors, if I may so call them, act as though I was one of their very few fertile males and they proceeded to escort me into the colony. It was wonderful how well I could communicate with them without a single word being spoken. But to write about ant-instincts in human words is as impossible as trying to explain human emotions using pheromones and a pair of antennae.
It was however too early for me to venture into the colony. Moreover, it was getting to be dinner-time with Liz, and I wouldn't miss out on that even if the fate of the whole colony depended on it. I will always be more human than ant that way, I decided. But when I tried to turn around and walk away, the guards wouldn't let me. Stouty, as I had begun to call her, grabbed hold of one of my hind-limbs, the left one I think, between her pincers while Scrawny started pushing me from the side turning me around in the other direction.
My first impulse was to scream out to Liz at the top of my voice but decided not to as I did not have much of what I could call a voice to begin with. After struggling in vain for the better part of what seemed like eternity, I realized that I had no choice but to let myself be led to the colony. Thus, weary from all the shoving and pushing, and dejected at heart, I marched on calmly with the guards. Scrawny leading the way and Stouty right behind me making sure I did not give them the slip.
Soon I would be in my cocoon of a chamber inside the ant-colony; feasting on honey-dew, fresh fungi, and juicy insect parts, and having sex with females five times my size. All of which would seem like a fair deal to you all, but what has to be known here is the fact that while a queen can live up to 30 years, and a worker from 2 to 3 years, males survive only a few weeks. How unfair can nature be? But this was also the reason why so much of care was being taken to see to it that I arrived at the colony safe and sound. They wouldn't want me to miss my moments of mid-air love-making with their queen.
It was then that the term mid-air caught my attention. All this while it hadn't occurred to me that I too, like every other male ant, was winged, and could fly away at will. Without a moment's hesitation I flapped my wings as fast as I could and buzzed right out of the glass tank without caring to glance back. Flying wasn't as easy and delightful as I had expected it to be. It was like lifting a heavy weight above your head and keeping it there. After a while the muscles around the part where your wing is connected to your body aches just the way your shoulder would. I suddenly felt a burning pain on my right rear limb and I turned my head to see, to my shock and surprise, Stouty holding on to my limb and gnawing at it in a mad frenzy.
I tried to shake her off, but she held on like the leaf-cutter ant that she proudly was. I had no choice but to fly with her into the bottle of the compound that would turn me back into a human. The lid of the bottle was so designed that it would open on a hinge in only one direction, inwards at that, and that too with the slightest of pressure applied. The reason for this was that the compound is highly unstable and when exposed to atmospheric air, will quickly oxidize into an unknown blue compound that can be detected by known measures only to be something vaguely similar to Cobalt chloride. Also it would not turn me back into human once this happened. Once inside the bottle, I got transformed back rather quickly into my former charming two-legged self and came right out breaking the bottle.
On the little toe of my right foot, Stouty, who did not seem very stout anymore, was still clinging on tight, not knowing what else to do now. I picked her up and placed her back in the glass box saying "See you tomorrow, tough girl. Someday you will make your queen proud. But right now it is din-din time for daddy"
Thus ended the first and only post in David's blog
What if David could actually, by means of a concoction perhaps, turn himself into an ant? What if he did turn himself into an ant again the next day? What if all that blue substance that was found splattered over the floor with the glass pieces had actually been the compound that could have turned him back to human? Maybe a wind had overturned the bottle. Maybe it got oxidized and lost its properties. What if David is still in his room, in one of his ant colonies? If he is, how could one tell him from the millions of other ants?
All these questions rushed through Elizabeth's mind. Then she dismissed them as being utterly ridiculous and decided that she wouldn't let emotional vulnerability betray her sanity. She thought however that it would have turned out to be an interesting and informative piece of fiction, had David finished writing it. Something that would have brought Myrmecology within the layman's grasp. She let out a sigh as she logged out from David's blogger account
Later... much later, as the night was at its darkest, Elizabeth Laroche lay fast asleep in her bed, worn out by another day of brooding. In the blue moonlight flowing in through the gaps between the venetian shutter, something small glinted as it crawled up Liz's cheek. A small winged ant holding what looked in the moonlight, like a minuscule diamond, or a dew droplet perhaps, climbed on to Liz's lower lip. He placed the crystal of sugar carefully in one corner of her lips. Then he flew up a bit and alighted on top of her nose where he stood still for a moment as if regarding her. His head tilted a bit first to one side and then to the other. Somewhere inside his tiny heart, he felt a deep- rooted pain. A pain that made him realize that he didn't need a heart the size of a human fist to feel what he was feeling for her right then. A faint smile spread across her lips as a distant dream played in her subconscious mind. The little winged ant fluttered his wings and flew into the dark night outside. Someday this winged ant would thus fly into the darkness and would never be seen again; but on every morning till then, Liz would wake up with a hint of sweetness about her lips.
