Beneath Ceaseless Skies #141

by Rahul Kanakia

  For a moment, I think that the soldiers are stopping, but then they jabber at each other in their language and their truck speeds up.

  Every so often, an ant straggles out of Papa and tries to justify itself: “We are so sorry. His movements demanded so much work from us. And we were so hungry and exhausted. And then everyone just started moving at the same time. But we came back! We repented!”

  I want to crush the ambassadors, but instead I smile at them and tell them that I love them and believe them and forgive them. For now, I need them. But when I get home, I will tell Mama to destroy every last one of the traitors.

  Guns go off in the distance. Trucks fly past on the road. The air is full of yelling. I tremble. I am not like Mama. I do not have deadly mandibles with which to fight off the Krauts. Why did Mama bring me into this world? She says that someday I’ll be a queen of men, but no human being has ever paid the slightest attention to my orders.

  Then Papa stirs. He sits up and rests his back against the side of the jeep. “Has it been long?” he says.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “It’s dark now.”

  He puts an arm around my shoulder. “Don’t worry,” he says.

  Then the air hisses through his teeth. His fingers are probing my shoulder. “What’s this?” he says. He’s poking the caved-in place in my shoulder.

  “Nothing,” I say. “My skin broke open a bit when I fell.”

  “But... you look so normal...” he whispers. He lifts up the sleeve of my shirt. I crane my neck to look at the wound. The pale skin flaps loosely to reveal a dark black carapace underneath. The patch of carapace is dented and has several cracks. It is the first time I’ve ever thought about what was inside me. The sight makes me happy. Beneath the skin, I am just like Mama.

  Then I see Papa’s face. His eyebrows are wide open and the skin on his forehead is creased. “But... it will heal, won’t it?” he says.

  I cover the hole with my sleeve. “It doesn’t hurt,” I say.

  “I thought... but you’re so strong....”

  On the road, a truck kicks up mud and then pulls to a stop. Men charge out towards us. They are holding rifles. I hiss and I prepare to jump at them. But then the lead soldier skids to a stop.

  “Shit,” he says. “It’s Papa!”

  Papa stands up. He’s smiling and holding a bottle of wine. “Took you boys long enough to get here,” he says.

  The soldier laughs. Soon we’re surrounded by soldiers. A few of them clamber into the jeep and Papa drives us all back into town. The drive is full of shouting and laughter, especially when Papa yells for me to climb into the driver’s seat at take the wheel. The soldiers cheer as the jeep lurches forward. For the first time, I realize that these soldiers are my boys too.

  * * *

  In our cave, Papa says, “You should’ve seen those Krauts squatting in their stolen farmhouses, slaughtering livestock and eating seedgrain. Well... our boys gave them what they deserved.”

  Mama’s only response is a slight change in the tones of her song. Papa cannot see how the entire floor of the cave is moving or hear how the air is alive with screams. Mama has called her entire kingdom—billions upon billions of ants—up into the cave to witness the execution of the traitors. Tens of thousands of ants are cut open and left to die on a slight hillock at the front of the cave.

  Papa, his body refreshed by an inflow of fresh ants, is rocking his body from side to side and beating the ground with his fist. “But our boys were something. They were wonderful. Ragged, but still fighting.”

  After a long moment, the screaming falls silent. The onlookers flow over the corpses of the traitors and then scurry back down into their tunnels. On their backs, they carry a chipped pewter bowl. Thousands of ants climb up to the lip of the bowl and regurgitate tiny drops of liquid into it. Finally, it hits Papa’s knee.

  “What the hell is this?” Papa grabs the bowl and dips a finger into it. “Some kind of pudding?”

  Mama says, “Our foraging parties are having difficulty finding more human food for you.”

  “The fucking Krauts have laid waste to the countryside.”

  Mama says, “But I remember stories from my mother. She says that she once fed a guest with our own food for quite awhile.”

  Papa pushes the food away. Ants scramble into it and begin devouring the food, but they’re arrested by a trill of song from Mama. “Two thirds of the houses were empty,” Papa says. “Their owners are probably starving in some labor camp.”

