Victoria’s Secret

Victoria was a single mom.  But through a clear-sighted assessment of her immediate situation; a carefully cultivated positivism; an iron-willed determination to achieve her goals at any cost; and an inherited tendency toward objectivity, she managed to avoid much of the bitterness and self-recrimination that all too often accompanies that classification. 

            Looking back, Victoria had done everything that had been expected of a young female in her demographic.  She’d been a model daughter: quiet, obedient, and attentive to her duties.  She’d listened respectfully to everything the queen-mother told her, had simply nodded her heart-shaped head even when the queen’s most frequent adage—“One does what one must”—assaulted her early idealism.  And when the time came, in spite of her personal feelings, Victoria had obligingly grown her wings and swarmed up with her brothers and sisters to mate.  Then she’d submitted to the most attractive male, as was her right and privilege as a full blooded Leaf-cutting Ant, and she certainly had never blamed her mate for doing what he did then—i.e. die—right after they’d consummated their union.  Then she’d flown back down to earth, as was expected, shed her wings, and set to work.  And it was this realization—that she had done every single task required of her, and with dignity and a willing heart—that had gotten her through the salad days of her new life as a single mother and the trials that were to follow. 

            It was frightening in the beginning, even though she’d followed the queen-mother’s directives to the letter.  As instructed, Victoria had carried a bit of the family fungus in her mouth to the nuptials, nourished it with her own fecal matter, and had laid her first brood in its warmly growing midst.  But the laying of eggs was something she felt that one could never be fully prepared for.  It took so long, was one thing.  And there were so very many of them—over one hundred eggs first time out—was another.  The pain was something else, but she had been trained to bear pain, hardship, heartache.  One did what one must, for the good of the colony.

            After they hatched, she sent ten of her firstborn out to gather leaf fragments.  “Now march!” she told them.  “And don’t you dare come back without them,” she said.   As queen, it was important to be authoritative—the future of their new fungus garden and, by extension, their very existence, depended upon it.

            “Good job,” she said, stoutly, as they returned.  It was important to avoid over-praising the workers, but they did look so cute marching back in single file, carrying their leaf fragments overhead like little parasols.  She was proud of her first brood—what was left of them—though she quickly checked herself regarding the dangers of maternal tenderness.  She was queen, first and foremost. They were workers. One does what one must. They would all do their part to make the colony a success.

            So Victoria got to laying again.  One hundred more eggs.  This time, she sent out twenty new workers, along with the original ten.  One hundred more eggs.  The workers had all grown larger, stronger, from the increased richness of their fungus garden.  One hundred more.  And she was growing larger too.  Plumper, more regal.  Though she never touched fungus herself, didn’t like what it did to her mood swings.  One hundred more. This time, when the workers returned, she sent two hundred of them to dig chambers and tunnels.  They’d need those chambers very soon, for storage, for aeration, to hide from the inevitable predators.  “And make them deep,” she said, sternly.  “Or you’ll be sorry.”

            It was strange, to some of the workers, that Victoria felt the need to always add that extra threat at the end of her instructions.  It wasn’t as if they had ever disobeyed, or ever stopped working.  So it was strange, some of them said.  And then one rusty little ant named Jonah said, “I wonder what would happen if we didn’t strip the trees or dig the tunnels?”  But to most of the thousands of workers it was purely a rhetorical question; they shrugged, went back to their tasks.  Their colony mound had grown to over a kublick by this point, and their tunnels extended ten full kublicks below ground.

 “Not for us to ask questions,” said Horace, a large brown ant who’d always lacked imagination. 

“Maybe she eats us,” joked Cody, a strapping young ant of the most recent brood.  He was prone to be clownish. 

Jonah laughed with him then, but a few of the old timers—those who were starting to grow weary of their endless burdens—didn’t let the question die.  “I’m not absolutely certain,” said Elizabeth, a first brood female who was getting a little tired and not a little jealous perhaps, of the queen-mother, “but didn’t we have a lot more brothers and sisters when we started out?”  And her siblings agreed that they had.  “One of us ought to go ask her what happened to them,” said Elizabeth, and they all agreed.  But nobody volunteered.

            By the time the mound had grown to two kublicks tall, the tunnels expanded to more than twenty kublicks of underground chambers, and the worker force multiplied to nearly ten thousand extremely diligent individuals, the original brood was feeling increasingly unappreciated.  “We’re just numbers to her now,” Elizabeth said. “Somebody ought to ask her what happened to our original brothers and sisters!” Still, nobody volunteered.  “Nothing to lose at this point,” she said, more loudly.  Elizabeth was beginning to feel a bit cheated that she’d never been chosen to grow wings or to mate in a swarm or to start her own colony.  “That old witch gets fatter every day.” She spat out her elderberry leaf as if it were hemlock.

