Adam, Dave, Scott, and Thisero march through the immense jungle of grass, the withered gray and brown bodies towering over the four of them as they move together in single file. The amount of grass is so concentrated that it’s impossible for them to see anything in front or behind them from a distance. Though they move calmly and with purpose, they are anything but underneath their exoskeletal frames. They say nothing to each other, instead focusing on breathing and moving, the cool refreshing soil beneath their legs their only familiar comfort. Their stomachs gurgle in protest, empty and neglected.
There was no fanfare when they left the colony, their home hidden beneath a hill of dust and dirt, at first light several moons ago. No glorious sendoff and no voices showering them with adoration, just the haunting stares of their comrades with black compact eyes beady with hunger and fear. Even the queen’s stern and regal visage couldn’t mask the famished look in her eyes as they beheld her one last time before they set off on their journey. A few of their friends came over from the throng and said farewell, oval heads touching forehead to forehead, antennae cradling each other for hopefully not the last time. In all their time serving the queen, nobody from the colony had been exiled before, but famine and hardship can drive the most benevolent rulers to desperate extremes. The orders were clear: “Don’t come back until food is found.”
Thisero, leading the group, looks at the sky. The afternoon sun’s tenacious beams beat down through gaps in the grass jungle’s ashen canopy. Dried dirt, flecks of splintered plant, and nature’s various other love taps cover her onyx-black body. Despite numerous years in service to the queen, she aches with a fortnight’s worth of travel without the comforts of hearth and home. She needs a break. They all do.
“Stop!” Thisero calls out to her companions as she ceases her movement. One by one, the other three exiles come to a full stop, private whispers of gratitude on their mandibles for this moment of reprieve. “Let us take a moment to rest” Thisero huffs, lowering her stout frame onto the soil and turning around to face her companions.
Adam, who’s behind Thisero in the line order, collapses to the ground with labored breath. Her body, only a quarter the size of Thisero’s, is completely caked in dirt and grime. Though she is physically weaker than the rest, they all know her sense of smell has no equal. If anyone can locate food and get them all back home the quickest way possible, it’s Adam.
Dave, who’s behind Adam, lets her head sag with gravity’s weight, her single antenna and nub of a second one made all the more prominent. She begins to clean herself, shaking off tiny bits of dirt or plant matter stuck to her otherwise spotless body gleaming in the humble sunbeams of the afternoon light. During nights of poor sleep, Thisero swears she’s seen Dave spending her time on watch grooming and cleaning herself instead of keeping a lookout, but between sleep’s haze and night’s darkness, she can’t be certain.
Scott, who’s last in the line order, immediately starts doing some light stretching in between breaths after the group stopped moving. A huge bag about the same size as her made of old leaf material is slung across the back of her robust frame. How two or so weeks of travel have had seemingly zero effect on Scott, Thisero does not know. Scott’s size and strength rivals hers to the point of being a reminder of how she used to be. All Thisero sees when she looks at Scott is her inevitable undoing, her aging body eclipsed by the strength of youth. She thinks the only reason Scott wasn’t made “leader” was purely a matter of seniority, but still, it’s good to have extra muscle in times like these.
For a brief moment, none of them say anything, taking in the sound of each other’s breaths, each a different story: Thisero’s tired huffs, Adam’s broken wheezes, Dave’s graceful sighs, Scott’s active exhales.
It didn’t used to be this way. They remember when the bounties from their world and the strangest yet most delicious foods from the realm of the Giants would both be plentiful enough to combine and make the grandest of feasts. Many a night would be spent eating scrumptious leaves, getting drunk on the sweetest tree sap, and taking intrepid bites of the Giants’ food to see how they taste. There would be loud boisterous conversation, jokes, and merriment abound. Blissful dancing (much of it horrendous) would occur afterwards, the colony becoming a sea of blurry black legs. Though she would never admit it, even the queen was delighted at such a sight, her eyes aglow with a concealed ember of joy. Those were the greatest days the colony had ever known.