  Mama lifts up her body and dances through the darkness. She plops herself right on top of Papa, and says, “Why do you dwell on your peoples’ disintegration? In here, there’s no war. Don’t leave again. If you stay, I will keep you safe.”

  Papa tries to squirm out from under her.

  “You can’t understand,” Papa says. “Life is too simple in here. You know from birth exactly what you’ve got to do. You don’t need art or literature or courage or justice. But out there, people are free to do beautiful and terrible things.”

  “Someday we will have automobiles,” Mama says. “Our daughters will learn the song that your people need to hear. And then they will bring us automobiles. And wine. And typing machines.”

  “The only song that we understand is the song of freedom,” Papa says.

  Mama clacks her mandibles; they barely miss Papa’s face. He puts an arm on her back and slowly strokes her carapace. “There, there,” he says.

  “Stay here,” she says. “Soon enough, the rest of your daughters will hatch. They will need you.”

  “Our boys are so tired and thin,” Papa says. “I worry about them. Our generals don’t know shit.”

  Mama’s eyes are just a finger’s length from Papa’s. Her mandibles span his head. Another clack and he will be headless. Papa’s unseeing eyes stare right through her.

  His face twists. “You really want me to eat this bug-ridden mush? I can’t even see, dammit.”

  I call out, “There’s a lamp in the jeep. I can go get it, Papa!”

  “Olivia’s in here? Why would you start in on me when she’s here?”

  Papa picks up Mama by the waist and deposits her on the ground. Then he’s scrambling for his pack. “I need to go back out there,” Papa says. “Someone has to bear witness to all that madness and folly.”

  “Take Olivia,” Mama says.

  Papa is silent for a moment. I know he is thinking about my shoulder. He made me promise not to mention it to Mama.

  “A war is no place for a child,” Papa says. “Let her stay here and sing with you.”

  “She needs to make her own place,” Mama says. “I drove out my sisters, because I knew there was not room enough for all of us. Now I am larger than any queen that has ever existed. And there is not room enough for me. Olivia is larger still. You must teach her the songs that your people need to hear.”

  Papa slams a fist against the wall of the cave. The hand is swallowed up by the ants, and makes only a soft thud when it hits. “That doesn’t... that’s not possible! She will never lead real men. She’ll get chewed up and destroyed out there.”

  “My workers sometimes begin to think they are special, too,” Mama says. “They drag their feet and cry out for freedom and trumpet their dignity. And then I sing to them, and they forget everything but my voice.”

  Papa is groping his way out of the cave. I follow along just behind him. As we turn a corner, light floods around us and I see him transform. He stands up straight and stops crawling along, open-mouthed, slack and hesitant. He’s tall and strong now. Why can’t Mama see how the darkness saps him of his strength?

  I run forward and hug him.

  “Are you leaving us?” I say.

  “You’ll do fine without me,” Papa says. “Your mother, well she... I’ll always be grateful to her. She saved my life. But I can’t spend the rest of my life in a cave.”

  “At least let me come with you!”

  “You’ll have your sisters soon. They’ll
be more to you than I could ever be....”

  He throws his pack into the back of the jeep and climbs in. He’s about to drive away forever! I trill a tiny snatch of song, and, suddenly, his knee spasms. I rush forward to catch him as he falls. In his knee, the ants sigh out relief at the momentary cessation of work.

  “You’re still weak,” I say.

  “Dammit, when will these wounds heal?”

  He suffers me to lift him into the front seat of the jeep and says nothing when I climb up next to him.

  * * *

  We spend an entire night digging our way towards the basement of a farmhouse that the enemy has turned into a command center. Papa spells me sometimes, using a spade and a shovel to dig. But I sing some of the local ants away from their queen. They assist me, working constantly. And my flying fingers move more dirt than all the rest of them combined. My shoulder cracks sometimes, until I strap up the wound with tight bandages. Finally, I open the tiniest hole in the through the mortar of the basement and Papa sits there in the dirt and listens to the conversations of the enemy general.

