With help from his father the boy clasped two panes of glass close together and framed them air-tight with four wooden planks. He drilled a hole through the wooden frame and poured course dirt into the flat plane between the panes.

 

The next day his father came home with a jar of ants. Pour them gently, the father said.

 

And so he did, until the boy saw the ants crawling up the inside of the glass, climbing atop each other and clawing for the drilled hole. An intuitive sense of justice and order filled the boy; it seemed wrong that the entrance might become the exit. Justice and Order, the boy thought.  He poured the rest of the ants carelessly, some falling to the garage floor.

 

It's okay, the boy said. They're only ants.

 

It's not good.  His father crushed the fallen bodies beneath his boot.  He tapped the glass.  They have their own world now.

 

They have their own world now, the boy repeated.

 

In bed in the dark he thought over these words, and while marveling at his creation, he sometimes likened the ant farm to his brain. Because he was a foolish boy, he thought the brain was a long coiled tube like the intestines, and not a porous orb of meat. He imagined his thoughts crawling down the tube of his brain, living in a world all their own.

 

On the third day the ants had built their city. But the father did not allow the boy into the garage in the morning because it was Sunday and the boy would have dirtied his dress shirt.

 

In the afternoon, after church and a BBQ social, the boy and his father came home. The ants had built their city in two halves, and where the halves met workers hefted the dead bodies of their comrades on their backs to carry them to their district cemeteries. What happened? asked the boy.

 

It happens, the father said.

 

It does?

 

That's what they said. Where I got them.

 

Should we do anything?  If he squinted the boy could see his reflection in the glass. He looked warped, and he could tell he looked as if he were going to cry.

 

Never do anything, said the father. Just watch. They're ventilated. He shrugged and turned to leave. They can't get out, but they can breathe the outside air. That's all they need.

 

The boy stayed and watched. The father had fashioned a tiny screen over the hole in the frame, and the boy placed his eye near this and squealed when he saw an ant that looked like it considered him. He began to think it would be silly to cry over a bunch of dead ants. You're only ants, he said, making faces at them.

 

He thought of how it might feel to be an ant and see his giant head. He tried imagining himself where they were, crawling through tunnels of dirt. It was scary, he found, to think of his world held in place by two thin panes of glass, balanced between a gulf of inaccessible world on either side. But maybe he wouldn't be able to see that far, like the way we can't see all the stars from earth. Still, he thought, there's that screen they can walk up to and peek out. The larger world. If he were an ant, he decided, he'd go to that vent every day and wait for it to open.

 

The boy looked out the window of the garage door and almost laughed at the thought of an enormous face coming in from the blue sky to peer at him and make faces. Then he felt funny in a different way. The sky was getting darker and his head felt light.  Dad, he whispered. He tried to turn from the window, but everything had gone black.  Dad!

 

In a dream, or something like one, the garage door was made of netting and past it in the sky the boy saw his father's face made enormous, grinning, and never looking at him directly. The boy turned from the netting to his ants but instead of the farm he saw a throbbing brain and knew somehow it was his. He tapped the side with his finger and the brain jiggled, and inside, through its transparent walls, he saw tiny pieces of yellow light carrying dull, gray pieces of light to the brain's fleshy tail. The tail flexed and pushed and the gray pieces of light came out as brown pellets.

 

The boy opened his eyes and his father was holding him.  You're okay, his father said. But the boy was not okay. His father's face was close and large, but the boy knew it was not the face in the sky because it was looking him in the eyes. His father was only another person.