Hello, said Oscar, a small, inexplicable ant of no more magnificent proportions than another small, inexplicable ant; for, in the past four days of his life, there had been, or currently were (He never was very good at keeping track) thirty seven to eighty thousand small diamonds floating around his nest, each having smaller and even smaller images of himself played upon them, shouting one thing: That he had to give himself up, throw his life away, on the whim of Queen Argent; that he, the hardest worker in the colony (Voted so three years in a row), had to give up, or else resign from, his position as the head ruler and economist of the ant colony; that if he didn’t, he would be forced to do one of two things: To either throw away his robe and be exiled, or participate in seemingly crude acts; the first being very dishonorable, and the latter being very undesirable, so, he did what he felt he had to do; first, he went about, cleaning up his room, making sure that he had absolutely no dust on the floor, then, in an act of magnificent courage, went floating down out of his fifty three story room using the dust as a float, moving down past trees, brush, bushes, air molecules (Consisting of no less than seventy percent nitrogen!), bits of water vapor, and the gases pouring off from New York City, that he might be able to escape; that he, a worthless ant from the kingdom, might be able to save himself from a fate no worse than his uncle’s, his poor, poor uncle who had died but an hour earlier from the poorest food in the anthill, and had subsequently been buried in the hill’s walls as if they were savages; Oscar had cried and cried and cried over this fact of truth, until, one day, he realized that he had become an adult ant, that he had the power (The power!) to do whatever he wished with whomever he wished; and so, jumping out of his chair, he broke his back, looking up again at his nest; seeing, in the faces of thirty to eighty thousand small diamonds, his face, playing along, as if an image painted for the pleasure of the queen herself, with everything he did or said: Hello, they said to him, as he said it to them; hello, hello, hello, and as he drifted off into his poor, poor, poor death, he remembered a story from his life, a story which had been of great importance to him as he grew; a story about a young ant who had borne a great secret all his life, who had been forced to say nothing about the traitor living beside him every day in his life, until, at his last dying moment, he screamed out the secret, that his brother was a traitor; and so, as Oscar drifted down into his peaceful death, he, having no great secret, no great speech to tell, simply restated the only thing which played upon his memory, something to say to the faces glowing in front of him, only one thing to say before his unfortunate and untimely death: Hello.

~ZM~