The great steel messiah had buried its silver snout into the sodden Earth and lay there for three days. A wreck of brute creation, a belly full of death-reeking bodies whose eyes would stay shut until natures decomposing beauty would will the skin of their eyelids back to the soil. When the sun shone on the third morning and the aromatic vapour of death made its final plea towards heaven, the army ants finally caught wind and scuttled over each other towards their tragic feast. They spilt out of their colony in their thousands, their limbs flailing across the jungle floor, their jaws chittling like arctic teeth. Each one a disciple, each one on an eternal journey towards some vague notion of redemption and nourishment. Starved pilgrims towards idol lambs.
The colony arrived at the passenger carrier once the sun’s height indicated the cusp of noon. One by one, they took it in turns to smash their skulls against the metal barrier that lay between them and their platter of flesh and bone. The cacophony was so raucous that it would cause a deaf mule from a forgotten country to raise its simple head and pause from its graze, if only to pity the screws and nails that the devil must be pounding. The shriek of steel and rapid, bellowed thuds shook the jungle floor with a destructive and passionate vigor that put the fatal crash, nature’s brutal Deliveroo order, to shame. The strength of the army’s solidarity was put to test, with brothers slicing each other’s torsos and mothers chucking new-born larva upwards to be caught by Horn-billed demons as food for their squawking brats. So great was their hunger, the stench of death had inspired so sincerely.
They carried this siege without pause or cessation for a fortnight, their lunacy growing as the canteen of corpses strayed further from their mortal decorum. The unity of their colony had been completely disowned, scratching and thumping at the steel barrier like rabid dogs upon a hare. When finally the steel casing gave in, they burst forward as a red sea of delirious vermin and entered the vessel, filling it up to near extremity so that flesh barely reminiscent of humanity rose to float above them. They tore and ripped at the foul feast in front of them, the weight of their destruction and starved fervor casting wild bestial forms upon the walls of the wreckage. The slobbering, wicked beasts were so shocking in their brutality that it informed a sudden change of character within Noma, a solitary army ant who was a cut above the intelligence of her savage family. So appalled., she was by the devastation of the siege and the depraved hunger of her peers that she ventured within the skull of body, seeking some kind of solace for quiet reflection. How could it be, that she held more regard for the faceless victims of the crash than the savage population of the species of which she was a reluctant member? How could it be, her contribution to life’s cruelty be so insignificant yet so macabre and gruesome? Art, science, political history, culinary recipes, social psychology, video games, gardening leaflets – How could she ever contribute to anything of the sort?
She mused this while wandering the chambers of the corpse’ skull. She lay down within the folds of the control centre and took one, half-hearted bite in the name of pathetic self-preservation that caused an electrical shock that shot through every fiber of the corpse, incinerating every ant at feast, killing them instantly and fusing their smoldering frames to the rotted mound of bones that had enticed them.
Noma took her first breath.
She felt the whole mound shudder.
“Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God—children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God” (John 1:12–13)