Beneath Ceaseless Skies #141

  Issue #141 • Feb. 20, 2014

  “The Days When Papa Takes Me to War,” by Rahul Kanakia

  “Pilgrims,” by Ann Chatham

  For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  THE DAYS WHEN PAPA TAKES ME TO WAR

  by Rahul Kanakia

  The soft buzz of a distant plane silences the cardroom. Although we’ve heard no cries of alarm, the men cock their heads and prepare themselves to die: according to Papa, war makes death come quickly and for no reason and that is why soldiers are scared all the time. That seems sad to me. Soldiers should be happy to die for their queen.

  After the plane goes away, conversation revs up and then sputters silent like the motor of Papa’s jeep. Then it revs again and the words catch and fast chatter fills the cardroom. I am in a world of frenzied giants: humans in muddy uniforms, with hairy faces and rifles that never leave their sides. Though they are male, they are clearly more like soldiers than drones.

  In my world, I am the giant. No one down under the ground is bigger than me—no one except Papa. But here I am nothing, just a half-grown girl in a woolen dress. A few of the human queens have tried to touch me and sing to me, but I’ve pulled away. I know who my queen is, and I will not let a rival coat me with her musk.

  Mama is all-powerful. Even in this impossibly distant place, I can sometimes catch the faintest wisp of her smell.

  Papa downs the rest of his whiskey in one gulp. When he slams the glass onto the table, a cheer goes up from the men who surround us. Papa looks healthier than he usually does. His face is flushed red and his movements lack their usual herky-jerkiness. A line of ants crawls out of his ear and makes its slow way down, through the line of his big, bushy beard and under his shirt.

  I stand up high on the tips of my toes and whisper to them, in our language, “No, don’t come outside. Not here. Papa needs to look good for his people.”

  Most of them break and scurry back into his ear. But one ant says, “Princess, the tunnels within this man are clogged up and overflowing. Millions starve in the legs while, to the north, backed-up food rots away at the peripheries of the intestines. We simply thought to make an end run around the—”

  I crush the dissenting worker between two fingers. Papa laughs and says, “What are you picking at, Olivia?” He transfers his cards from one hand to the other and then puts it around me. When Papa moves, the men around us shift their stances. They want to see him play, but I can tell that they fear being touched by him. This is wise. If they fall any further under his sway, his musk will coat them and their fellow workers will no longer recognize them.

  “I want to go home, Papa,” I say.

  He laughs. “Don’t worry,” he says. “We’ll be home soon. I just came to see whether we’ve whipped those Krauts yet.”

  Then he is distracted by a soldier who darts out of the crowd with a dirty copy of a book that Papa wrote after fighting in a different war: one that happened a long time ago. Papa slaps the soldier on the back and signs the front of the book.

  Ever since I can remember, Papa has told me about the war that is currently raging amongst his people. But whenever I heard him say that he needed to go outside and find out what was happening to his boys, I thought he needed to find it out in the same impossible way that I needed to find out how deep the tunnels went or what made food taste so good after it was regurgitated. But no. He meant something different. He always does.

  Mama tried to tell him that he belongs to us now, and that our people do not have a side; for thousands of lifetimes, we’ve kept ourselves aloof from mankind’s horrible wars. But then Papa told Mama that if a bad man named Hitler was allowed to beat Papa’s side, then it wouldn’t be long before Hitler filled the world with a poison gas that would choke up and destroy all of our people.

  I did not want to come, but Mama forced me to. She said that the ants inside Papa would refuse to work unless a member of the royal family was there to guide them.

  He gathers me forward with his arm and catches the eyes of the soldiers. They all love him. Papa is a journalist, but everyone wishes that he was a soldier.

  “My darling girl,” Papa says. “Olivia’s just eleven....” The soldiers chuckle at the joke that they do not know is a joke. Actually, I was hatched eleven weeks ago.

  “God, she’s no bigger than my nine year old,” says one of the soldiers.