The glass wind-chime on her tall French-window swayed in a gentle breeze that swept in, filling the room with a familiar tingling, that had for quite some time now, ceased to be the music that it once had been to her ears. But still there was that certain soothing quality to it that had comforted her during these days of loneliness and worrying. It always brought back to her the memories of better days; and better days, there were many. The days when David woke her up with minty fresh kisses right after he had brushed his teeth and had his cup of morning coffee. There was always a faint minty sweet undertone to his morning kisses and she had reached a point where she could no longer wake up without them.
Then it happened. She could have sworn that he was in his study. He always used to lock himself up in that cluttered insect-house of his that he called his study and would stay in there lost in his research for hours on end. So, whenever he was not seen for long hours, she took it for granted that he was somewhere in that study, clad in that long lab-coat of his, arching over the old microscope perhaps, lost in one of his microscopic worlds.
But on that particular day however, she knew that something was wrong when there was no sign of him way past dinner-time. They always made it a point to dine together, and in their three years of married life, they had never missed out on it; save on the very few occasions when one of them had been out of town. She did not want to disturb his work for she knew of the ardent love he had for his subject - Entomology. In fact so popular was his passion that his fellow-scientists called him the insect-man.
The grandfather-clock in their expansive dining hall struck, announcing the passing of the day, and Liz could wait no more.
She knocked at his door, gently first, and then harder, as there was no answer. She sighed and rested her palm on the handle and the door creaked open a bit. She peered in.
"David?... Helloooo?"
Her eyes wandered about in the cluttered room filled with glass boxes and jars in which he kept all sorts insects, termite colonies, and ant colonies. She had gotten used to the insects by now and they no longer freaked her out. She even assisted him once in a while to rearrange the settings inside his study and to move the heavy racks with the glass boxes from one corner of the room to another. Sometimes for subjecting them to more sunlight and sometimes just to make space for more jars and boxes. She used to tell him that she would be alright as long as there aren't any of his creepy-crawlies running about freely and taking a plunge into her soup.
"David? Darling, are you there?"
There was no answer. He was nowhere to be seen. The window was wide open and there was broken glass, from a beaker perhaps, all over the floor and some sort of gooey cobalt blue substance which was spilt everywhere.
It had been a week now since that horrid night. She had called up his friends, relatives, and reported to the police - not necessarily in that order - over the span of the next few hours after David's disappearance. No information regarding his whereabouts had presented itself. The Gendarmerie had searched his study thoroughly, but could not find anything significant. They had sent samples of the blue substance to Paris for analysis and the lab report that followed said that the substance was nothing but a compound of cobalt and chlorine that is commonly found "as an indicator of dryness in silica gel beads used as a desiccant."
Liz and David loved each other deeply. On the previous night, Liz had cried herself to sleep, worried sick about her husband. And on this day, as she lay in bed inspecting the grain of sugar that she found on her lower lip, she missed his minty-sweet morning kisses more than ever.
The phone rang, startling her out of her trip down memory lane. She picked it up and said hello. The voice on the other end was coarse and heavily accented
"May I speak to Mrs. Elizabeth Laroche?"
"Yes. That would be me", she said.
"This is inspector Anthony Chevalier from the police headquarters", said the coarse voice on the other end.
"Is there any news of my husband?" Liz asked, her heart pounding hard.
"I am afraid not, madame" said Inspector Chavalier in a tone that sounded genuinely remorseful for having to disappoint Mrs. Laroche. "At least not anything of great significance. However, we have tracked your husband's online activities on the days prior to his disappearance and we seem to have found something that you may find interesting."
Liz did not say anything but waited for the inspector to continue.
"Was your husband planning on writing fiction?", asked the inspector.
"No... not that I know of" Liz said with a pause in between.
"Le Science fiction, perhaps?"
"He had never said anything along those lines. He usually tells me everything. At least, that is what I believe."
