Story idea:
Title: They All Go Marching Down.
After the collapse of humanity, a lost and confused survivor scavenges a field of dead bodies crawling with ants. With each body the survivor loots, they experience a flash of that person’s life.
When I was little, we used to play baseball out in our front yard. A trio of trees stood in for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd bases and a bald patch of dirt was the pitcher’s mound. One day, after what I’m sure was a rousing game of wiffleball with me as the pitcher, my brother and I retired into the house. But I left my baseball cap on the pitcher’s mound.
Going out later to retrieve it, I discovered that our pitcher’s mound was not just a bald patch of dirt. It was an ant hill. And the inside of my hat was alive with countless, scurrying ants.
I dropped the hat and ran, terrified by the inanimate object come to life. When I went out later, the ants had vacated their invader, but I could never wear that hat again. Everytime I thought about it, I could feel the ants scurrying across my head, winding through my hair, and burrowing into my ears. The hat lived forevermore out in the garage, eventually discarded, boxed, or forgotten.
This horrifying childhood experience grew into an irrational fear of ants. Not of one ant. Not of five ants. But of a living curtain of ants, writhing and squirming. This fear inadvertently found its way into many of my stories. So many that eventually I decided to investigate this fear to understand why it’s held on so long.
And what I discovered was a new story idea. A story idea born from the fear of what is left behind. Of what nature takes from the things we discard. And the loss of identity in the scurrying, writhing, and squirming form of death. As a kid, finding the ants in my baseball cap, I didn’t understand that I was experiencing my first fear of death. And unlike my baseball cap, I could not banish it to the garage. Instead, it found its way into the make-up of my psyche. And eventually, into my writing.
I don’t often give away any spoilers in my story idea posts. But for this, I will make an exception. In the story that will one day be titled They All Go Marching Down, it is revealed that the lost and confused survivor is actually an ant himself. Along with the ocean of ants feeding upon the remains of humanity, flashes of the humanity he devours leaves something behind on him. And in the aftermath, he loses his own identity to the identity he’s stolen.
Perhaps this is a cheap and predictable twist-ending to this story, but with all the fear and anxiety of the future our world is currently facing, I find hope that maybe, even if its stolen, our identity will find a way to continue marching on.
What childhood fears of yours have grown into stories?
Start your story in the comments below…