Invading 
by Tara Chisenhall

          The pot of pink geraniums grown elsewhere but bought and brought home to reside outside on the patio was accented by wisps of green variegated leaves falling softly from the rim. The blazing sun, offset by sloshing decanters of water, emboldened the leaves to grow. The vine shot down the sides of the pot, slithering across the porcelain tiled patio, until it found the bed of rocks. Wriggling under the rocks, it sank down into the cool dirt underneath, letting loose its roots. The roots lengthened, strengthened, stretched and grew, tunneling through damp soil until it reached for the sun. Pushing its leaves upward and out, it wove through the bed, arching around the brown rocks. It wrapped the liriope, pythonic, until smothering the long, grassy leaves and purple flowers. It trailed on, jutting over or through the stone retaining wall, under the hostas and past the skip laurels. It wound around the large wooden post leading up to the deck, lining the path for a trail of tiny black ants trooping slowly up the post from who knows where. The ants strutted, single-file, twenty feet along the wood going higher and higher until reaching a steel hook. Creeping out across the smooth top of the hook, they stopped at the rim of a tulip-shaped moat from which hung a swaying hummingbird feeder. At this impasse they waited, the entire line quivering until two ants stepped off and down onto the moat. As a hungry green hummingbird lighted at the ledge of the feeder, the sway shifting the water cupped in the moat. The ants slipped under, furiously swimming, the boisterous splashing from the next-door neighbor’s pool reverberated with screaming and blood-curdling screeching from ten laughing children, and I stood there inspecting. Listening. Invaders. All of us.