The Day of the Nuptial Flight

by Sarina Dorie

  * * *

  “I need more samples. The best nectar,” Drone Marco said.

  There were no flowers at this time of year. “Fuzzipillars,” I said.

  I sacrificed my underground food stores for my queen. After many “tests” Marco decided it might be safe. I remember the moment when he told me this, holding the yellow-green vial and bringing it to his lips.

  “Lara gift!” I screeched and clacked my mandibles together.

  “I understand. But no human has ever drunk this. I don’t want to give this to my sister. I would rather it make me sick than her. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.” I made my head nod as they did. I would rather a drone die than my queen.

  He drank, making a face. He didn’t die. The following day, and another after that, he drank. He studied many images on the wall and consulted other humans.

  Drone Marco at last intended to give the Black-Eyed Queen a vial.

  “Rover gift Lara,” I insisted.

  “Yes, thank you for the gift,” she said.

  “No.” She didn’t understand. “No Marco gift. Rover gift.” I didn’t spit out a nugget of nectar, afraid she would refuse it again. Drone Marco had warned her that my body contained impurities that might taint the nectar and they didn’t know how she might react.

  “I understand the gift is from you, not Marco.” She moved to take the vial of yellow-green fluid from her larva mate.

  My antennae twitched in agitation. Marco studied me for a moment, then poured the liquid into a different container. He leaned over and held it out to me. I closed my mandibles around it and brought it to Lara.

  She drank.

  I waited for the armor on my lower abdomen to peel back and for the frenzy of the mating dance to take hold of me. Nothing happened. Perhaps it was too cold to do so. Perhaps I needed fresh nectar. If only I had a cow-worm to milk.

  Each day Drone Marco prepared her nectar, then handed it to me to bring to my Black-Eyed Queen. Each day she thanked me. As she grew rounder and the perfume of fertility stronger, there were times when I yearned to shed my armor to mate with her. When I thought of my Black-Eyed Queen, my armor ached and my antennae quivered with delight.

  I hated to think I would never mate. I hadn’t been able to fertilize the queen of my kind, whether because I’d been drunk on fermented nectar or because I was impotent. Even if I had been able to fertilize Lara, I suspected it wouldn’t work as she already had a larva inside her.

  Still, I wanted to offer my seed to her as my greatest sacrifice and become her nursemaid for the rest of my days. The yearning in me grew as the months of cold dwindled by. Her scent overpowered me with wanting. Her belly swelled, larger than Young Honey-Pot’s.

  The sun thawed the frozen earth and the human hive returned to its barren fields. How surprised I was one day as I chattered away with Lara, something I was growing quite good at, when her larva mate burst into their chamber, shouting with so much joy he made my antennae twitch.

  “It’s a worm. Alive. In my lab,” Drone Marco huffed. I raced away with him, leaving the Black-Eyed Queen to waddle along like a honey-pot.

  They hadn’t harmed this cow-worm, though they’d contained her in a giant clear casing without any dirt or moisture. “Give dirt and water for the worm.” I said. “Then I milk for nectar.”

  Drone Marco instructed his workers to do as I bid and then opened a door for me to climb into the chamber with her. I showed them how to massage the worm and where to collect honey-sweat. Drone Marco climbed in with me and gently pressed two fingers as though they were antennae. At first he bumbled like a hatchling, but eventually he mastered it. I let him collect his samples.

  I didn’t offer to regurgitate my own and give them to him. I stored them in my belly, waiting until later when it was just my queen and me in the chamber. I waited until Queen Ellen was cooking in the other room where I wasn’t permitted.

  “I have the best gift for Lara. Worm nectar,” I said.

  My Black-Eyed Queen waited for me to spit it up, but worm nectar isn’t like that from a fuzzipillar. Honey-sweat isn’t a thick amber that will harden with time. It’s liquid. I had no vessel to hold it.

  “I need container.”

  She glanced about and finally kneeled before me and held out her hands, cupping them like a bowl. The gesture was so different from what we had done before: the offering previously going from me to her larva mate and back to me. The intimacy of the moment as I placed my mouth over her hands and regurgitated was greater than any other I had shared with her.

  “Drink. This is best nectar.”

  She stared down at the liquid in her hands, dribbles leaking through her fingers and splattering onto the floor.

  “Drink for your baby. You will have healthy baby.”

  She brought her hands up to her lips and drank.

  “More?”

  “Oh my god! Don’t tell me you just drank that,” Queen Ellen said from the doorway.

  The sensation of my armor crushing my thorax, my gut tube churning, and antennae tasting every perfume in the air was too much to hold any longer. This wasn’t what I had felt for that other queen of my kind. I was sure this wanting, yearning, craving was beyond what any drone had ever felt for any queen.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Queen Ellen asked.

  “He only gets like this when something upsets him.” My Black-Eyed Queen crouched over me, smoothing her warm, fleshy fingers over my face, remnants of my nectar offering clinging to her skin. She stroked my antennae until I could take it no longer. I rolled over onto my back, the best position to take aim since she wasn’t built like one of my own kind.

  The throes of ecstasy shuddered through my abdomen. My armor peeled back. In a burst, my genitals exploded onto her abdomen, splattering purple matter over her white clothes. Her face scrunched up and she stared down at herself and then at me. Tiny dots of purple covered her thorax and face. My exposed posterior burned with electric throbs. Bits of inside matter dangled over the sides of my armor. If I was to become her handmaiden I knew I was supposed to chew off the remaining parts and reseal my armor with my saliva, but the pain was so intense, I didn’t know how any drone had ever managed.

  My antennae caught the sizzle and smoke of her fabric before she did. The white clothes hissed as they disintegrated and she screamed when my seed touched her skin. She fell onto the floor, her agony twisting my antennae with newfound pain. I didn’t understand. The queen was supposed to rejoice at the offerings of her drone.

  The other queen screamed, too. She filled buckets of water and splashed them over the Black-Eyed Queen. This made the hissing worse as my entrails spread over her and the floor. Lara writhed like a frightened fuzzipillar, clawing my seed away.

  Had I just killed the one I revered above all else? I had to make this right.

  Despite the shock of the pain, I knew I had enough strength to chew off the remains of my abdomen. Or I could use my energy to chew the last store of fuzzipillar nectar in my cheek and gift her with the medicine that had once saved her drone. I regurgitated a bead of nectar from my cheek and softened it inside my mouth until it was mixed together. I spit it on my queen, whose cries subsided into a whimper. I then lay down to die.