  On the way back, we see a sentry and Papa’s face goes very still. He makes many hand motions to me. I think we are supposed to try to sneak around behind the sentry. But instead I weave a complex song and ants boil up out of the ground and invade the man. He falls down, twitching, while Papa whispers, “Dammit, that wasn’t necessary.”

  I sing out to the ants and they begin to take control of the man’s muscles. He rises up. The man shouts some words that I cannot understand, but then my ants clamp down on his throat.

  Papa’s eyes are wide. He looks at the Kraut as if he is me, and then he looks at me as if I am the Kraut.

  “It’s okay,” I say to Papa. “His body is ours now.”

  The sentry walks with us through enemy territory. His eyes dart from side to side, but the rest of him moves with sure-footed confidence: the ants inside him know this territory better than he ever could.

  When we are far enough from the camp, I withdraw the ants and leave him collapsed on the ground.

  “You can shoot him now!” I say to Papa.

  “Is he still alive?” Papa says.

  “I don’t know... Mama usually chops off their heads right afterwards. But I can’t do that. I don’t have the mandibles.”

  “That was... you enslaved him.”

  “He’s the enemy.” Is Papa confused? This has been a very tiring week.

  “You can’t do that again.”

  I know that Papa just doesn’t understand me, but he won’t listen to anything I say. Instead, he keeps muttering about enslavement until I finally promise him that I won’t use the bodies of any more Krauts.

  When we get back to town, he barges into the military headquarters and yells at a general. He files reports with his newspaper, but the generals say that the reports contain secrets, so Papa’s stories never appear in the paper. He screams into many telephones. Papa tells the generals where to strike, but they won’t listen.

  He pools the liquor rations of a whole battalion of officers and throws a party. It lasts for three days, although Papa and I are the only ones who stay the entire time. During the party, he loudly yells his recommended strategies to anyone who will listen. And, just as loudly, he berates the generals for their cowardice and stupidity.

  At one point, a lady journalist sits on his lap and one of the soldiers tries to guide me up to my room. But I shake free of his hand and move closer.

  The journalist says, “I hear you found a girl that you didn’t even know you had.”

  “Her mother’s a real monster,” Papa says. “But... she had something. A kind of fire to her....”

  “And will you go back to her?”

  This other queen is getting her smell all over Papa. I am not sure that Mama will want him back after this.

  Papa maneuvers the journalist off of his lap and onto a nearby chair. “You know... I didn’t think so,” he says. “But... there are more kids that need looking after. I bet they’d be something really special, those kids... if they could just be guided properly....” And then he looks at me in a way that I do not like. He tries to smile, but the smile is lop-sided.

  The next morning, while he is sick from liquor, he hears that the generals want to imprison him, so we escape back to the cave.

  “Not a moment too soon,” Papa says. “You’re getting too old to be around so many men.”

  We’ve been outside for a month, and I’ve changed tremendously. For weeks, I’d felt a strange pressure inside my skin. The pain, at times, grew intense. But then, one night, I dreamed that I was being sawed in half by a giant Kraut, and then I woke up to find my bed covered in viscera and broken bits of carapace. I felt my shoulder; it was renewed. My body felt strange. None of my clothes fit. My new carapace was six inches taller, had hair in new places, and the chest of a human queen. The carapace sat unsteadily on me; when I got out of the bed, I had to grip a chair to keep from toppling over.

  I didn’t want Papa to see the disgusting gore on the bed, so I forced myself into my old clothes and wrapped up the bedsheets and left the inn—luckily, it was still dark—to deposit the soiled load deep in the forest.

  In the morning, all Papa said was, “Hmm. We’ll have to get you some new clothes.”

  But when we reach the cave, I know that the nest has noticed the changes in me. The ants rustle as I approach, and they stay away from me. When a few of the ants from inside Papa run down to rejoin their former fellows, they’re butted and buffeted away as if they’d become part of a rival nest.

  The place smells different. Disgusting. Foreign. Before, it just smelled like home. What’s gone wrong with my senses?