            “You go ahead,” said Horace. “Ask her.”  He picked up the leaf she’d spat out and went to work on it with his own mandibles. “Tell us what you find out.”

            “Cowards!” she said, though they all just kept chewing.  She tossed her antennae and turned sharply on her back tarsomeres.  “I hope you choke,” she said.

            It took Elizabeth longer than she expected to find the queen-mother.  Her echo-locator had never been as sharp as her mandibles, so it had always fallen to Elizabeth to do the stripping and chewing, rather than the burrowing and navigating.  By the time she had negotiated the glebs and glebs of winding tunnels and chambers, in fact, she was feeling a bit claustrophic and somewhat grateful, truth be told, to be a worker instead of a queen.  She stopped from time to time to munch on fungus.  But just enough to keep her strength up—she was somewhat vain of her tiny waist.

            At last, the grandest chamber.  Elizabeth felt a bit covetous again, but was comforted when she saw the enormous bulk of the queen-mother.  (I may be unappreciated and unfulfilled, she said to herself, but at least I’m not fat.)  Victoria’s enormous back was turned, so Elizabeth took advantage of the moment to gaze deeply at the splendor of a queen’s chamber.  The handsomest young soldier ants—the queen’s own secret service—were scurrying to and fro, cooling her, warming her, servicing her, probably, though Elizabeth couldn’t imagine that process, given her mother’s astonishing bulk and their diminutive size. 

            Elizabeth tiptoed in closer.  She saw enormous piles of white eggs in one corner of the chamber, piles of larvae in another.  The queen-mother was munching on something—as if that old cow needed any more food—but Elizabeth couldn’t quite see what it was and she didn’t want to get too close.

            “Who’s there?” bellowed the queen-mother.  The handsome soldiers froze in their tracks.  Elizabeth froze too. 

            “It’s just me,” she said.  “Elizabeth?  Remember me?”  She tiptoed a little closer, but the fiercely protective soldiers sprang to life, surrounding her.  “I just wanted to ask you a question,” she said.

            Victoria motioned for her guards to disperse.  “You’re a scrawny little thing,” she said.  White matter was falling from her mouth.

            Elizabeth held her tongue.  To be insulted by such a huge… well, no matter.  “Yes, I am,” she said, somewhat proudly.

            The queen took a closer look.  It pleased her to hear the pride in her daughter’s voice.  “Bravo,” said the queen.  She finished chewing and swallowed hard.  A long-buried maternal tenderness resurfaced, but she fought it down bravely.  “Well?” she said.  “What is your question?”

            Elizabeth moved closer.  “Well, some of us were wondering… that is, some of us remembered…” she crept closer as she spoke—she strained to see what kinds of delicacies a queen was privileged to eat—“brothers and sisters from long ago, and we wondered, well, what happened to them?”

            Victoria had indulged her daughter’s approach, had softened, in fact, at this evidence of her daughter’s courage.  But at the presumption of the question itself, she rehardened into her full queenly imperiousness.  “One does what one must,” she said only.

            Elizabeth began to ask another way, thinking herself misunderstood, but then she stopped, looked around again.  “Oh,” she said, fitting it all together at last—the eggs, the larva, the enormity of her mother.  She started to back away.  

            Victoria took a new mouthful of white eggs, chewed them slowly, deliberately.   She let the juice run freely from her mandibles as Elizabeth watched.  Then she signaled to her soldiers with a twitch of her antennae.

            They closed in, carried the terrified Elizabeth to their queen.  “For the good of the colony,” Victoria said, “no one who enters this chamber may ever exit again.” The soldiers locked Elizabeth in their collective grip as she struggled and clawed at the desperate air; they marched her straight to Victoria’s powerful jaws.

“Please, please my mother please,” cried Elizabeth as she watched the jaws unhinge.

Victoria paused. “My dear child,” she whispered.  Then she clamped down cleanly, mercifully. She tore and chewed and swallowed—hard.  Her soft eyes glistened with regal tears.    

Melody Mansfield's first novel, The Life Stone of Singing Bird, was published in 1996 by Faber and Faber to favorable reviews by the New York Times, Booklist, and others. She has also been lucky with short fiction, essays, and poems, and most recently, with her bug stories. This story is her fifth published bug story. She is working toward a Bug Collection.

Email: Melody Mansfield

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