the anthill stirred with a stick
Also the living room evening resembled an anthill which had been stirred with a stick; it was too full of persons, all of them restless and loud.
Context
Ennet House at full documentary density on group-intake night — the room overfull and roiling, a man without hands and feet working the stairs, and just outside the window a would-be resident being sick in the bushes before he can even ask to be let in. The institution shown not as doctrine but as the raw physical fact of it: the door recovery advertises is a stirred anthill, and the price of admission is arriving at it this wrecked.