Usually it’s a little black ant that visits, but today it was a little green one. Light green, as if I could run my tongue across his pleated back and taste the sharp tang of grass. But he, I shall call it he, to do him or her more courtesy than for him to merely be an it. How could he be an it, wriggling from side to side between the fine hairs of my arm, just enough to send a delicate prickle up my arm, as if to catch my attention? Perhaps he wanted me to lightly knock the dust off one of his fine atennae, so fine that at first I saw only the dust suspended in the air. But his legs, as fine as those atennae, pricked again and so I led him onto a pencil. Across the smooth orange paint he flew across, till he came upon the eraser, then leaped to the desk whilst I hurried to fetch my camera.
I need not have hurried. He stopped as soon as I lifted the camera. Click! and he began to move again. But alas, how blurry the image! Again I lifted the camera, and again this creature no bigger than my fingertip paused. He scurried to the end of the desk, where the vestiges of an afternoon sun cast his figure in sharp relief. He stopped as if to pose for my camera, again, and I tried once, thrice. But my camera is insufficient. And my words are insufficient, but here they are. You can go now, sir, I whisper, and he goes.