  Papa shakes his head. “Her mother was... she was a singer.” He gives them a faraway smile. “I met her before the war. But not much call for singing nowadays. And what with the shortages... things haven’t been too easy for Olivia. Her mother... well, we all have to go down under the ground eventually.” I feel the humor almost shaking loose inside him.

  “Mama enjoys being underground,” I say. “But Papa hates it.”

  One of the soldiers looks down at me with wet eyes. His hand twitches towards me and then goes still.

  Papa claps a hand onto my shoulder. “But now that Olivia’s come into my care, I’m gonna make sure she gets fed up right.”

  “When your convoy didn’t return, we thought you must be dead,” says the oldest soldier at the table. “The newspapers even published your obit.”

  Papa’s face loses its smile. “The Krauts hit the convoy. One of our boys held out for three hours, sniping them from under the truck, but it wasn’t enough. I took three bullets, and limped off into the fields to die.. Eventually, I collapsed in a vineyard and let my blood mingle with the soil. But the woman who owned the winery stumbled upon my body and cared for me. I spent the spring and summer hiding in the cave where she used to age her champagne. I shouldn’t have survived that day.”

  His body still wants to die. It is only kept alive by a million ants laboring inside him. When he gesticulates, I can see the flash of black under his shirt where the scurrying mass of ants is working to keep his wounds closed and his blood flowing.

  “We’re closing on Paris right now,” another soldier says. “Are you going to join the push? I hear it’s getting pretty hairy.”

  Papa is silent for a long moment, then shakes his head. “I have things that need to be taken care of.” He glances down at me.

  Laughter erupts around the table. I shut my eyes tightly. The musk of fear and excitement and anger momentarily overwhelms me. Papa’s people have marked this place—this whole surface world—again and again and again with scents that scream, “No! Do not come here!” And yet... here we are.

  I feel a presence off and to the side. A woman in an apron is jabbering at me in a language that I do not understand. I shake my head and hope she will go away, but she speaks softly and slowly and gestures with her hands. She crouches down low but does not approach me or try to cover me with her musk.

  She points over to the staircase, where two children sit. They smile at me. So, this woman is a queen. She blows her face up wide and makes an outsized chewing motion. I think she is asking me about food.

  I murmur, “Sugar...” even though I know that she will laugh and refuse, like all the other queens.

  But she smiles and goes off to a place at the far end of the room, where dozens of men crowd together and stamp their feet and wave their arms. When she returns, she’s holding a little tray of sugar. I bring it up to my face and carefully sample it with my tongue.

  She kneels a few feet from me and says things in a quick, low tone that is almost like a song.

  The soldiers are still laughing with my father. He is tense and motionless.

  The older soldier says, “It’s okay. The war’s almost over; it’ll go through to the end even without you, Ernest.”

  “Olivia!
” Papa shouts. “What’re you doing?”

  I startle. Sugar spills down my fingers.

  The woman stands up and is about to say something to Papa, but then the room falls silent. Outside, there is shouting. Then we hear the whine of a falling bomb. The room erupts. Men jump, men fall. The woman turns and knocks me down with a sweep of her arm. Then she is on top of me. I struggle to get out from under her. She is coating me with her scent!

  But there is something so beguiling about it. It is clean and pure and certain. It tells me that I am safe. I try to struggle free—it’s my duty—but I cannot escape. And then, as the whine gets louder, her pores unload all their pent-up fear.

  * * *

  Mama is as long as my leg: she is the largest queen that has ever existed. Her backside groans with the billions and billions of eggs that are constantly growing inside her. Her legs are like bayonets that are coated in velvet. Her eyes are as wide as the bottom of the wine bottle that Papa drinks from. Her belly is thick and hard and jangly as a soldier’s pack. And her mandibles are like two scythes. Once, when a man wandered into our cave, I saw those mandibles chop off his leg at the knee and then sever his screaming head.

