I had always felt there was something wrong with my little brother and seeing him on the kitchen floor torturing ants just confirmed it. He’s six and a half and he’s on his knees, crushing the back end of ants and smiling as he watches them try to continue moving around. I open the refrigerator door and get myself a fizzy water. I may only be 13, but I’ve seen the videos of what soda pop does when it mixes with stomach acid, so none of that crap for me. 

I pop the top and look at Alex. “What’s with the ants?” 

He tilts his head to look back at me, grinning. 

“I found them.” 

He looked back down at the ant that was scrabbling around with the front feet it had left, while its back end stayed squished to the tile floor. 

“Mom doesn’t like ants in the kitchen,” I remind him.

I took a step forward and crushed the ant. Alex made a face like he was disappointed, then like he was mad, but when he looked up at me, I didn’t see anything about either of those two things. Nothing at all. Then he spotted another ant and grinned. He had a plastic straw in one hand, and he moved it carefully over the ant, then smushed down and took out the ant’s back half. Alex wasn’t very coordinated yet. The ant stopped moving completely instead of just being paralyzed from the middle down. Alex sighed and frowned.

“So why are you crushing the ants?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I feel like it.”

I took a drink and considered. “Does it make you feel good when you crush them?”

Alex shrugged again. “Not really. It’s just kind of int.. intra…”

“Interesting?”

He looked up, smiling. “Yeah. Interesting. It’s interesting to watch them try to keep walking.” He poked at another ant. “Why do they do that?”

It was my turn to shrug. “Because they don’t know any better?”

Alex grunted. “I wonder… I wonder, would people do the same thing—I mean try to walk if you mashed their legs.” What I could see of his expression made me stop breathing.

I froze for a moment, then made myself inhale.

“Probably not,” I said. “Most people are smart enough to know they should wait for paramedics. They wouldn’t be trying to move; they would be trying to call for help.”

There was quiet for a bit as I watched Alex digested this. Finally, he frowned. 

“I wonder if they would try to walk if you did something else to them, like there was a reason they should move.”

There it was. I had been hoping he wouldn’t go there. He was my brother, after all.

I turned over the options in my head. Tell mom? If she believed me, she might do something. She might take him to a shrink, for example, and that could work. Even if it didn’t change the way he thought, he could be taught not to do anything about what he was thinking about. But then he might just learn how to pretend he wasn’t going to do anything. And that would not be good.

If he didn’t get caught, that would be one thing. But if he did, there would be a big stink. Reporters, social media, all that crap. That wouldn’t be good for mom. And it wouldn’t be good for me. I had my own plans. Being the brother of a known torturer would be too much attention.

And—if I was honest, I wasn’t sure he had the brains to avoid getting caught. And the mess he might make on the way to getting caught just made me want to  be sick and do something to him all at the same time.

I took another sip of water to calm down.

So, what to do? What could I do? Reasonably. While he smashed the back ends of ants, I thought. And the answer came. Do nothing.

Nothing, right now. Watch him. Watch him hard and plan. I hadn’t thought of starting so close to home, but there you go. Life is random. Having Alex as a little brother was a randomness I could do without, but I could deal. I had time.

I poured what was left of my can into the sink and crushed it to throw into recycling. 

“Hey, Alex,” I said. “Mom’s going to be home soon, and we need to get rid of the ants before she does. Be a good guy and get the bug spray from the garage. You know where mom keeps it.”

He looked up at me, then down at the ants again, then up and nodded. He dropped his straw and, wiping his bug-smashing hand on his pants, he stood and trudged off.

I watched him go and smiled. 

“Thanks, buddy.”

On the floor, the crippled ants continued to struggle.

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Robyn McIntyre is a writer of literary and speculative fiction whose work explores loss, moral weather, and the quiet consequences of living alongside things we fail to notice. She is drawn to stories that trust the reader, resist easy resolution, and let meaning accumulate through implication rather than explanation. Her writing often sits at the edge of genre, using speculative elements not as spectacle but as pressure—ways of asking what remains when certainty erodes. She lives in Oregon, where she reads deeply, thinks carefully, and believes good food and a happy dog are reasons for living.