Miss Womble, the fifth—grade teacher, came into the office. “Can I help? I know her；she lives next door to me. ”
“I suspect ants are in her shoes and stinging the living daylights out of her, but she won’t let us take off her shoes.” related Miss Bell.
Miss Womble was a great neighbor. She had even played Annie—over with us on occasion. She put both hands on my shaking shoulders and looked into my distressed, red eyes.
“Oh, yes,” she said, as if remembering a fact.“I had a bite from one of those ants. Did you know they are sock eaters? By the time I got my shoe off, that ant had eaten almost the entire bottom off my sock.” She nodded her head up and down as she looked at the other two adults. “Must be sock-eater ants.”
They returned the nod, as if they, too, had been bitten by sock-eating ants.
“Let me see here.” She freed my heel from the shoe. “Just what I thought. Those sock ants have eaten part of her sock.”
Miss Bell opened the medicine cab, got a cotton ball, and saturated it with alcohol. Miss Womble slipped off my shoe and sock and shook both of them over the