  Papa sits at the edge of the cave with his shirt open. He holds a loaf of bread in one hand and tears off hunks of it with his teeth. Ants scramble over each other to reach the fallen crumbs. Millions upon millions of ants cover every inch of him, right up to and including his eyes. They push the blood through his body and remove the waste from his bullet-stricken gut. There are no complaints. Mama’s thick body vibrates with the multi-faceted tone of command that contains a strain of song for each and every worker. She drags herself through the groove that her belly has worn in the dirt floor and delicately thrusts her legs into the wall around Papa, so she is resting right on top of him. Her mandibles caress Papa’s cheek.

  The cave is dark and Papa can see nothing.

  He sighs. “I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of that song. When I first woke up in here, I was lying on the dirt and it was dark and I was bleeding, but that song told me that I was in the right place. When are you going to teach Olivia to sing like that?”

  “She will grow into her song.” Mama speaks without interrupting her song. Papa can only hear a fraction of it. It pours into me until I think I am on the verge of overflowing. But... today there is a part of me that it cannot reach.

  “I don’t understand why the Krauts had to kill that queen,” I say.

  “Careful,” Papa says. “‘Kraut’ is fine when we’re alone. But you’re supposed to’ve grown up around here. They’ll expect you to say ‘Bosche.’”

  “But she was so kind to me! And she wasn’t dangerous; she barely marked me at all. I don’t think she had even one single bit of territory.”

  “They’re monsters,” Papa says. “They’ll kill everyone they can’t enslave.”

  “But... they won’t win, will they?”

  “Maybe...” Papa says. “I don’t know. I heard some disturbing talk. Our generals don’t know what the hell they’re doing. Sometimes they’re timid and sometimes they’re reckless. We’re getting dangerously overextended. And each of their mistakes kills thousands of our boys.”

  “Well, if it’s just soldiers, then that’s fine,” I say. I’m relieved. “Dying is what soldiers are for.” Underneath me, the carpet of ants shifts slightly, but Mama soothes them with a change in her tone. She starts singing of the new territories they’ll open up with their deaths.

  Mama says, “You’ve seen enough, then? I need you here. The next group of princesses will hatch all too soon. You must teach them.”

  “Dammit, I saw a woman die today!” Papa says.

  His hand gropes around in the mass of ants by his side. He grabs a dusty green-glass bottle and unstoppers it. When he tilts back his neck to drink, he reveals a patch of white on his throat that rises and falls with the guzzling motions.

  “Can’t we help them, Mama?” I say. “The Krauts don’t just kill soldiers; they kill everyone.”

  The song changes and the ants boil over amongst themselves and I think she is about to fill me with anger and self-loathing. But instead she says, “It’s good that you care for your Papa’s people. Someday, they too will bow down to you.”

  Mama is the largest queen that has ever existed. But someday she will surrender that title to me.

  I am ravenously hungry. I hold out my hands and a stream of ants crawl into it. Each one deposits a little speck of sugar. When I bow my head down to lick up the sugar, I hear the murmur of the workers:

  “...carried this for a hundred thousand lengths...”

  “...almost walked into a poisonous spray...”

  “...didn’t take even a bite of it for myself...”

  I whisper down to them, “Thank you...” and they convulse with unexpected ecstasies. I lick up all the sugar, but I am still hungry.

  * * *

  It is only another week before we leave the cave again, but I’ve become much bigger: my human clothes barely fit. After we drive to town, Papa tries to talk to the generals and tell them what they are doing wrong. Wherever we go, he is treated like a queen, but somehow he cannot seem to speak to the person he wants.

  Then, a calamity.

  Papa runs out of wine. Because the enemy destroyed the last supply train, none of the soldiers have any wine to share, so we drive ahead, into the area that our boys have not yet taken back from the other side.

  To Papa, one side is the enemy, even though both sides love his books.

