Sometimes I Forget We’re Living in Outer Space and Have Been This Whole Time

A great many orchids, the endangered lady’s slipper for one, expend a portion of their energy creating pseudobulbs where they host ant colonies, because the formic acid ants spit at intruders gives the soil a pleasingly bitter pH.

This is an example of myrmecophilia, a way of being in a love relationship with ants. Though I think it sounds like how I love mermaids, because of the myrme– of their tails glimmering in the moonlight and then the –philia of the kinds of unions I wish were possible.

The myrmecophiliac caterpillar invites the ants who raised him to slurp his syrups: they massage, tickle, lap at his dorsal nectary. It is a dangerous pleasure for all. The caterpillar must transmit chemical appeasement signals through the milky nectar to keep the ants from suckling the skin right off his body. He beats and thrums warnings by drumming himself against the earth when the ants become too exuberant in their thirst.

I don’t know how to enter the mind of an orchid or a butterfly, a farmer, a commodities market, a soybeaned field of Roundup acres, but I know I love how mermaids are a kind of beautiful catfish monster. If a mermaid tells you the shore is near, it means you are about to drown. Like an orchid, her songs radiate across galaxies in a pitch human ears would find unbearable if they lived long enough to hear the song radiate back. An ant could live lifetimes inside that note, as could the Glaucopsyche lygdamus, the silvery blue, touching her antennae to the air above each leaf as she tastes for a site in an ideal position near the ant colony to leave this egg.

“Soo keiffer,” I have learned to croon from the bellows of my chest, and one of the huger caterpillarish beasts will lumber over to eat grass from my hand, then let me put my palm on the slick wet of her muzzle, knowing how an udder swells, milky and sweet, with each breath. The ants in this sandy soil are entirely invisible to us, the stars are getting farther and farther away. The monks were unequivocal in their manuscripts: mermaids do not have souls, only their world of water passing through the roots, through the limestone, through these blades of grass, through us all.

Read more from Issue 18.2.