Round and Round It Goes

It's darker than she expected. Only 8:30. Closer to fall now, that didn't take long. It's risky but she's cutting through the church lawn and the new concrete walkway, freshly painted. A writhing dark mound appears at her feet, undulating, ebbing and flowing at it's outer most edges. Ants. Thousands of them. Small, fluid, perpetual motion machines. So busy, so fast. All clumped together on top of each other in the middle of a huge expanse of barren concrete, in a crack. What is it that draws them to congregate at this point, this fissure in the ground? She stops, pondering how they know that this is the place, the perfect spot to harbour a colony. To forage and feed, build a compound all for themselves. In the morning they'll be gone, washed away by the overnight storm. Ephemeral. Moment to moment. The steps of the church have transformed, freshly painted an ochre~y cappuccino with too much of a gloss, ridiculously slick. An accident waiting to happen. Come Monday morning after the congregants have shuffled and slid, some tumbling and cracking their fragile hips, the paint will be buffed, roughed up with sticky sand. Just like it was before they decided to repaint it. The highly dysfunctional evolutionary circle of maintenance. Build it, wear it out, rebuild it, repair it, tear it down. Destroy it when it's no longer of use. Gentrify when the neighbours are a bit too "cultured". Move in, take over, dominate then disappear leaving the detritus behind. This is the last church left in her neighbourhood. Three mosques and a leftover lawn bowling club, no synagogues. Change. The ants are starting to form a skinny trail leading off the concrete pad. Crabapples in the grass, fetid and soured, a perfect feast for hungry insects. Fuel for the long night before the end of their world. And so it goes, and so it goes, round and round and round it goes.