by Elizabeth Davis
We burn. But that is fine. We have burned for many generations. Such as here. Life here is good. We come back heavy with food, and our young grow strong. Already wings have sprouted on the new queen, and it will be soon, we know. We eagerly bustle through our tunnels, made easy in this dirt. The cool soil protects our young from the beating sun and those that would steal them, winged things with hard beaks.
Not that they try much anymore. For we are fierce and have reared our young on the flesh of those that seek to eat us. We have become quick leaving just the bones, and the hearty diet makes our young strong. Their exoskeletons are hard and mandibles sharp. We wonder how large the next hive will get, hope rushing alongside us.
For we no longer fear the lands outside our home as we once did. We march confidently as we scout, some of us going many dark and light cycles to return with strange treasures. More than food. More than leaves.
Sometimes it’s nothing but click-words that fill the air that seep in and let us dream stories. Of the other hive-kingdoms they had come across, the ones that wonder at a loner when safety is in numbers, and of their ways, raising caterpillars, or living in the bark mountains. Some tell of giants.
The new queen asks about all this, especially the sun. We know why, for she burns like the rest of us. She asks about the great light that awakens the plants and brings new scents into the tunnels. She asks about its colors and how far up it is, fluttering her still developing wings. We know that she brags to the males that she will forsake them all and mate with the sun. The males whine to us about her boasts when we feed them, each one gorging themselves to feed the flames inside of them brighter and brighter.
We lovingly soothe them with our antennae, sending safe and warm pheromones. The old queen stirs from her slumbers when we carry off her latest batch of eggs, telling the males not to worry, that she boasted the same thing when she still flew. Yet her males do not drop to the ground unfulfilled still burning. Hers become ash, their fire passed on to the next generation and generation after that.
Still, life is better than before. So much better than before.
A before none of us saw first-hand but all of us remember. A before with no sun, the light cold and blue. A light that never enchanted our queens for it was always there, invading through the walls of our home. Our hive narrow and constrained. The dirt there was sparse, pushing against slippery clear crystal where monsters watched us. Horror stories of scrambling against this slippery surface, feet failing to hold. Then suddenly a great shadow loomed. The fake sun would be gone and we were watched by a silent giant that took its place.
These giants smelled of nothing, but they moved like all living beings. White shells over pink flesh, their eyes were small and too close together. They were strangely smooth, only a few sprinklings of hair. But worse were their mouths. For they were like antlion pits, smooth and tight until a wrong step and then they opened, into an endless dark tunnel. A tunnel that could swallow the colony whole, locking them away in their stomachs.
Many of us choose to look away, to keep our heads down. To continue to dig, forage, and nurse. To not think about the giants that could be looming overhead, watching our every step. The giants whose appendages would reach down, scooping us away, taking us far from the reach of family, and then they were gone out from our memories.
The mother of the mother of the mother of our queen did not look away. She listened, hearing with more than just feeling for the vibrations as the ground shook against the walls of the giants coming. She learned that they don’t always open their mouths to eat or fight. But to communicate, shaking everything with each thought. She learned to parse their sounds, breaking them down into concepts like “pests,” “invasive species,” and “extermination.” Concepts that made her mutter in her sleep. Workers heard them as dire prophecies and they were puzzled. Why would the giants wish to wipe us all out? What threat could we pose to them? We never led raids against their colonies, carried off their young — how could we?
But monsters don’t need reasons. We learned that on the day that multiple shadows loomed over us. They talked and shook the ground as one of their appendages reached down. It was a gray thing, covered in thick hide, one that our stingers could not penetrate. It extended down into our tunnels, gliding through each curve and twist. It was more like a proboscis or a stinger than a limb.
It emerged from neither front nor back but from somewhere beyond the two giants standing over us, their bodies twisted as they pushed it forward.
Then we who were fighting, we who climbed onto the appendage, we who plunged our stingers in again and again, even after their venom was gone, we who tore with our mandibles, dooming ourselves to starvation as they broke against the tough shell. We were the first to notice the change, the new smell that broke the familiar hive chorus.
Then the pain began. The queen watched helplessly as we fell around her, legs collapsing with spasms, bodies wrenched in twisting shapes by the pain, the pain that clogged our breaths and left us burning. Burning like venom from other hive-kingdom soldiers as their stingers broke through our armor, leaving us dying. Burning like sun when caught by floating crystal above, making a concentrated beam that drifted one to another, leaving desiccated corpses in its wake. The bright burning army that raged over our lands, destroying those who didn’t run fast enough inside, those who dared to stay out in the forest for just one more morsel of food.
We know all this because the same burning came upon her. She writhed, twisting her back as the giants stood around, “satisfactory,” “better than the last batch,” “we will have to move on the next stage of testing with this formula.” As she writhed, the queen thought of us, still just eggs in her. She thought of the great battles won by our ancestors, of the lands we had left behind. Lands of much food and easy living. Lands of hard wood, stealing the crumbs the giants dropped, where digging too far brought you to endless water. Of when the endless water invaded our lands. And we clung together, the corpses of those who drowned keeping the rest safe as we floated away.
All of that would die with her, for she had not hatched a new queen yet, one to carry her memories to a new colony, to remember if we were to perish. So she held on despite the burning, her body wracked with pain. Even when death would be a mercy, she held on, burying the burning deep to regain some control of her limbs, of her body.
For when we forget everything else, we still remember to dig.
Slowly she started to walk, dragging her body through the piles of corpses. As she left behind the birthing chamber, she felt the giants talk. “Anomaly, resistance, tests, tissue extraction, dissection.” Then one of the clear walls that had defined our lives, our tunnels swung away, hitting her with cold stunning air. She fumbled without its limiting support and a giant reached in.
Only two of its claws were needed to grip her tightly, leaving her flailing in the air as it dragged her away from her graveyard home. Away from the home we had built. She was not a worker and lacked the sting, but still she reached down, grasping the thin chitinous plates of the giant in her mandibles. She felt them puncture through and she pushed the burning that filled her into those two small punctures.
The giant dropped her as it trembled from its own high pitched screaming. She fell far, breaking one of her legs. But she was free to drag herself away as the other giant attended to his brethren, who thrashed on the floor like her children had before a painful exhale. Flames broke through his shell, making his innards run like water down a hill.
It was beautiful, those flames, beautiful like the sun, giving off light that battled the cold blue light that marked the land of the giants. She now understood what burned inside her, the beauty that her next generation would be filled with.
Fire ants the giants had named us, and it is a good name. For we carry the fire within us. A fire that burns through any carapace, a fire that leaps from our mandibles ready to consume. Our queen went far away, and her daughter even further, the fire sustaining them. But occasionally we see giants cast their shadow, reckless in their size to us until they feel our bite.
And they will. Again and again. Until they learn to no longer cast their shadows between us and the sun.
* * *
About the Author
Elizabeth Davis is a second generation writer living in Dayton, Ohio. They live there with their spouse and two cats – neither of which have been lost to ravenous corn mazes or sleeping serpent gods. They can be found at deadfishbooks.com when they aren’t busy creating beautiful nightmares and bizarre adventures. Their work can be found at 42 Stories Anthology, Luna Station, and Scarfice from Duskbound Books.