Chemical Warfare

• Lori Palminteri
• Uncategorized
• July 2, 2025

It was a quiet, hot weekend in Astoria, Queens. Summer wasn’t just in the air, it was the air. Gardens tended to by neighbors flourished with color and floral smells. A drastic and welcomed contrast to Manhattan that would, from now until September, reek of piss. Until Labor Day, all roads to eastern Long Island would be packed on Fridays, people desperate for a beach break from their work week. And on Sundays, the traffic back crawls like a million ants, returning to their Queen.

On this particular day, actual ants, a steady line of two way traffic, were rained upon by bleach suds, writhing and drowning in the toxic bubbles, as I, their executioner, explained to them, “if you stopped coming into my house, I wouldn’t have to do this! You brought this on yourself!”

I wouldn’t say we had an “ant problem” as much as it was an ant foreshadowing problem. Seldom did I ever have more than a handful of ants trying to make their way into my refrigerator. But, behold, each morning I woke to having to murder several ants. Summer is the ants favorite season. We have that in common. And our deep love of sugar. And the similarities stop there.

In the Spring, I filled tiny holes near the cracks of doors is cayenne pepper. Cayenne pepper is a good way to deter ants before they become a problem. The spice messes with their antennae. Peppermint oil is also a good way to keep ants and other pests at bay, while making your home smell fresh. However, my preliminary efforts were not forceful enough for these tiny soldiers.

With the exception of maybe like five different insects, I deplore bugs with a near insanity. Every time I kill a mosquito, I feel like a super hero doing the whole world justice. Few times in my life do I wish I had a boyfriend more than when there is a bug to kill. On occasion, I get a house centipede in my apartment. And I know, like spiders, these are relatively okay pests to have because they kill other insects. Though the house centipede is an unsightly little monster. Once, I sucked one up with a hand held vacuum. Because I could still see it alive inside the dust chamber, I threw away the entire machine.

My love for nature is combated with my hatred for bugs. But generally, if they are outside and not on me, we can all live in peace. Cross the border into my home or on my skin, and surely, it means war. This is how the ant genocide started.

My landlord was away that weekend, so I took it upon myself to be the hero and rid our (technically, theirs) property. From out the door, down the wall of the house, across the driveway, and into the shrubbery, the ants communicated in their weird robotic way, knowing there was food inside, despite the fact that they keep dying to get there. So I sprayed down their path with the suds, only to wake up to find ants in my kitchen again, and an even heavier trafficked road of ants. Some of them were carrying the bodies of the dead. Instead of foreseeing what the dead bodies of the ants meant for the living ones, it’s almost like they liked the fact that I “cleaned” their pathway.

“How are you guys not getting that you are marching to your deaths?” I had to escalate things. Under my sink, I found a rusted bottle of ant killer that I think has been there since before I moved into that apartment (so over a decade ago). It no longer sprayed, but kind of just leaked a little bit. There wasn’t enough to cover the Oregon Trail of ants. Much like the characters of game of Oregon Trail, most of these ants will die, not of rattlesnake bites or dysentery, but at hands of a young woman who looked at ants the way The Punisher looked at the people who killed his family.

As kids, my siblings and I used to use WD40 to cruelly kill earwigs. A behavior my parents didn’t punish, but encouraged. It was a useful tactic. The earwigs fell from between the cracks of the wooden deck as they were blasted with a metal lubricant, and we laughed and laughed at their pain before their imminent death. I guess WD40 was relatively cheap, because we always had bottles of it in the garage and we didn’t get in trouble for using it on our bike spokes or massacring bugs. If killing insects was an early sign of becoming a serial killer, we’d be troubling kids. Our death wishes did stop at insects though.

In my little apartment, I did have a can of WD40, and memories of my childhood sadism flooded my brain, like how the WD40 would soon flood the ants. I sprayed them down. I sprayed them all down. The driveway looked like Normandy Beach, but with ants.

Look, I know you really have to get to the Queen to fully stop an ant invasion. Later, my landlord would set traps to have the ants return the poison to their master. But at this moment, it was gorilla warfare between me and hundreds of six legged creatures. They had fair warning. It didn’t have to be this way. They could have gone somewhere else. Being hell bent on getting inside the house was a direct road to Hell as long as I’m a gatekeeper.

The following day, there were no ants in my apartment. Their conga line had mostly  disappeared. Where there were once many ants, now there were few, confused about what happened to their comrades, as if the scent of the lingering chemicals wasn’t enough to clarify the foreshadowing of their own fate if they continued down this road.

I wondered if the ants believed they were the good guys. To be fair, they weren’t the bad guys. They were just being ants. I guess that made them all the easier to feel justified in killing them… they don’t believe anything. They will do anything, without question, that a fat assed female tells them to do. No thinking, just taking orders. Like far too many people I know.