On a Blue Moon

It appeared in the middle of the day. She was combing her hair in front of the mirror when she caught the quick movement in the reflection. She froze, then ran out of the room and slammed the door shut, trapping it inside. Her heart pounded so fast that sweat formed on her forehead, and her breath came in short gasps. She had always lived with a sense of fear, though she wasn’t sure when it began or where it came from. Perhaps from the horror movies she wasn’t supposed to watch, or from her cousins’ stories told on summer nights when they visited from abroad. They would stay up late, sharing tales of strange things that happened to children sitting by a fire in the forest, or of ghosts wandering through abandoned houses. Her cousin once gifted her a stack of stories by Christopher Pike and R. L. Stine. It was her first encounter with horror. She spent hours reading them, and carried them wherever she went, to relatives’ houses or her mother’s hairdresser. Once, they watched The Mummy t...

Ants have no names. They live as one body, a superorganism, and each ant is a cell inside it. They recognize each other by scent, not by name. When they meet, they touch antennae to “smell” each other. If the scent matches, they know they are family. That is why when our protagonist, whom we will call Hana, got lost and ended up alone in a cold, almost empty room with no ant smell around at all, she was terrified. She had never spent a single night away from her community before. Hana, a queen in her colony, was subjected to a strange incident recently. During one of her short naps, a sudden powerful vibration sent her flying. A flower petal broke her fall. For a moment she could not move. The shock made her tiny legs quiver uncontrollably. The air smelled different, thin and sharp, carrying no trace of her kind. She pressed her body close to the petal, trying to steady her breath. The vibration came again, heavier this time, like a distant storm. Could it be the wind? Or a creatur...