"Seventeen Chandeliers"

I wrote this story while sitting on the floor of Preston Bradley Hall in the Chicago Cultural Center, aka, the room with beautiful giant glass dome in the middle. Lauren gave me the word "lodestar" to write a story about and this is what happened.

I know a world exists outside this room, but I fear I will never see it again. This cavernous space is filled with slow-moving giants. I am fortunate to've not been sighted yet. They are quiet like me. I make my way across rough plains of burgundy, crimson, teal, sienna. I am in a maze with no walls. A false lodestar watches over me. I know it to be false, yet every day I am tricked by it, day in, day out, every day. They all blend together, the days.

At night, it is quiet. Quieter than when the giants of the day roam. I allay my fears of solitude, of capture, of death, by knowing that each day anew, my true sun rises on the same grandiose windows that tell me that there does exist a world outside these walls. But it soon flies away, camouflaging itself with other false stars, seventeen by my last count, though infinite they might as well be: their reflections around the ceiling are eternal.

Eternity.

My life before this seemed eternal too. I worked. I could always find the hill, my mound, my home. I had no friends, but I did have loyal coworkers, and we defied enemies and predators. We worked...I don't know who we worked for. I was promised that we worked for a queen but no one I knew ever saw her. But we never questioned her existence, nor our own.

This may sound absurd to you, because you believe that you know who you work for. You are in control, because you pick who you work for. You would never doubt autonomy: your actions are always your own. To you, I am just an ant, a blind follower, dependent on my nature, a slave to evolutionary processes.

But I made it out. I escaped, I am free, and now I am lost (your philosophers have covered this ground, but it is all new territory for ants).

Tell me, how do you decide to steer the ship of your life? Do you aim to reach a shore? My shore is always my hill. It's not my fault I am limited by minimal intellectuality, to be tricked by conniving chandeliers that I believe are the sun. Sophistication does not come easy to an ant like me.

Tell me, what does the room you are sitting in look like? Look at it. Take your time. Do you feel lost in this room? No, and why should you? Because you chose to walk in this room, to sit, to read a story. Me, well, I am in this room because I crawled into a giant's shoe. I did not know it then. I was looking for food. But I found a shoe, and by the time I crawled out, I was trapped in this room. My lodestar filtered through clear panes...but you don't believe that something clear filters your perception of the thing itself? No. You could not. Because to you, it is clear that you are not an ant like me. That you know why you are sitting in this room and why you are reading my story. You know exactly what it is that guides you to your shores, and would never mistake the sun for seventeen chandeliers.

I will never be so lucky. If I were clever, I would find a way to take advantage of one of you giants, to slip back into a shoe or bag and escape this room...for what? For yet another room? An endless series of spaces only further from my hill, my home, my work, my life's work. So it is here I stay, where I will live, where I will die, day after day, the same confusion, the same despair. What you giants admire and stare at in quiet awe, are the same things that will be the quiet end to me, these words the only trace of any existence of a life of an ant who foolishly left his hill.