Johan Ramis Moya began writing in 1999, sparked by romantic disillusionment and the death of his father. He received his first literary grant in 2006 for a book of stories titled "Post-History", and that same year won a spot in the short story collection "Internacional Dinosaurio" with "The News." The following year, "National Theater" was also published. In 2008 Johan was a finalist for the Gaceta de Cuba Short Story Prize, one of the island's most prestigious literary prizes, with the story "Anathema of the City". He now studies theology, works in the National Library as the donation coordinator, and is a fan of many English-language writers, including Hemingway, Carver, Bukowski, Pound, and Nabokov, among others.
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An ant wishes to reach the other side of the road. The first option for achieving her aim is to venture across a construction zone, where a group of lively workers go from one side to the other as they steal cement, sand, and bricks destined for a tourist hotel. The ant stops and thinks. She says to herself that she does not wish to die beneath a worker’s boot, and pictures her body sprawled on the sand that is collected into sacks with such swiftness, to end up being a fossil stuck to the wall of a proletariat who dreams of having a house like the hotel he builds. The second is to cross a dangerous residential avenue. But neither does she like the idea of being left embedded beneath the wheel of a luxurious automobile of some bourgeoisie capitalist and left to die, like an insignificant ant. A profound existential crisis takes hold of her. It is not the act of dying that distresses her, but the inevitable ideological connotation surrounding the probability of her death.
Translated by David Iaconangelo. Photo from Centro de Formación Literaria Onelio Jorge Cardoso
