the grasshopper and the ant

Editor’s note: Funny how hard it’s been to find the discipline and motivation even to repost my old writing once a week. As usual, I’m relearning old lessons about motivation, attention, and routine. But that’ll be a story for another day, and I suppose late and half-assed is better than never.

This next one is a deep cut from my old blog. The summer of my freshman internship, I made a resolution to respond to one post on r/WritingPrompts every day. I wanted to write more regularly, get feedback, and I had vague dreams of some editor discovering my writing and freeing me from the steady march toward white collar office work that I saw in front of me. No such luck.

I mostly responded to weird and obscure prompts, so I didn’t get much feedback. This post was a notable exception. It was by far my most successful story that summer, I got around 200 upvotes and a handful of kind comments. The prompt was: Write a children’s story that turns into the most moral-lacking piece of work possible.

I had two goals with this story. The first was to try to set tone using sentence structure and vocabulary. For most of the story, I use simple words, short sentences, and familiar phrases to try to create a feeling of comfort and familiarity. Later, at the climax, the sentences get longer and the words get harsher to make the ending hit harder. I think I succeeded there, from the comments, but it’s a subtle effect that’s hard to measure.

The second was to write a story where everything goes to shit but nobody’s entirely right or wrong. Where the hero is partly to blame and the road to hell is properly paved with good intentions. In that sense, one of the comments on the Reddit post still sticks with me as the best compliment the story could have gotten: “Grasshopper just tryin' to get his dick wet. Nothin' wrong with gettin [sic] yo dick wet.”

All that said, the story is a little crude. Trigger warnings, and all that. The original post can be found here on Reddit, and here on my old blog.

Once upon a time, in a village in a beautiful meadow, there lived an ant and a grasshopper.

The ant was a cobbler, and made shoes for the entire village. He loved his job and worked very hard, from morning 'til night, and made enough shoes for the entire village all by himself. And not only did he always charge fair prices, he was very kind and understanding of anyone who fell upon hard times. He had a wife and a daughter who he loved very, very much, and lived a peaceful and happy life.

Nobody quite knew what the grasshopper did, but everybody loved him. He was handsome and charismatic and fun to be around, and he always generous. His father had left him enough money that he would never need to work again, they said. But nobody really cared, so nobody really knew.

The ant and the grasshopper were good friends.

One day, the grasshopper asked the ant, “Why do you only make one type of shoe? Everybody looks the same. If you made different kinds of shoes for everyone, then everyone could have their own kind of shoe.”

The ant replied, “It's much easier if I just make the same kind of shoe for everyone. That way, they get their shoes more quickly and don't have to pay as much.”

“Oh,” the grasshopper replied. “That makes sense.” He still seemed pensive, however, and soon after left the ant's shop.

The grasshopper then started his own shoe store, where he sold all kinds of different shoes. He never made the same kind of shoe twice, so everyone who came to his store left with a shoe that nobody had ever had, and that nobody would ever have again. For the people of the village, who had always worn the ant's plain shoes, this was very exciting. The grasshopper's shoes weren't made as well and didn't last as long, but money wasn't a problem for most of the villagers. They'd bought their shoes cheaply for so long that they all had plenty saved. Eventually, everyone bought their shoes from the grasshopper's store and nobody went to the ant's store anymore. The ant steadily fell into bankruptcy.

One day, going out to party as usual, the grasshopper saw the ant at the bar. The grasshopper had never seen the ant at the bar before; he didn't even realize that the ant drunk at all. The ant looked very sad. The grasshopper went over and asked the ant, “What's wrong?”

The ant replied, “Nobody comes to my store anymore. I haven't sold a single pair of shoes for the past year, and I'm not sure how I'm going to feed my family anymore. I'm deeply in debt. Nobody seems to want my shoes anymore, but making shoes is the only thing I know how to do. I love making shoes, and I've only made shoes my entire life.”

The ant almost never left his store these days, so he didn't know about the grasshopper's store. And the grasshopper was so busy these days that he hadn't met with the ant in a long time. The grasshopper told the ant about his store, and told him he felt bad that he'd taken away all the ant's business. He offered to buy all of the ant's remaining stock, and the ant was so thankful for the opportunity to pay off his debt that he immediately agreed. Out of their longstanding friendship, the grasshopper offered a very generous price.

The grasshopper painted on the sides of all of the ant's shoes and sold them in his store. The people of the village loved the paintings, and they loved even more how much more comfortable these shoes were than the shoes that grasshopper had made previously. They sold very quickly, and the grasshopper became even richer. Seeing the opportunity for a fruitful collaboration, the grasshopper reached out to the ant and proposed a system: the ant would make shoes to the grasshopper's design, and the grasshopper would color and sell them.

This partnership was very successful. However, as the grasshopper got richer and richer, he hired more and more ants, and he saw no reason to pay these ants nearly as much as he paid his friend. However, the other ants complained, and the grasshopper decided that it wasn't fair the he paid his friend so much for the same work the other ants did. So he paid them all the same, and the ant fell into poverty again. And as the grasshopper's business grew even further and he became even busier, he no longer remembered that one of the ants who worked for him had once been his friend, and never again reached out to help. Out of desperation, no longer to able to support a household of three, the ant sold his teenage daughter into slavery. As it so happens, the grasshopper was looking for a new bitch to fuck that day, and the ant's daughter was very beautiful. So he bought her, ruined her pretty mouth and pink cunt, and chained her to one of his factories when she was too old to entertain him any longer.

And the grasshopper lived happily ever after.