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Pheromones
“What are you doing?” A few seconds pass. There's hundreds of them, but nobody replies. A huge circle of them had formed, everybody following one another in a constant, never ending spiral. For as many of them as there are, you’d think they would reply— at least one of them should have. They all knew him; they were family— so why won’t they respond?
He waits, he waits, and he waits. Standing on the sideline as he watches his family slow down. They must be hungry and exhausted. They formed a circle without him, and now they refuse to answer his calls; his desperate, confused pleas to stop— to end what they started.
He can only watch as they drop one by one. When one fell, the others behind simply circled around the fallen, creating a new trail as they continued to follow the pheromones ahead, hoping to eventually find their home. Just a few more minutes, they think. Almost there, they think.
They think and they think, until only he remains.
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This flash fiction piece is based around the "ant mill" concept where ants lose track of their pheromone trail and follow one another in an endless circle until they die. While ants cannot think and process events on the same level that humans can, ants are able to identify and remember who is in their nest based on unique smells— which lead me to humanize the ants and explore the "ant mill" phenomenon from an ant's perspective.