As a result, around the steps to the cafeteria concrete slabs had been poured well after the building foundation had been laid. Looking at it, you would assume that there had originally been a walkway from the open-air halls to the steps of the cafeteria, and then later, as more space was needed, someone paved over the open ground so that students could eat outside.
As you know, concrete is often poured within a wooden framework, a framework that building contractors, especially ones employed by the county, don't always remove. You occasionally see a sidewalk with a section of one by two embedded in it. Or, more accurately, you see where that one by two used to be. In Florida, exposed wood doesn't last very long with the humidity and high insect activity. Ours is a prehistoric land ruled by reptiles and insects which humans have only recently begun to colonize in significant numbers with the advent of controlled environment technology, which down here we call AC.
Or maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the contractors did a perfectly acceptable job according to the local standards in putting down these slabs before time and gravity weighed upon them as they lean heavily upon all the Ozymandian constructs of man.
Either way, running from the corner of the building to the steps themselves, a gap blossomed from the thickness of a sheet of heavy construction paper to perhaps half an inch, so that either the patio or the building now seemed slightly askew. I'm not sure how the foundation of this building was constructed. Many older buildings in Florida have crawlspaces built beneath them. Though I don't believe that this one did, it definitely was no longer completely married to the ground.
Occasionally, I would sit on the steps waiting for the cafeteria to open. Not being much of a social creature, I tended to focus more on the world around me than on my fellow students. Looking down one day, I noticed that crack just below the brick facade where the foundation met the newer concrete. I also noticed that a darkness seemed to cling to it, making it appear deeper than just a gap between mismatched planes. When pale concrete reflects the bright Florida sun, there are tricks of light and shadow that can make you doubt what you think you really see.
A moment later, I noticed movement, the tentative exploration of a pair of antennae, just one at first. Any loose pebble sent skittering their way brought increased activity and more emerged. Not too far, not far enough to see the heads those antennae were attached to. But far enough that they could feel along the first fraction of an inch of concrete to see if any scrap of sustenance had dropped within reach. If a shadow fell across the opening, they went into full retreat. Should any gobbet or crumb drop near their entrance, a lone scavenger would dart out to retrieve it, while increased numbers crowded around in case more manna descended from the sky. That assemblage would grow to tens, then dozens, perhaps even hundreds. A forest sprouted up and down that tiny opening, masking the bodies one atop another, each beside or beneath a third, a sea of cilia like you might see under a microscope flagellating that half an inch of open ground before the entrance to their delve.
I can only imagine the immense number of creatures that eked out their existence beneath that foundation. An entire settlement of hundreds if not thousands occupying a warren they had expanded from what they saw as a natural cave, living on the detritus our microcosmic community had left behind. I can still imagine the night when they felt safe and comfortable enough to emerge and descend upon our leavings.
I don't really hold much against that colony. They were industrious creatures doing what needed to be done in order to survive, gathering food, excavating living space, feeding and raising their young.
Insects outnumber us by at least a trillion to one on this planet. Their populations grow as they live off our society's castoffs. Were we to disappear, they would inherit our planet in greater numbers than we can comprehend, even after our absence took its toll on the species most dependent on our sumptuously wasteful way of life. Recent studies at the University of Florida have found that cockroaches exhibit what is known as emergent behavior, that they show tendencies to make complex, group-based decisions. In other words, the beginnings of a hive mind.
In the opening scene of Blue Velvet, a 1986 movie directed by David Lynch, the camera zooms into an object on a well-trimmed lawn that turns out to be a human ear bereft of its owner. The camera then focuses through that ear and into the ground itself where it finds a number of insects moving through the earth and fighting one other. That scene is a metaphor for an unseen world, one we rarely witness, representing life in the margins just beyond our sight.
Our world is alive with such unseen colonies that few of us take the time to notice. Sometimes, those colonies wear human faces, and we willfully blind ourselves to their existence, much to our disgrace.
© 2008 Edward P. Morgan III
Bright red cardinals engage gray and white mockingbirds in a territorial war, each flicking from tree to wire, singing out their borders with madrigals of battle. A colony of jays erupts in a riot of shrieking blue until a vestal white egret stalks innocently from their lair. Ospreys haunt an aerial highway concealed below a canopy of adjacent trees and homes as they hunt the margins between more bountiful lakes. A dusky heron stands in water as still as the reeds concealing him while fingerling fish dart between his legs unaware of the danger until his yellow bill flashes like lightning from a clear, blue sky. 
