Hothouse

By Ryan Nowicki

She gazes beyond the cave toward the frigid gales that ruffle the oak trees, a little creature within a great earthen tower. Her many compatriots and acquaintances and strangers flood in, wind-swept waves of them cresting the doorway in search of shelter. Some make their way through the colony to labor, moving foodstuffs and construction materials and information. Others don treated grasses and furs and brave the breeze, hobbling off to other mounds where strangers lie. They will be welcomed there, just as she lets the strangers wander about this mountain. They will not dare approach her room, nor any other chamber they are not guided toward. She knows this. The air waves tell her this. Patterned plosives and approximants in the atmosphere pressure them, little wind-lifted marionettes, singing plots and director’s cuts. She makes her own and responds to those of others in turn. She uses these waves because she cannot smell well, and neither can they, not on these lengthscales. This makes them quite different from other colonial animals, and as a result of their lack of typical pheromonal communication, they lack proper queens, their naked bodies all equivalently small, only distinguished by their chosen adornments on their backs and their bellies and their buttocks and their breasts.