Lazy Susan and the Scrumptious Ant Buffet

Susan the spider had found paradise: a penthouse all to herself, warm and full of cozy crevices, protected from the elements, far outside any other spider’s territory. Not to mention predatorless. She could stroll freely wherever she wanted, carefree, and let her mind wander about the art of web-weaving, the meaning of life, and the novel she had always wanted to write but never had time for (nor paper or any writing implements, for that matter, nor a spider publishing industry to print it, but let that not get in the way of her dreams.)

Predators of spiders were not that many, but the most dangerous of all, and the most baffling since they never consumed their victims, not even once, not even a nibble or the most gingerly of licks, were the big fleshy monsters that typically inhabited penthouses. There was one in here too, but this flesh monster was nice. Susan called him John. Every time Susan saw John, she raised her front legs and did a little dance to greet him. In turn, John did not, as others would, jump back five feet, run away screaming, or throw one or both of their shoes at her. John just made eye contact and a few calm sounds, which Susan didn’t understand very well since her legs could only could perceive crude vibrations, but to her it sounded something like:

“Bar bram barbro barbra brrr bru.”

Susan inferred the only possible explanation: that the flesh monster was returning the greeting. And that he called her Barbara for some reason.

There was only one problem: where was the food? The penthouse was virtually bereft of insects, save for couple of silverfish she once saw in the bathroom. How was a girl to feed herself under these conditions? The mere thought of having to weave a dozen different webs all over the place to catch a pittance destroyed her soul, but there was no way she would ever return to bird-infested gardens or risk the ire of the other apartments’ skinbags.

There had to be a better way.

⁂

Susan’s mother had always warned her against ants. Sure, they were tiny and delicious little buggers who moved slowly and predictably, like an all-you-can-eat buffet on a conveyor belt, but there were a lot of them, they teamed up, and they could bite. Then again, Susan’s mother died trying to kill a hornet who got caught in her web, which Susan thought was considerably stupider, so who cared what she had to say.

Besides, Susan had a brilliant idea. While exploring the penthouse, she had found two interesting bags next to each other, their contents identifiable from a few crumbs scattered around them. The first one contained coffee grounds, a foul and likely toxic brown powder which John brewed every morning, noon, afternoon and evening. The second contained sugar. Ants loved that stuff. This was the perfect bait.

Susan methodically crawled along every fold until she found the entrance she was looking for. As she had suspected, the bag contained an obscene amount of the sweet stuff, weighing as much as thousands of Susans, enough to feed an entire ant colony. Having carefully memorized how to quickly get in and out of the bag, she took bit by bit of sugar and rubbed it along the path, sometimes using short threads to stick grains on the side of the bag and on the walls. She had soon completed a sweet road that crossed the room, went through the opening to downstairs she had used to come up, and then along various perfectly memorized routes all the way down to the garden where she recalled an ant colony existed. She dropped a particularly large pile right in front of their lair, retraced her steps, and waited.

Ants were like clockwork: there was never any doubt as to what they would do. If there was sugar for the taking, there would be taking of the sugar, and if there was a road of sugar, they would follow it to its end, whatever the end may be. And Susan would be waiting for them in a comfortable nook. Trying to catch them in a web was pointless: they would just walk around it. She would do as her jumping cousins did: jump in, take one, jump out. Only very few, lest the ants became wary or agressive, but a few out of very many was still many. Surely the ants’ cost-to-benefit calculation would accept a one-out-of-ten casualty rate in exchange for a literal bag of sugar. There would be a steady flow for weeks.

Indeed, it did not take long for scouts to start advancing along Susan’s road. She left them alone until the sweet manna was found and the ants kicked themselves into high gear. A long and dense file marched to the sugar, and a long and dense file marched out. Beautiful. Susan could easily pick off and snack on just enough to sate her hunger, which turned out to be many less than one out of ten, and they were none the wiser.

Flawless plan from Susan. Free food for weeks.

Well, that was until John came back from his usual daytime absence and went to brew himself yet another cup of monster liquid. Susan had been a little worried that he would crumple the bag differently and disturb the trail, but ants were resourceful, she was confident they would still find their way, and if not she would help them out and all would be good for the night at least. John, however, was far more agitated than anticipated.

“Brr! Br-bar-bram-brr-bur! Barbrombrumbarbrr! Robribrubrrr-brrrrm!! Barbramborbrrrrib! Rabrabrombibomburrrrrr!!!”

He was apoplexic. He threw the bag of sugar in the garbage. This was how Susan discovered that John hated ants. Hated ants, with as much verve as Susan hated hornets for killing her mother (sure, her mother had been careless, but the hornet was still to blame for protecting herself in the first place). Perhaps ants had killed his mother? It was certainly more sensible to hate ants than to hate Susan, because ants ate what he ate, whereas she ate that which ate what he ate, but that had never stopped flesh monsters from being spider-hating lunatics. Susan loved John for at least clearing the minimum bar of wisdom so that she wouldn’t have to lower her standards any further. She had to be patient with him. Still, she didn’t quite understand what the big hubbub was about: there was plenty of sugar in that bag for both the ants and John’s foul brown soup.

What the hell was John’s problem?

Susan’s roommate’s irrationality threw a wrench in her plans. He stuffed everything sweet in the fridge, that big cold box: the sugar, the fruit, everything. All that was left was the coffee bag, because humans were the only living beings in the universe who could consume that dreck, and the bagel seeds he sowed all over the floor every morning. These damn grains sought every single crevice in the apartment, better than Susan could, hell, better than an army of ants could. They had an omnipresence of sorts which made you wonder whether it was bagels—rather than men or spiders—that God had made in His image. Yet ants liked them and carried them around like little menhirs. Very cute.

