The Antronauts

I was eight years old.
Noon, on a sticky-hot summer's day.
There were three of us.
Myself
and
in the mirror opposite of
Don Quixote and Sancho,
Bill the elder -
short, round, eccentric and brilliant -
with Paul the younger -
tall, thin, prosaic and plodding.

Languidly leaning against the shaded basement wall,
we drank, belched and bottle-whistled cool sodas,
while periodically fingering our beaded, forehead sweat.

With the innocent cruelty of children,
we began to torture a black ant.
We were listlessly watching the insect's frantic attempst to crawl
out of an inverted cone scooped in the sand
when,
out of boredom,
Paul fired his six-shooter cap-gun at the hapless prisoner.
We lazily laughed until,
abruptly,
Bill stood up,
muttered for us not to move,
and strode off.
Paul and I looked at each other.
Our pulses quickened,
for we knew yet another evolutionary leap
was about to be taken in our young, impressionable lives.

Bill,
with kitchen matches, straws, tinfoil and
a transported gleam reappeared.
I was instructed to find a Y-shaped twig,
while Paul was ordered to gather a flat rock.
When,
puzzled and eager we returned,
Bill held high his genius -
an inch long, two-part cylindrical tinfoil,
the former,
held fifteen caps,
the latter,
a stunned, terrified captive ant.

Assiduously we stuffed the tinfoil in the straw,
held it in place on the flat rock,
leaned it up on the twig
and applied the lit match.
!SSSSSSSSSST!

A streak of silver flew miraculously twenty to thirty feet through the air.
We began to madly jump and cheer,
until once again,
as he did so often, Bill abruptly stopped.

Casting himself
on hands and knees,
he scoured the underbrush for his spaceship.
Upon discovery,
he gingerly opened the tinfoil,
only to find an unmitigated disaster.
The ant, not only lifeless, was without hind quarters.
Shocked and dismayed,
Paul and I looked to Bill,
hoping against hope
his ample inventiveness
would overcome this unexpected, horrific impasse.

After an hour of
countless minor tweaking and adjustments,
with the lives of some thirty ants sacrificed upon the altar of science,
Bill led us at last to the promised land.

The reward for the heroic survivor
was placement in an inverted sand hill
where it lost its life in a deadly battle
with a small but fierce red ant.