Micro Monday - July 6, 2026

Planting Season

Happy Monday, folks. Here’s a story to start your week.

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Planting Season

Try as she might, Kathleen couldn’t seem to do anything about the two anthills at the opposite ends of her vegetable garden.

She’d tried everything: boric acid, heat traps, poison, pots of boiling vinegar. None of it worked. The worker ants died by the score, but the queens were too well hidden, and the ants always came back.

One morning, she plucked a single ant from the western colony—the ones she called the Cucumber Ants—and set it in the middle of a pack of Tomato Ants. The Tomato Ants surrounded it and plucked its legs off one by one before decapitating it. Then she repeated the experiment with a Tomato Ant. She watched with vicious glee as the Cucumber Ants avenged their fallen brother.

It took all summer, but she eventually managed to convince the two colonies to go to war with one another. The violence of it terrified and elated her in equal measure. The seeds of cruelty, planted during her long months of conflict with the ants, had finally born fruit. She despised them for their stubborn existence, loved and hated them for being so easy to manipulate.

How right it was that she should rule over them as a god.

***

“Found her in the backyard,” Andrew said, pulling off his latex gloves. “It isn’t pretty.”

Tim nodded. Wellness checks on an eighty-year-old usually weren’t. “I’ll call it in. Heart attack?”

“Hard to say,” Andrew said. “The ants got here before we did.”

Image: Hans-Jürgen Neubert - CC BY 4.0

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