  I thought the enemy’s countryside would be filled with poison gas and ten-foot Krauts who danced on the torn-up bodies of innocent queens. But that is not the case. The other side is just like our own: huge ruts in the road, craters in open fields, collapsed houses, the charred wreckage of tanks and trucks. We drive through three villages before Papa decides to stop. He walks up to several houses and holds low conversations with their inhabitants before he finally emerges with a crate that is full of clinking bottles.

  On the way back, our jeep gets stuck in the mud.

  Papa leans on the back of the jeep and makes grunting noises while I hold the wheel and press down on the pedal when he tells me to. Finally, I get down and wander around back.

  The ants inside him poke out from the edges of his eyes and scream to me, “Please end this torture! We need to rest! We need—”

  I silence them with a snatch of song. I’m not as skilled as my mother. In her presence, they’d never even think to complain.

  He says, “Guess we’ll have to head back on foot. Doesn’t matter. This is a wonderful day.”

  “Why don’t you just push it?” I say.

  Papa laughs. “Isn’t it good to be out of that damn cave?” he says.

  I flex my toes and dig the tips of my shoes into a less-muddy part of the ground. Then I put my hand on the bumper and push the jeep forward.

  When I look at Papa, he’s stopped laughing. He’s not moving. “How long have you been able to do that?” he says.

  “Do what?” I say.

  He shakes his head three times and then, suddenly, he’s scooped me up off the ground and into the basket of his arms. He bounces me up and down a few times. I giggle.

  “You’re a tiny little thing,” he says. “I bet I could toss you right up into that tree.”

  “No!” I say, and suddenly I am not sure whether or not he’ll do it. Papa has told me enough stories to make me realize that he is capable of doing anything.

  He bounces me once, then twice, and then his arms go limp. I drop down onto the ground and roll in the mud and hit my shoulder, with a slight crunching sound, against the bumper of the truck.

  I slip around in the mud, trying to stand. Then I hear a squelch. Papa is on his knees. He’s striped with thin black lines of ants. They are spilling from his eyes and ears and nose and from the eternally open wounds beneath his clothes. The blackness pools at his feet.

  On my hands and knees, I scramble to his
side. His eyes are rolled upwards so I can only see the whites. Air is escaping from him, but he cannot say a word. I put my head down amongst the milling ants. Millions of voices whisper upwards. The ants are holding some sort of mass meeting:

  “...have to select our own leaders...”

  “...free of that death trap...”

  “Wasn’t so bad in the stomach...”

  “What are you doing! We have to go back! He’ll die!”

  “No! No more leaders... no more slavery... a free people should make decisions by consensus....”

  “The queen will be oh so angry!”

  “...his muscles are crowded with tens of thousands of dead workers. Can barely move amidst all the corpses.... “

  “I smell another queen nearby. We can ask her if she’ll take us in....”

  I scoop up a muddy handful of ants and lift them to my face. I fill my lungs and sing at them, “No! What are you doing! Get back inside of him!”

  Down around my knees, the puddle of ants tenses up and then shimmers. A few of them crawl up onto me and start biting me. Others run off and escape into the ground. And some straggle back up into Papa. I try to sing louder, truer, and more beautifully. I try to put out enough song to capture each and every one of the traitors. But so many of them escape.

  Still, it is enough remain. Papa’s eyelids finally close. His chest starts to rise and fall. He gasps and spits out the mud that flecks his lips. But he does not speak.

  My shoulder emits another crack when I pick him up, but I manage to deposit him in the back of the jeep, amongst his bottles of wine. I cover him with a tarp, and sit there with his muddy body for hours. Cold creeps down into me from the hole in my shoulder. I’m caked with mud that flakes away into dirt as it dries. I do not know how to drive the jeep and I’m not sure I can carry him all the way home. Where is home? We are so far away that I can’t even smell a hint of Mama.

  A truckful of the enemy approaches. I duck down low under the edge of the tarp. If they knew who we were, then they would certainly kill us. Now I understand why the enemy is so murderous; they kill every other queen so that their soldiers cannot betray them and join another nest.