The Shower Ants

Cheyenne Nicely

My shower adopted an ant colony—just a few hundred of them. They live in the cracks of the caulk, between the tiles and the gap where the door slides shut. They like to crawl across the floor, climb up the walls, walk upside down on the ceiling. But their favorite thing is to gnaw at the vanilla sugar scrub that cascades from my body to the floor, sticking to my shower unless I’m bothered to wash it away.

I was wary of this adoption at first. I wasn’t ready to be a parent, not even to a measly ant, but my shower insisted. I’ve grown quite fond of them now. I’d go as far as to call them my friends. The shower ants watch me when no one else will. They applaud my nightly concerts, beg for encores—or so I’d like to believe.

When my shower and I are entangled with one another, they huddle in the corners to avoid the spray. Call us bad parents, but the shower ants don’t yet know how to swim. Call us worse parents, but we’ve lost an innumerable amount to drowning. They’re mass casualty events, akin to a tsunami. They take our children by the legs and drag them into the endless void known as The Drain.

My shower warned them of The Drain once they were old enough to leave the cracks in the walls. They were told not to get too close, to stay away when the water ran, to not panic as they were swept towards The Drain. Not all our ants listened, but it’s probably for the best. There’s no point in having evolutionarily weak shower ants anyway.

We were able to live in harmony for a while. I fed them sugar scrub while my shower kept a wall to their backs. But as my relationship with my shower grew more unstable, I began to resent the ants it had brought home. I hadn’t intended on hurting them, but it was the only way I could think of to make my shower feel remorse. I missed the way things used to be and just wanted to revert back to the place we were before.

So, I hunted down the bath cleaner and sprayed my children to death. Their bodies curled up on the floor—legs tucked in, writhing in their last moments. I rinsed them down the drain with the same coldness my shower had shown me the night before. I watched them swirl en masse and turned the water off once I was sure they were gone.I felt relieved, like I could breathe again. I basked in the privacy of my shower once more and made a mental note to be more careful about cleaning the sugar off the floor, lest I become attached to a second colony of shower ants.