The Caterpillar Queen

a new short story

The Caterpillar Queen
by zm strother

It was that time, and the Oak Tree was alive!  Its skin wriggled and creeped, a living carpet of furry yellow caterpillars who coursed from one branch to the next, in search of foliage and conversation.
Gillip munched his leaf with an air of distraction not suitable for the exquisite juiciness of his midday meal.  While his top feet fed the fibers and flesh steadily into his jaws, the next four tugged idly at his coarse mustard bristles, and his red dodecahedron eyes drifted up to the dappled sunlight that pierced the upper branches.  His mind wandered; he wondered who the Queen would choose.  He already knew it wouldn't be him, but he wondered, all the same.  At first he didn't notice the gentle tugging at his claws, so when his gaze floated back down he was surprised to see Duthel greedily tearing large chunks from the other end of his own leaf.  Duthel's eyes were set, narrowed - uncompromising.  Gillip abandoned his prize and inched around to the bottom of the branch.  He gripped tightly with his rear segment, but let the rest of his body dangle free.
Gillip was not well liked.  He was not a stunning conversationalist, and in the social world of caterpillars, that was a debilitating handicap.  He was alone on the bottom-side; he was usually alone.  He wished he could find the words.  He imagined himself expounding on the virtues of acorn oil as a treatment for caterpillar cramps, surrounded by an enthralled audience.  The illusion thinned.  Gillip could see the others working their way to the Tree's great central bole.  He tried to understand them; he tried to stare into their minds.  He gave up.  He considered joining them for ceremony, but he didn't think he could bear the frowns and stares that would be heaped on him.  Gillip knew he didn't belong.  And yet, his curiosity demanded satisfaction; even pariahs are subject to the fixations of celebrity, and he wanted to know who the Queen was going to choose.  Then he was struck by an idea.  He worked himself back to the top side and on to the trunk, the great central highway of the Oak Tree.  He flowed with the crowd all the way to the Bole's entrance, and then kept going up.  Up to the next branches he went, where he resumed his inverted position and was delighted to find that he had a spectacular view of the entire Bole and the teeming caterpillar population that steadily grew around its outer edge.

As the hour of the ceremony neared, Gillip's initial enthusiasm for his strategic position waned.  He was overtaken again by niggling depression.  He saw them all gathered below, and he knew his absence was conspicuous only in his own mind.  To the rest of them, the lack of Gillip would be perceived, if at all, only as an unexplained relief from some awkward tension in the back of the mind.  Gillip wept.  Tiny caterpillar tears drifted as fractured starlight in the wind.
Then he felt something - an internal convulsion.  He curled up and began to vomit - but all that issued forth was a sticky white paste!  It poured out of him like water from a faucet at first, then in explosive bursts, but it would not stop.  He gasped for breath in between wretches; on and on it went.  He tried to crawl to the top side, but the white stickiness had hardened around his bottom section, and he could not escape.  He flailed his free legs in wild rising panic, trying to wrench himself free.  He succeeded in splattering ropes of plaster around himself and the surrounding branches.
Little by little his stomach unclenched and gravity helped him to droop down, but the vomiting still continued.  His throat burned.  He was choked with cold terror and bubbling froth.  He was encased up to his midsection in white death.   He could see the Queen below, obvious by of her tremendous size and her solitary position in the center of the Bole.  Gillip could see a second slowly inching out to meet her.  She had chosen, but he didn't care anymore.  He was betrayed by his own body, possessed by some caterpillar demon, slowly drowning from the inside out by a rising concrete tide.  He just wanted it to stop.
It surpassed the last of his legs.  It was even with his jaws.  His face was frozen downward, and he could see two caterpillars entwined below in the middle of the mating dance.  It was the last thing he would ever see.  He cursed them with his final breath, and spewed forth the final pieces of his stalactite tomb.

Ripping apart!  Bursting forth!  Sweet emergence, an unfolding rainbow of checkered diamonds, spiraling into fractal infinity.  Gillip dropped into the open air, his wings carrying him on the sweet breath of Spring.  He swooped low, low enough to see the Queen her post-coital feast.  She sucked greedily at Duthel's desiccated remnants.
Gillip arched back up to the horizon and forth!  He could have sworn something had been bothering him, but he couldn't remember what.  He flew away and left it all behind.