THE BATTLE OF KITCHENGRAD: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

That energetic crowing from the Pathé cockerel announced grim news. War!
   They broke the Treaty of Outside and advanced through Saint Gardensburg with one steady aim: the invasion and annexation of Kitchengrad. The bastards.
   Advance scouts struck by dawn’s early light, and, when local forces finally responded…our intrepid reporter discovered that the kitchen floor was a hot mess of ants. Outrageous. How dare they?! Get the propaganda out of the cupboard and dust down the fighting talk.
   The Six-Leg Commies were noodling around, looking to seize the means of production and any droplets of water they could find. My belated counter-offensive was, despite my initial annoyance, rather compassionate – all options considered. I employed the services of a special prison normally reserved only for Eight-Leg Capitalists.
   Capitalists will scurry all over the place, walls and all and then some, come September. They are around. In force. Looking for trouble. The bastards. And, when they are spotted out and about indoors…
   I reach for the Spider-Glass™ and Spider-Paper®. Then I capture the Capitalist humanely and, just as humanely, deposit the Capitalist in the depths of the garden, there to fend for itself until eaten by a larger Capitalist or passing bird. Now this is the Law of the Jungle – as old and as true as the sky.
   My ability to capture meandering flies with the glass prison and paper technique is certainly improving. But the see-through prison isn’t great at capturing those petty Anarchists. Better to herd the bastards to an open window and expel them with a swift kick up the window pane.
   When it comes to capturing Capitalists under glass, there are two tricky propositions.
   One, the Capitalist with legs wider than the mouth of the glass. Tricky, indeed.
   Two. Jumping Capitalists. Trickier, by far. Nothing to do with the Wall Street Crash of ’29 and tall office buildings, given that brokers tended not to jump en masse from anywhere. That’s all fiction, damn it. These Eight-Leg Capitalists wear a safety harness, anyhow. Webbing is funny that way. Well. Damn.
   No, not Wall Street. This street. Where the Zebra-Striped Capitalist lurks on folds in curtains. “It’s curtains for you, y’bastard.” Said no one, ever, when trying to contain one of the twitchy Capitalists next the window.
   The curious thing about my invisible prison is that you can capture a Capitalist in it. A Capitalist. Just the one. If you ever attempt to catch two Capitalists in there, why, one will inevitably drain the other. Now this is the Law of the Jungle – as old and as true as the sky.
   This is also true of a prison holding one Capitalist and one Communist, if you can pack them in there. The Capitalist will convert the Communist to the Capitalist’s cause, in a most direct fashion. Why would you imprison both, though?
   It is, quite clearly, near-impossible to put a Capitalist and a Communist in the same prison cell. Murder in the dark is the only possible outcome. It would also be fucking maddening to try to capture one spider and any number of ants inside the glass jail.
   Another curious thing about my invisible prison is that you can capture around three Communists in there. Any more than this, and there’s a risk that they’ll form a Presidium. Before you know it, a weak-kneed Tsar is deposed and there’s violence at railway stations and Post Offices. The odd bakery. Well, we can’t have the disruption of baked goods. That serves no purpose.
   Anyway, I grabbed the sturdy glass that normally traps spiders and I used it on three ants at a time. Out they went in rapid-fire succession. No shots fired. The Fifth Column could no longer infiltrate Kitchengrad – not after the political landscape altered before the start of summer.
   Basically, I did away with the dark kitchen carpet. That changed the game.
   The kitchen carpet’s replacement was a light vinyl number. And there they were, for the whole world to see, breaching the Treaty of Outside. Ants, in their millions. Okay, dozens. Two dozen, at most. More than a handful, damn it. The infiltrators were exposed to the harsh light of day by the cold touch of vinyl. Could I blame these Communistical agitators for going on the march?
   I keep the food preparation areas as clean as inhumanly possible. That’s one thing. We’ll call it a good thing. Weather, however, being outside, is well outside my control. Sad, but true – and most likely for the best, in the long run. Once the dry spell turned into a near-permanent thing, the ants went on the hunt for water.
   And I provided that liquid content. In the form of vinegar, all over the kitchen floor. First, I smeared a big oval of vinegar in a thin line around the main area of invasion, containing the enemy forces. Second, I used the glass prison to escort the soldiers back to their own country.
   Job done. A few Bolshevik stragglers appeared over the next minute or so. (All the Mensheviks went to the wall in an earlier phase of the revolution.) The straggling pilgrims hadn’t quite received the memo from on high.
   To outside observers, I materialised in the garden at regular intervals, performing a ritual dance with a glass in one hand and the paper prison door in the other. It is far easier to put Communists in prison. Ejecting them from jail seems strangely difficult, as though they wish to martyr themselves in prison and be more effective from there.
   Spiders, most spiders, find the glass jail slippy. Ants stick to it like, well, ants. You really have to shake the bastards out of there, or coax them with the corner of the former prison door – the piece of paper. And on this piece of paper, there was a new treaty…
   I believe it is peace for our time. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts. Go home and get a nice quiet sleep.
   Next. Vinegar on the doorstep. I’d had quite enough, herding these Commie Cats who were really just ants. Valiant struggle leads to a well-won reward. Coffee for myself. A break from hostilities. Peace for our time. Time, though, can be measured in small units.
   I returned from an invigorating coffee to fight the Second Battle of Kitchengrad. My chemical defences were deployed around the kitchen door and also at the back door. But the old landscape remained in a buffer zone – the back hall carpet is dark.
   You couldn’t see all the discombobulated ants who were lost when the blast doors closed at both ends of the Danzig Corridor. Or something like that. Perhaps I should do away with the Danzig corridor and add more vinyl.
   The vinegar dried in quickly, and, at its weakest point, the defence crumbled. This Maginot defensive line only had to fail by the width of an ant. I should have used stained vinegar instead of the clear stuff. At least then I could see where my own defences were. Or weren’t.
   Cut off at both ends, the ants followed the corridor trail back to the ant-sized crack in the door they were all exploiting to get inside in the first place. They noodled around there, holding some sort of Communistical meeting. In the other direction, they made an accidental assault on Kitchengrad once more. Blundering in with slogans on placards.
   The Commissars had returned to that part of the kitchen outside the initial oval of vinegar. Bastards. I surveyed the fresh round of chaos. What was their aim? They ventured as far as the sink, where there were water splashes aplenty. Ants never made it as far as the food preparation area. No trail of crumbs to pick up on, y’see.
   This second, smaller, incursion was much easier to manage. And then, of course. Chemical warfare in the wake of further operations. This time I sloshed clear vinegar on the vinyl floor and took the sacred Mop of Justice to every corner I could find: especially places where I hadn’t seen any ants – those areas could serve as trails back in across the vast plains if left unattended.
   After that second sortie, it was chemical warfare all over again, again. Pepper. I keep a large supply of vinegar for cleaning. And I keep a decent supply of pepper for food. I ground the pepper down at the main door and the kitchen door. Corners. Obvious trails. Those areas now look a little dusty, but low-level chemical warfare is better than the high-grade stuff.
   I don’t keep Ant Powder™ in the house. Pepper is the only powder of that nature I’d consider. Is that true? There’s always the ultimate nuclear option, which I don’t like to contemplate – based on the notion of fallout directed back my way.
   Coffee grounds. Ants hate coffee grounds. But to use the nuclear force at my disposal means less coffee for me in the long run.
   And, in a grim war against the Soviet Ant Machine, that really would lead to Mutually Assured Destruction.