It wasn’t long until rumors started spreading, whispers of the Giants commandeering metal beasts, cutting down trees, displacing massive amounts of earth, and spraying plants and grass with mysterious liquid substances. Shortly after that, food count began to drop and the food that would be brought back wouldn’t taste as good. The greens bearing the faintest taste of bitterness, the tree sap less sweet. Fewer and fewer festivities, less and less smiling faces, and the rumors grew all the while.
Dave comes out of her preening trance and notices Adam’s condition. “Adam, are you okay?” She rushes over to Adam’s collapsed form on the ground.
Adam, though not fully recovered, has enough strength to respond. “Y-yeah.” she says. “Just exhausted is all.”
Dave nods, eyes alight with empathy. “Here, let me clean you up a little.” She coos. She picks Adam up delicately with her front legs and begins to clean the dust and muck off of Adam. Regardless of Thisero suspecting her of vanity, everyone knows Dave’s a great healer and caretaker for the colony. Without her, they wouldn’t have lasted as long as they have. After she finishes cleaning Adam, Dave gently inquires, “Are you strong enough to stand on your own?”
Adam nods. “Yeah, I think so.”
Dave lowers Adam to the ground. Though her small body and legs visibly tremor with fatigue, Adam stands on her own. Dave nods, pleased that her skills have yielded another successful result.
After catching her breath, Thisero stands up and asks Scott, “What’s the status of our ration supply?”
Scott stops stretching and takes the huge bag off her back with ease. She begins to rummage around in it and a look of concern blossoms on her face.
“Is something wrong, Scott?” Thisero inquires, walking towards Scott to get a better look.
“It’s gone! The remaining food and water. It’s all gone!”
“What?! Let me see.” Thisero yanks the bag out of Scott’s slackened grip and pokes her head inside. Sure enough, where their leafy water skins and parcels of eating grass should have been, a pile of stones have taken their place.
A sickening dread stirs inside Thisero. While the constant traveling has been rough, their sizable stockpile of food and water comforted her, a source of reassurance that they had a good chance of living through exile and coming back home with food in hand. But now…
Adam and Dave go over to Thisero and Scott. “So, um, what happens now?” Adam asks tentatively.
Anger flares up within Thisero. “I’ll tell you what happens now. One of you confesses to being responsible for this crime. Either one of you ate the rest of our food or some invading creature stole the rest of the food while one of you fell asleep on watch last night. Directly or indirectly, one of you is responsible for this.” She fixes her furious gaze upon Dave.
“Why are you looking at me? I didn’t do anything.” Dave fires back defensively.
“Don’t lie to me Dave. I’ve seen you spending your watches cleaning yourself. It makes sense you would also sleep on the job.”
Dave flinches at these words, her healer’s grace overridden for a solid visible moment. “Tch…” she hisses through clenched mandibles, her antenna and nub twitching.
Thisero takes a moment to savor the triumph of her guess hitting home before the inner sea of wrath within washes over her once more. “Care to explain yourself?” She interrogates, her voice saturated with venom.
Adam interjects quietly. “Hey guys, I think I smell–”
“Thisero, that’s enough.” Scott intervenes, moving between Thisero and Dave. “What exactly are you trying to accomplish here?”
“Well, Scott, in case you haven’t fully grasped the nature of the situation, we are in the middle of nowhere searching for food for our starving colony in vain, and we are now suddenly without food and water for ourselves. So forgive me if I feel the need to want an explanation and a sense of justice for why we don’t have any food and water.”
Scott scoffs. “A sense of justice? Some good that will do us when we’re all dead from starvation. Have you considered, I don’t know, cutting Dave some slack and moving past this so we can gather some food and water?”
