Path Integration by Allison Cross

An ant circles my mother’s sunroom, dragging a dead ant behind her, as if the room keeps changing its mind.

I look for the rest of the colony, for a crack in the wall or along the bay windows where she may have come in, but there’s only this ant carrying her dead friend. She turns in circles for long moments, paces one way, scurries back, no sense or structure from what I see. She wanders through this room as I have this house, looking for cracks in the walls and windows that might let air in, or let me out. 

I ask myself why I believe the dead ant is a friend.

I perch on the edge of a faded blue armchair, unwilling to fall into the shape of the body moulded in form. I’m unsure if it’s his or hers. I watch the ant. Early morning winks through the maples and warms the red oak floor. A high bookcase is filled with my mother’s art catalogues and plant guides, the tabletop is strewn with display books of photography and the wilderness of Algonquin Park. The view from the windows is trees, close enough to imagine I’m in a treehouse, though my body refuses the illusion.

I scoop up the ant with her dead friend and carry them to the bathroom. There’s a tiny hole in the window screen, which I hope they’ll slip through. Somewhere between my hand and the sill, the dead ant is gone. I’ve interrupted something, something older than intention.

I google ants carrying dead ants, and I learn for most species, it’s a female’s job. She can carry fifty times her own weight. She maintains the nest, manages waste, and removes the dead, protecting the colony from predators. She does not pause.

Yesterday, I watched my mother try to save an ant in the kitchen, nudging it toward the door with her cane. I tried to help and crushed it instead. The sound was so small it almost wasn’t there. I saw disappointment flicker across my mother’s face—a spark of grief cutting through the hangover from the wine the night before. I wondered at this woman with the wounding tongue when she drinks, eyes chips of ice, with her judgments toward her daughters, and the regret she feels over the death of an ant. 

My father nodded off next to us, a scotch-on-the-rocks by his side. His body was bent and swelling, chair-ridden because his lungs filled with fluid when he lay down in bed, and I knew this would be one of the last scotches he’d ever have, my mother by his side.

That night, lying in bed, I listened to their voices through the bathroom door. Are you okay? Everything all right in there? Do you need some help? Are you okay is the last language my parents will share.

I pressed a pillow over my head to push away their fear, and woke with my stomach in knots, tears lodged in my throat. I swallowed them into a recess of my heart where they could mix with the family bloodline. It’s hard not to judge a mother when she drinks, but when she wakes near noon she looks small and fragile, and I ache for her.

Is this what love looks like at the smallest scale—duty mistaken for tenderness?

Ants build bridges with their own bodies so others can cross.

I will never know what this ant meant to do with her dead, because I picked her up and carried her away. Her task was simple; I complicated it. I refuse to ask Google if ants grieve. The answer would be insufficient. There is quantum entanglement, monism, and the stubborn feeling that something passed between us. I go to the window to bring her back, but she’s stuck high between the panes. She never made it through the hole in the screen. This feels like a verdict.

I leave the house and the overheated rooms—the heat blasting in mid-May—and decide to walk. I pray no one will recognize me from high school, decades ago. I walk through the town I ran away from, and see it as I saw it then: the tattoo and piercing shop, the dollar store, the beer store, the liquor store, the hardware store, the feed store, the used car lot, Walmart, potholes, pickup trucks, construction boots, baseball caps, tired gazes, unsteady walks. Seven thrift shops, selling the past in different arrangements.

I float through the grocery store on my green and blue Nikes, which no one here has seen before. I know this because people stare at my feet. They don’t know my shirt is from Los Angeles, my pants from Paris, or that my mother told me to buy one bag of precut salad because it’s expensive, when what she meant was two. My head pounds, my hands shake. You’d think I was the one hungover, but maybe I’m carrying it for her.

In the pharmacy, I follow her list: Rolaids, saline, gauze, laxatives, nasal spray, Tylenol, calcium, vitamin D, and Mirabegron. Overactive bladder, my mother has noted. I stand by the greeting cards, tighten my pelvic floor, and feel absurdly loyal. Her antidepressants are big and blue. I tell myself I’ll be like Neo and take only the red pill, away from this.

Back home, I hold her close and let myself love her. She asks, What was that for? And I say, just because. She relaxes into me, her head on my shoulder.  I think of another ant fact: when the queen dies, some colonies continue for years as long as they have her scent. My siblings and I are back, building a raft.

I check the window. The ant is gone, and my heart drops. Then I see her lower, near the hole in the screen. She’s alive. I push my finger through and whisper. She climbs onto my skin. We return to the sunroom. Three other ants are searching the floor.

As I lower my hand, I see her dead friend. I place them close together. I don’t stay to watch what happens next.

Grief changes direction when it’s interrupted.

Allison Cross spent twenty years as an international fashion model before transitioning to integrative health. As a writer, her short stories and essays appeared in Green Hills Literary Lantern, The Thieving Magpie, and Bright Flash Literary Review. She won a 2024 Writer’s Digest award, and 2025 with Leaf by Leaf.

22 October 2026