Faster Than the Eye

The ant would not stay still, and that was the problem.

Maya lay flat on the warm concrete with her chin on her arm, watching one shiny brown ant patrol the crack by the drainpipe. Its jaws were open. Not a little open. All the way open, splayed wide like a pair of scissors stuck at the widest angle, wider than its own head. It walked around like that, jaws gaping, as if it had forgotten how to close its own mouth.

She had been trying to film it for an hour.

The camera was her uncle's, heavy and black, smelling faintly of the garage. He had handed it over with a shrug and said it shot a thousand frames a second and he never used it anymore, so. The sun pressed hot on the back of her neck. A bead of sweat ran down behind her ear and she did not move to wipe it.

She nudged a crumb of cracker toward the ant with one finger.

The jaws were still open. Always open. She had decided the ant was broken, or sick, or maybe just a strange kind of ant that lived its whole life gaping like that. She pressed the button to film anyway, because the ant was pretty and the light was good.

Then a smaller black ant wandered into the frame.

Maya did not see what happened next. That was the whole thing. She was looking right at it, eyes open, close enough to count the brown ant's legs, and there was a tiny dry tick sound, the lightest snap, and the brown ant was simply gone. Not walked away. Gone. The spot where it had stood was empty concrete.

She sat up so fast her elbow scraped.

Gone. A whole ant. She had been staring at it and it had vanished between one breath and no breath at all. The little black ant stood there alone, antennae waving, as confused as she was.

Her heart was doing something quick and strange. She found the brown ant eventually, a hand's width away, sitting on the concrete looking perfectly fine, jaws gaping again, as if nothing had happened.

It had jumped. But ants do not have jumping legs. She knew grasshopper legs, flea legs, the folded spring-loaded look of a thing built to leap. This ant had ordinary thin legs. There had been no crouch, no push, no leap she could see.

The camera. She had been filming.

She scrambled up the steps into the cool dark of the house, found the little screen on the back, and pressed the button to play it slow.

At normal speed it was the same nothing. Tick. Gone. She slowed it down. The thousand frames opened up like a hallway with doors she had never known were there.

Frame. The brown ant, jaws wide. The black ant edging closer.

Frame. Jaws still wide.

Frame. The jaws were shut. Closed completely. And in the same picture the brown ant was already lifting off the ground, its whole body tilting backward into the air.

Maya stopped breathing.

She stepped one frame back. Open. One frame forward. Closed and airborne. There was nothing between them. The camera took a thousand pictures every second and the jaws had shut and flung the ant into the air faster than the spaces between those pictures. Faster than the camera could split.

She ran it again. And again. The ant slammed its closed jaws against the ground, and the ground threw it backward, the way she could shove off a swimming pool wall, except she needed her whole legs and a wind-up and the ant needed nothing she could see.

The jaws were not broken. The jaws were not stuck open. The jaws were loaded. Open all the way meant cocked, held back, full of waiting. Like a mousetrap before the bar comes down. The ant walked around all day with that much stored up behind its own face.

She whispered the word out loud to the empty kitchen. Loaded.

A thing that small. A thing she had nearly squashed without thinking, that she had decided was sick because it would not close its mouth. It had been holding the fastest thing she had ever almost-seen. The whole hour she watched it, the ant had been ready, every second, faster than her eye, faster than a thousand pictures a second, and it had only let go once, for one tick, when the small ant came too close.

Maya looked at her own hand on the counter. She tried to imagine moving any part of herself so fast it disappeared from a camera built to catch lightning. She could not. Her hand was slow and pink and obvious. Everything she had ever done had happened slowly enough to see.

She thought about how many ants she had walked past in her life. Cracks in sidewalks, picnic blankets, the legs of the porch. How many of them had jaws like cocked traps, holding back something her eyes were simply too slow to ever catch. The yard outside was full of them right now. The whole yard. The whole world, probably, busy with movements that finished before they could begin, in every crack, under every leaf, all the time, with nobody watching slow enough to know.

She took the camera back outside.

The brown ant was still there by the drainpipe, jaws wide, patrolling its crack as if it owned the afternoon. Maya knelt down very carefully this time. She set the camera close and steady and pressed record, and she watched the little red light, not the ant, because she knew now that the ant would beat her eyes every single time.

She broke off the corner of the cracker and slid it slowly toward the open jaws, and waited for the tick.