"We have found a secret blog of your husband", continued the inspector, "which he seems to have started recently. I don't think he had any intention to make the blog public. In this blog, he had written just one chapter of what seems to us like a ...roman de science fiction... science fiction novel. We thought you might want to read it too"
"Yes!... Yes of course", Liz exclaimed.
"You might want to write this down. The URL is lafourmiliere.blogspot.com"
Liz quickly grabbed a pen and started writing on the back cover of a magazine that lay next to the phone
"L-A-F-O-U-R-M-I-L-I-E-R-E", the officer spelt it out for her "It means... 'ant hill'"
"The blog was created using his official e-mail id, which is why we could track it so easily, but we had no choice left but to hack into it. The password is 'forever_liz'. You will have to type it in to be able to read the blog"
The inspector thought he heard a whimper at the other end when he said this.
A few minutes later, Liz was seated at her desk and on the screen of her computer was her husband's blog-page. The title read 'La Fourmiliere - The ant-hill diaries.'
Liz remembered that during the recent years, David was getting increasingly interested in Myrmecology, the branch of Entomology that dealt with the scientific study of ants. Come to think of it, she thought, he was always interested in ants. His favorite bedtime story as a child had been 'The Ant and the Grasshopper".
She also remembered him telling her, during one of their tea-time conversations, his cup of camomile on his right hand. "You know something, Liz. Ants have the most ideal form of society. The solutions to almost every known human problem can be sought out by studying them. And what could be more fortunate than being a male ant? They have nothing to do in life except eat and mate"
"You are kidding me, right honey?", Liz said giggling "Isn't it the males that do all the foraging and food-collecting?"
"No, no, no, ma chère", David said. "The life of an ant starts from an egg. If the egg has been fertilized, the progeny will be female; if not, it will be male. A fairly large ant colony consists mostly of sterile wingless females that act as workers and soldiers. There are only very few fertile males in a colony and we call them drones. Then there are one or, contrary to what most people believe, more fertile females that we call queens."
This, however, was news to Liz.
David went on. "The winged drones emerge from their pupae along with the breeding females and their only duties in the colony are staying well fed and having a lot of sex", he said with a broad grin, flaunting that dimple on his left cheek that Liz had been in love with from the day they first met.
Elizabeth Laroche stayed lost in memories before her computer screen for a minute or two, and she hadn't noticed that she was smiling. Then she suddenly snapped back to reality. She had to know what was in her husband's blog.
The 'About me' section of the author said 'David Laroche - Entomologist and a very dedicated husband'
There was just one blog entry and it was made on the night before his mysterious disappearance.
Day-1 with the Leaf-cutters
I hadn't yet fully gotten accustomed to my newly acquired parts and the senses that came with them. I find especially the twin antennae to be a pair of fairly complicated contraptions. I had never before in my life had to rely so much on my sense of smell. My antennae helped me sense not only the intensity of scents, but also the direction of them - two parameters I would have to depend heavily on during my life as a leaf-cutter ant.
The pheromone communication, however, came naturally to me. I doubt if ants have much of a free will when it comes to this as most of these chemicals are produced instinctively. It is as though there was only one solution to the problem at hand and that known solution was always one pheromone or another. So, everytime the problem presented itself, the respective gland would produce the respective pheromone automatically. Just the way you close your eyes when someone sprinkles water on your face. It is my pheromone glands that i will have to be thankful to for helping me get through the inspection phase and pass myself off as a fellow-ant.
As soon as I was spotted in the vicinity of the colony, two of the guards came running to me, which I should confess here, quite scared the life out of me. It is quite an intimidating experience when you yourself are just about the size of an ant. I could now distinctively tell one ant from another. It helps when they have faces as large as your own. There was this stout, tough looking guard who immediately started tapping me all over my face with her(let me remind you that all worker and soldier ants are sterile females) antennae while her scrawny side-kick was pacing all around me and touching me at places I would rather she hadn't.
In that moment of horror, i felt all my senses getting suspended and myself going numb, all prepared to get shredded alive. I had no idea what to do, but in that very moment of horror, to my relief, my glands knew exactly which pheromones to produce. The chemicals that I secreted made two inspectors, if I may so call them, act as though I was one of their very few fertile males and they proceeded to escort me into the colony. It was wonderful how well I could communicate with them without a single word being spoken. But to write about ant-instincts in human words is as impossible as trying to explain human emotions using pheromones and a pair of antennae.
