Raised by Ants

This is a short story I wrote through automatic writing while working on a big scifi piece.

Basile Lebret
3 min readNov 26, 2020
Photographe by Paolo Neo

There was something weird with Boris and it wasn’t that he was raised by ants.

Sure, this simple fact was quite out-of-the-ordinary but this wasn’t the point.

Boris was your typical Caucasian teenage boy which meant he watched too much porn, had a second account on twitter which served him to act as a troll and a seriously fucked up love for a girl named Alice. Typical, I said.

But the dude was weird, I mean it. Like it wasn’t just that people would say to girls : Do not date this weirdo, he’d bring you to his house for his parents to eat you. Because people would do this, and it wasn’t only that he’d been raised by ants, surely there was something fucked up about him.

It’s not that I think it’s impossible to be raised by arthropods and still become a good guy. I mean, History would tell you that Boris grew up to run a grocery store and he’d raise three beautiful children and nobody ever talked about insects ever again.

But at the time it was weird. Maybe it was the era. Nobody ever saw someone raised by ants. I mean you’d have this crazy images. Friggin’ giant ants limping across dirt basement in their one story house. Who actually knew what this kind of parents would do to their kids ?

I mean, it was a first. And surely you’d have to be cautious. Those were GIANT ANTS, MAN. Not that I’d have a problem with that. I just never spoke to the kid, not that I hated his guts or anything. It was just like that. And now that I recall there wasn’t a lot of people talking to the boy.

It wasn’t about the parents, let just say the kid was weird. Like fucking silent all the time ; always hanging out with this fat goth chick. Except for this girl, I don’t think anyone ever talked to the guy. I mean, let’s be clear, it’s impossible to start a conversation with the likes of : So your parents are ants but they live in the ground and shit? That’d be messed up, anybody would tell you so.

And so it comes we never spoke to the dude. And the dude was all quiet and stuff. Like alone, like he wasn’t even bothered by his loneliness. This ain’t normal. Not that I think the dude should have suffered or something but it should have at least annoyed him, right ? Like what with being different and all and nobody ever talks to you. I was kinda popular in high school so I know it’d have bothered me.

And there he was, with his parents being ants, not being annoyed as shit nobody wanted to be near him. Just going on with the flow, contempt with himself, that’s how I took it at the time. I still think like that nowadays. Dude was fucked up. Like he didn’t need us, like he didn’t anyone’s company except for that goth chick.

Boris was fucking weird, man, and it had nothing to do with his parents being ants.

Since I was kinda harsh on the October release with The Babe, I tried to be more smooth for this month release. Hope you liked it! Next week we’ll talk of Yukio Mishima and how an event which happened when he was twelve somehow shaped his psyche and his art.

If you want other fiction written by me, you could try Eggshell or Chillaxing.

--

--

Basile Lebret

I write about the history of artmaking, I don’t do reviews.