ants
by Chad R. Miller
It’s a scroll, a fictional memoir, and a modern-day ghost story. It’s a portrait of a place and time, a person, a situation, and a state of mind. It’s “the words of words and thoughts.”
In Chad R. Miller’s ants, a nameless narrator lives a double life, floating along the margins in two unfamiliar worlds. He works by day as an English teacher in Southeast Asia while also studying writing at a university in the American Midwest. One is a world of searing physical directness and delightful mysteries, the other a cerebral and virtual realm in which he interacts with Americans who are eleven and a half hours behind and eight thousand miles away. Struggling to keep his feet on the ground and his identity intact, he anchors himself by writing small observations about matters of local immediacy: geckos, street dogs, fires, ghosts, and ants.
