Daniel Silveyra dot com

You are aware that it is happening but it is too far away. What fresh horror do I bring to you, to make my point? Which fire across which hill, which Youtube clip of which village covered in grey water? Grandparents dying from the heat. Children drowning in the sea.  

I can’t watch nature documentaries any more. I know what they will tell me is happening. Even without watching I know what they will tell me. 

Ignorance is bliss but bliss is privilege that we can’t afford. So we’re all watching, sitting side by side in a stadium filled with 8 billion people while ghosts play for our future. The seats aren’t all the same, though.  

But we can do something, people have done things before, what happened to that? Look how far we done came. Let’s organize, let’s organize. Maybe the tail can wag the dog. 

But we aren’t the tail. We are the flea. 

*** 

Ants came into my house this summer, I think because of the heat.  

They started coyly, a few strays meandering towards my bird of paradise across the room, then into the kitchen. I watched them with interest. They were on a peach tree in the patio – I smiled watching them eat the sap on the leaf stems –  and so it made sense they would be here too.  

I didn’t want to use poison, out of some sense of solidarity. I found the hole on the front door and duct-taped it, and I sprayed vinegary water to cover their scent trails. I saw them get lost and wander off the trail, even as more of them followed. A spider made its web overlooking a busy corner. I don’t know how it caught the ants walking by, but I saw their corpses. The other ants didn’t stop to look at the corpses.  

Close to the front door the ants would come in fast like on a highway and then start veering off in one of three directions – the kitchen, the plant, and an empty corner. I didn’t understand why so many would go to the corner, but I had been wiping the floor often. When they were at the end of the road they slowed down and moved in random semi-circles, tracing back and then forward – those were my favourites. 

I used poison in the end. But it was the kind that was safe for humans and pets, I asked at the store.