This was my first published feature story. I love all the detail I was able to include from my reporting, including weather information I back-traced from metadata included in an iPhone reference photo sent to me by a source.
The man showing James Morgan around the vacant assisted-living duplex pointed at the baseboards: “This is what we’re dealing with.”
In the empty room, the problem was obvious. Piles of dust covered the white baseboards like dark snow, collecting in drifts against the wall and spilling out four and five inches onto the floor. It was the same in the living room and the bathroom—mounds of black dust against tan laminate tile. But when Morgan leaned down for a closer look, he realized it wasn’t dust; it was death. The carcasses of thousands of reddish-brown ants, no more than an eighth of an inch long, heaped against the base of the wall. In Morgan’s sixteen years as an extension agent, he had never seen anything approaching the number of ants indicated by the mass of corpses on the floor.
Read more at atlantamagazine.com. Illustration by The Red Dress.
Jessica Norton 