Susan collected the seeds and carefully placed them to corral the ants towards hidden places where they would be mostly invisible to John. Or she would have, if the ants were of a mind to cooperate. Unfortunately, they did not understand the danger they were in whenever they were in John’s line of sight and just wandered everywhere. Every so often the poor man could be heard yelling at them.

“Brom brabra groumbouloum! Barbarbrrr!!”

What could he do about it, though, other than accept the situation? Who could get rid of ants, if not professionals such as Susan? Susan soon got an answer to that. As the flow of ants became suspiciously low, she followed their trail back to investigate where they may have been diverted. In a corner, she found a few mysterious metal cylinders with small openings on the side that acted like revolving doors for ants. What were they getting from there? Susan got into a free opening—with difficulty, for it was barely wider than she was—and inspected the stuff, right under the antennas of the oblivious ants who collected it (they were not the sort that attacked first). There was sugar mixed with some other substance. Susan warily tasted a trace amount, and although she couldn’t be certain, she was fairly sure that it was poison.

This had to be John’s doing. Only a human could have made this and put it there, and it couldn’t have been with gentle intentions.

Susan was getting quite fed up with John’s shenanigans by now. She had the ant situation perfectly under control: she directed them along trails of her making and kept them away from John’s sugar using food John threw away, what the hell more did the fleshbag want? What obscure, tortuous logic did his blind hatred follow?

She hoped to someday pierce that thick skull of his and understand the full extent of his psychosis, but in the meantime there was work to do. She could not let the ants die, first because she was an ethical spider who did not condone genocide, second because she was a hungry spider, third because she was a proudly lazy spider and active hunting was beneath her (this list being in reverse order of importance.)

She carefully scooped out the poison from the traps and stashed it in a secret nook behind an improvised web. Susan supposed this whole debacle had a silver lining: who knew when she might need large quantities of borax? Well, she had a stash, now. It was only after she was more than halfway done that she realized she was being an idiot and she could just weave a thick web in front of the traps’ apertures. Which she did.

Now that the ants had been protected from their self-destructive instincts, Susan happily resumed her bagel seed scheme.

Alas, John was quicker-minded than she thought. Not a day had passed before he gave a distinctly different greeting upon seeing her. He held a trap in his skin pincers and showed Susan the webbed apertures. He saw. He knew.

“Barbra! Brambrom! Bar-bar-brobibargrob! Bibarbom barbra borbrogram! Ba-bom-brom borbag bram!”

“It was another spider, I swear!” Susan danced meekly, but this was an easy lie to see through. There were no other spiders here. Certainly not any of Susan’s mental caliber. John’s excitement was terrifying, she had never seen him like this. His bulging eyes were large enough to eat her. She curled up to fake death, but the barbra-brom-broms kept going, and when she tried to bolt he tailed her until she was safely inside a hole that not even his little finger could slip through.

Had the nice flesh ogre become an enemy? It appeared so. She would have to leave. And yet he had no more right to be in this penthouse than she had. They had both discovered it independently and it was utter madness that a hundred-kilogram monster could not peacefully cohabit with one who weighed barely more than a gram. Susan was angry. She would never willfully leave her beautiful home. He had to leave.

How did you make a human leave? What scared them? From previous experience Susan had inferred that her kind did—terrified them, even—which was about as absurd as elephants being afraid of mice. However, even that had never been enough to chase them off. These humans were a hard nut to crack. Susan exerted her small but powerful brain to figure out a solution. Was there another way? She tried to think outside the box and suddenly it came to her: a solution so perfect, so simple she was surprised she had not immediately thought of it.

As soon as the door closed behind her roommate and she was once again alone, Susan got to work.

⁂

When John came back to the penthouse that evening, he called to Susan: “Barbra! Barbra! Barbra!” Of course, she wasn’t dumb enough to come to him, but in the end he left a little dish on the ground on which a few things wriggled appetizingly and curiosity overtook her. The closer she got, it became obvious that these were a few ants, mangled and powerless to escape. Ants? For me? Susan thought.

Had they been laced with poison to kill her? Susan considered that for a moment, but she did not think so. That would have been a convoluted plan coming from John, especially if you compared it to the much simpler alternative of crushing her when she had tried to play dead (stupid, stupid, stupid—never play dead around flesh monsters, they always want to make sure). Indeed, come to think of it, in all of his excitement, John had not once attempted to harm her. It occurred to Susan that perhaps he was not, in fact, angry. Perhaps he was merely impressed by Susan’s genius scheme. Perhaps he had understood that it merely served the purpose of sustenance and had decided to give her the goods directly. That was certainly an elegant solution. The less work for Susan the better.

As she mulled these thoughts and nibbled on a few (delicious) mangled heads, John slowly came closer to watch her. They made eye contact and Susan greeted him in her usual fashion. He greeted back: “Barbra brom brom!”

Just like before!

Susan did a little jig of happiness and relief: she and John were good now, it was all a misunderstanding. No doubt interspecies communication was a difficult thing, but with some effort, perhaps they could get far. They needed a strategy: certainly, they had to start with simple messages before ramping up the complexity… But then she remembered what she had spent the last two hours doing, the back-and-forths between her secret stash and the noxious bag, and realized the program might have to be sped up significantly, for she had a rather complex and urgent thing to tell John. Shit! she thought. How the hell do I tell John that I just poisoned his coffee grounds?