Adam speaks up again. “Guys–”
“Gather food and water?! You mean the thing we’ve been trying to do for our colony for the past several days and have explicitly failed to do? Look around you!” Thisero angrily gestures at the gray grass that surrounds them. “Do you see anything edible here? All of this is dead, killed by the Giants and their polluting influence. Come to think of it, what made Her Majesty think it would be possible for us to find a new food source for our colony in the first place? Who are we kidding? This is a fool’s errand, a suicide mission. We are going to d–”
“GUYS!” Adam screams-pleads in desperation at the rest of the group. The animosity between Thisero and Scott evaporates in the scream’s wake. Everyone’s attention falls on Adam, now huffing and puffing from producing such a loud vocalization. After a moment, Adam says “I think I smell food, lots of it. Somewhere in this direction.” She points in a direction to the right of them, into a part of the grass jungle that appears to be a little less dense. “Come on, let’s go.” She scurries off, now taking the lead.
Thisero quickly flicks her gaze back at both Dave and Scott. “We’ll finish this discussion later.” She then leaves in the same direction as Adam. Dave and Scott quietly exchange quick apologetic glances, then go in the same direction as Adam and Thisero.
After marching through more of the same grassy jungle landscape, the group of four happen across a clearing. Without the projection of the jungle’s canopy, the afternoon sun shines down relentlessly upon them, instantly making them feel hot. A little ways away from them sits the beginning of a strange rocky looking terrain that continues on as far as their eyes can see, its shade of gray considerably darker than that of the withered grass jungle. Upon the strange terrain, dead ahead of them, is a sight almost too good to be true: a huge mound of sugar, bigger than any mound the group had seen before, bigger than the ones they’d seen and scavenged from during the golden age of the colony.
At first the group is too stunned to even react. Then, they break out into tears of joy, crying and laughing without relent. It feels unreal, them stumbling upon what can only be described as a miracle in their darkest hour. Any lingering ill will between the four of them disappears entirely, vanishing like a bad dream upon waking. Not even the harsh sun can beat back the floods of joy flowing within the four of them. They all touch each other’s heads together, expressing apology, forgiveness, and thanks all in one. We’ve done it, Thisero thinks, we’ve saved our people.
Scott dumps out the pile of stones from her bag and begins to toss in as much sugar into it as possible. The rest of the group pitches in, and before long, the bag is filled to the brim with sugar. As they retrace their steps, still marveling at their luck of coming across such a bountiful source of food, a sense of peace washes over them. It’s over. Their time in exile is done. They are coming home.
*
Margaret stands in her kitchen, lazily staring out the window at her sad excuse for a backyard, spacing out. The weatherman did say that the sunshine this summer was going to be off the charts, but she didn’t think it would be to the point of scorching the color green of her grass. The kitchen, like the rest of the house, is small. Every countertop surface is covered with various things, ranging from wet dishes too large for her dishwasher to food splatter and other casualties arising from meals made for her twin seven-year-old boys, Liam and Neeson.
Then something catches Margaret’s eye. She snaps back to reality, leaves the kitchen, and goes out the back door. Stepping out onto the patio that stretches from one end of the backyard to the other, as well as taking up more than half of the backyard, she sees it: a huge mound of white powdery substance on the edge of the patio. She rubs her face with her hands. She knows what Liam and Neeson have done. They must have gotten into her borax-sugar mixture and dumped it on the ground while she was busy making them breakfast. They did this with the sugar last week, and she thought she solved the problem by locking the baking cabinet up. I guess I’ll have to do the same for my cleaning and pest control drawer, she thought to herself. Every time she thinks she’s figured them out, they always do something else to give her a parenting migrain.
Sighing, she goes into the house for the dustpan, then goes back outside to scoop as much of it up as possible. She doesn’t get all of it, but at this point, she’s too tired to care. They don’t currently have an ant problem, and all she wants is to go back into her tiny air-conditioned house and do absolutely nothing until it’s time to pick Liam and Neeson up from the chess summer camp. She desperately needs the quiet time. She carries the full dustpan back into the house, dumps the contents into the trashcan by the backdoor, belly flops onto her living room couch, and then promptly falls asleep. It’s going to be a long summer.