Original story: "Joe and the Big Ant", by bonzopoe

Every night a big ant appeared walking near the desk, and every night the sole of the shoe in turn hovered over it, cutting off its existence. However, the next night a new ant appeared making the same journey, earning the same fate. This happened for at least a couple of weeks, but it may have happened before and Joe hadn't noticed.

The curious thing is that it is always a single ant, just one, more or less at the same time every night; as if it were a scout sent on a reconnaissance mission.

During all this time Joe repeated the same operation without giving much importance to the fact, and apart from a small black pile in a corner of the room, made up of the remains of the ants that have perished under the weight of his shoe collection, Joe never He realized that he had become part of a dynamic, of a relationship with an entity that was foreign and unknown to him, except for one fact: every night it sent an ant; one that Joe mechanically knocked out of existence, thus maintaining a balance, a balance he was unaware of.

Sin darse cuenta José se volvió parte de un macabro ritual diario, en el que era jurado, juez y verdugo. Cada día, alrededor de las 10 de la noche, sin importar que pasara en el mundo, José estaba en su casa para cumplir su parte del rito, casi como si ello definiera quien era. Desde la cama montaba guardia mientras leía a Kafka, a Orwell, a Nietzche, a Huxley; y entre página y página, miraba en espera del hormigón, con el zapato listo para cumplir con su destino.

One night, Joe waited until dawn and the ant did not appear. And the following days, neither. José had almost resigned himself to returning to his ordinary and meaningless life, when he noticed that the black mountain, formed by the bodies of the crushed ants, began to lose height every night, so he patiently waited for it to disappear completely, under the premise that the cycle would start again, and with this he would recover the role that gave him meaning.

The night after the mountain disappeared completely, Joe lay in bed reading as before, keeping watch for the ant that he was sure would appear. It is not known for certain whether it was from anticipation, anxiety, or simply lack of sleep that Joe at some point inadvertently fell asleep.

When he woke up, he looked at his watch and saw that it was 10 o'clock at night, so he breathed a sigh of relief. But immediately afterward he noticed that the dimensions of the room had changed.

Everything was huge, dark, dusty and totally out of scale, and after struggling to climb down from what he assumed was his bed, he remembered Kafka as he passed what looked like the base of a table or desk. A strange premonition, like a distant memory, suddenly broke into his head, and he was about to turn to confirm his suspicion, when the weight of a huge paw on his body prevented him from doing so by crushing it. Joe was right, a new cycle had begun.

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