It was however too early for me to venture into the colony. Moreover, it was getting to be dinner-time with Liz, and I wouldn't miss out on that even if the fate of the whole colony depended on it. I will always be more human than ant that way, I decided. But when I tried to turn around and walk away, the guards wouldn't let me. Stouty, as I had begun to call her, grabbed hold of one of my hind-limbs, the left one I think, between her pincers while Scrawny started pushing me from the side turning me around in the other direction.
My first impulse was to scream out to Liz at the top of my voice but decided not to as I did not have much of what I could call a voice to begin with. After struggling in vain for the better part of what seemed like eternity, I realized that I had no choice but to let myself be led to the colony. Thus, weary from all the shoving and pushing, and dejected at heart, I marched on calmly with the guards. Scrawny leading the way and Stouty right behind me making sure I did not give them the slip.
Soon I would be in my cocoon of a chamber inside the ant-colony; feasting on honey-dew, fresh fungi, and juicy insect parts, and having sex with females five times my size. All of which would seem like a fair deal to you all, but what has to be known here is the fact that while a queen can live up to 30 years, and a worker from 2 to 3 years, males survive only a few weeks. How unfair can nature be? But this was also the reason why so much of care was being taken to see to it that I arrived at the colony safe and sound. They wouldn't want me to miss my moments of mid-air love-making with their queen.
It was then that the term mid-air caught my attention. All this while it hadn't occurred to me that I too, like every other male ant, was winged, and could fly away at will. Without a moment's hesitation I flapped my wings as fast as I could and buzzed right out of the glass tank without caring to glance back. Flying wasn't as easy and delightful as I had expected it to be. It was like lifting a heavy weight above your head and keeping it there. After a while the muscles around the part where your wing is connected to your body aches just the way your shoulder would. I suddenly felt a burning pain on my right rear limb and I turned my head to see, to my shock and surprise, Stouty holding on to my limb and gnawing at it in a mad frenzy.
I tried to shake her off, but she held on like the leaf-cutter ant that she proudly was. I had no choice but to fly with her into the bottle of the compound that would turn me back into a human. The lid of the bottle was so designed that it would open on a hinge in only one direction, inwards at that, and that too with the slightest of pressure applied. The reason for this was that the compound is highly unstable and when exposed to atmospheric air, will quickly oxidize into an unknown blue compound that can be detected by known measures only to be something vaguely similar to Cobalt chloride. Also it would not turn me back into human once this happened. Once inside the bottle, I got transformed back rather quickly into my former charming two-legged self and came right out breaking the bottle.
On the little toe of my right foot, Stouty, who did not seem very stout anymore, was still clinging on tight, not knowing what else to do now. I picked her up and placed her back in the glass box saying "See you tomorrow, tough girl. Someday you will make your queen proud. But right now it is din-din time for daddy"
Thus ended the first and only post in David's blog
What if David could actually, by means of a concoction perhaps, turn himself into an ant? What if he did turn himself into an ant again the next day? What if all that blue substance that was found splattered over the floor with the glass pieces had actually been the compound that could have turned him back to human? Maybe a wind had overturned the bottle. Maybe it got oxidized and lost its properties. What if David is still in his room, in one of his ant colonies? If he is, how could one tell him from the millions of other ants?
All these questions rushed through Elizabeth's mind. Then she dismissed them as being utterly ridiculous and decided that she wouldn't let emotional vulnerability betray her sanity. She thought however that it would have turned out to be an interesting and informative piece of fiction, had David finished writing it. Something that would have brought Myrmecology within the layman's grasp. She let out a sigh as she logged out from David's blogger account
Later... much later, as the night was at its darkest, Elizabeth Laroche lay fast asleep in her bed, worn out by another day of brooding. In the blue moonlight flowing in through the gaps between the venetian shutter, something small glinted as it crawled up Liz's cheek. A small winged ant holding what looked in the moonlight, like a minuscule diamond, or a dew droplet perhaps, climbed on to Liz's lower lip. He placed the crystal of sugar carefully in one corner of her lips. Then he flew up a bit and alighted on top of her nose where he stood still for a moment as if regarding her. His head tilted a bit first to one side and then to the other. Somewhere inside his tiny heart, he felt a deep- rooted pain. A pain that made him realize that he didn't need a heart the size of a human fist to feel what he was feeling for her right then. A faint smile spread across her lips as a distant dream played in her subconscious mind. The little winged ant fluttered his wings and flew into the dark night outside. Someday this winged ant would thus fly into the darkness and would never be seen again; but on every morning till then, Liz would wake up with a hint of sweetness about her lips.
