KIMIKA AND THE ANTS

(Been a while since I posted any fiction here, so here's a flash from a while back.)

KIMIKA AND THE ANTS

Kimika stares at the numbers she has set down on the page. She sees them running all ways, like ants across the paper, and she chases those ants with her pen, never quite catching them. Kimika does not understand what her teacher, Mr Osaka, has told her to do. She cannot remember the rules to make those numbers sit still. She can see the other girls in the class, bent over their work, their small-moon faces crumpled and creased with concentration, and they are writing. Kimika can hear the scritch scratch of their pens, and she thinks she is the only one who sees ants.

Kimika thinks of Grandpa Ishio and the stories in his head. She thinks of the biggest number in the world; she cannot yet put a name to that number but she thinks it must be more than a hundred and that is the number of the stories that her Grandpa Ishio has. She remembers those stories, though sometimes when she remembers they are just one story and Grandpa Ishio’s voice does not stop for breath in the telling of the tale. Kimika looks at the page before her and she wishes Grandpa Ishio was with her now; he would have the words to stop those ants from running this way and that, for there is a magic in words, Grandpa Ishio says.

Kimika makes a story come, one of Grandpa Ishio’s stories. It is the one about the boy who emerged full formed from the great peach stone and he grew as quick as stories can and came to be the warrior Momotaro. Kimika tells herself of the Lord Monkey and the Lord Brindled Dog and the Lord Pheasant of the Moor, and how they sailed with Momotaro out across the sea in a bamboo boat and, reaching a far off island, they found and thrashed the great ogres that were the terror of the country, and the heroes afterwards brought back all the lost treasures of Japan. There were precious jewels, and coral fans, and amber beads, and emerald necklaces, and gold and silver bells, and tortoiseshell combs, and bolts of the finest silk. And there was a coat made of rice grass and wearing it made a person invisible. Kimika looks up at the clock on the wall and even those numbers are become ants. She wishes for the rice grass coat then.

‘Don’t forget the hammer,’ she says, only the voice in her head when she says it sounds like Grandpa Ishio. ‘Don’t forget the hammer.’ He means the hammer that Momotaro brought back from the Isle of Ogres. And it was a magic hammer and every blow of the hammer struck showers of gold. Kimika looks down at the page of her book and she thinks that to make gold out of the ants on her page would be a fine thing indeed, and the ogre, Mr Osaka, would be pleased with that and not notice that her numbers didn’t add up. Instead she scribbles with her pen.

Kimika is busy with her scribbling, not really knowing what she does, making a cloud that glowers and glowers across the whole page, and all those ants are soon shrunk to one that sits in a small white space in the middle of the paper. 

‘The pen is mightier than the sword,’ her Grandpa Ishio says with some satisfaction, and it is as though he is there beside her, leaning over her shoulder and his lips close to her ear. ‘The pen is mightier than the sword,’ he says again, and Kimika did not think that could be true till now, till she sees the one small ant trapped in the crowded darkness of her scribbling, outnumbered by the marks she has made on the page, over and over, too many to count, more than all the stories in Grandpa Ishio’s head.

Mr Osaka looks up for a moment and seems to be listening to the scritch scratch music of the girls’ pens, and Kimika pretends she is thinking hard, wears a mask that makes her look like all the other girls in the class. Then, when Mr Osaka looks away again, Kimika bends to her work and scribbles the last remaining ant into dark.