  When we round a corner, we come upon Mama. Her head is flush with a barrel that she is shoving forward with her massive body. The barrel rides on a thick carpet of ants. Shockingly, despite the song trilling from Mama, I hear a few wisps of protest from the ants:

  “Please... it’s crushing me....”

  “We’ll go back to work... just a moment of rest....”

  As I come closer to Mama, my skin goes cold and all the tiny hairs of my body stand up. A sour taste hits the back of my mouth. Something about her repulses me.

  She turns away and leaves the ants to move the barrel on their backs. “So, you’ve become a queen,” she says.

  “I... I suppose.” I do not feel like a queen.

  Papa is tromping forward. He throws his pack on the ground in his own corner and is surprised to not hear it thump. He reaches out a hand and touches a mattress. “My god...” he says. He sits on the mattress and reaches for the almost-empty bottle of liquor that he left behind. When he pulls it up, the bottle is brand-new.

  “What have you...?” he says.

  He cannot see that the cave is stacked high with barrels of wine and pallets of cans and boxes of army rations. He takes a swig from the bottle and then pulls the blanket up around him. When he tries to lie down, his head bangs against a typewriter.

  “Was it very awful out there?” Mama says.

  I think I see the hint of a smile on Papa’s face, but then his expression becomes very grave. “The damn fools,” he says. “They’re leading our boys into the slaughterhouse. They’re throwing away lives by the hundreds of thousands and no one can stop them.”

  As Papa expounds on the generals’ idiocy, Mama turns her eyes to me. I never before realized how hard and dry and cold they could be. So different from my and Papa’s soft, liquid eyes. “How long will you be staying?” she whispers to me.

  I settle down near the entrance, as far from her as I can possibly sit.

  I am the largest queen that has ever existed.

  * * *

  Even before the first frost, I can see that Mother is slowing down. Still, she keeps acting recklessly. Before, she went months without ever leaving cave. Now, she goes out every day in order to forage for more food for Papa.

  While she is gone, I am terrified by the grumblings of the a
nts:

  “When the rest of the eggs hatch, we’ll have to work even harder....”

  “...it’s the human, he’s the one who’s seduced her...”

  “The other one is to blame as well... she eats so much...”

  I cannot sing loud enough to quiet them.

  Papa spends more time in his cot, drinking and telling stories to the darkness. Sometimes he likes to look at the almost-hatched eggs of my sisters and talk about the things that he’ll show them and the world that they’ll create: a kinder and more beautiful world. I think he has almost started to believe in Mama’s vision.

  In the mornings, he hunches over the typewriter and operates it with much cursing and banging and complaining about the darkness. Whenever he finishes a page, he quickly stows it away in his pack without letting me see it.

  Sometimes he gets geared up to go out, but Mother always arranges for his blind gropings to encounter an unopened bottle before he can leave.

  Finally, Papa says, “Dammit. You’ll have to do for now. People are dying out there, and I know that we can do something about it.”

  I am thrilled at the thought of leaving. Since we came back, the cave has only gotten more colder and darker. I wonder how Papa—who’s seen so much more of the world than I have—can stand it for even a second. We leave while Mama is out.

  Papa leads me along a side road. He’s in fine spirits. He even lets me drive the jeep. He wants to eavesdrop on their movements again, so he can pass the intelligence to the generals. But as we spy on an enemy convoy that’s stopped nearby, I realize something:

  “The generals won’t act on our information,” I say. “They never act on it. It’s up to us to win this war for them.”

  Unless I act, the Krauts will destroy the entire world. The weight of it makes my legs twitch. I finally understand what it means to be a queen.

  So I sing out and ants climb one of the enemy trucks and into the body of the driver. His mouth opens in horror as his body stamps onto the accelerator and runs over some of the soldiers milling in front of him. They shout and try to get out of the way, but the truck is too big and too fast. It collides with another truck and they both topple. The enemy is running everywhere, wildly. My Kraut screams apologetics as his hand pulls out his gun and starts shooting his former comrades. My ants go inside a few more of the Krauts and they begin to fire as well. Soon enough, everyone is dead.