WHERE YOU ARE
TIMELINE
XX
INTERFERENCE POINT
480,000,000BCE
TETHER
collective
42°53'38.8"S
147°17'57.9"E
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You are here.
Oh you remember this place. How damp and cruelty get into you through the walls. Being marched through in a herd of other girls on school excursions, the obscenity of the past too thick to absorb. The casual violence of your country’s institutionalism. The rancid vibes in that pustule of a house they called the Matron’s Quarters. The tiny cells. And people lived there! Long after all the girls and women went away, the arse-flashers disbanded, the babies buried (the babies buried) people lived there in the shadow of the wet bad past.
How then, how and why, is the body you find yourself in now so buoyant and so light? You remember the shade this place was always in but right now sun pours like a heat lamp. Go to where you remember the factory to be, and be awed. In this timeline it’s not a series of squat squalid reminders amid some tremulous artwork but a smooth and gorgeous edifice, its tawny surface stretching high into the sky. There is an opening in the waxy surface. It is the size of you. From it reeks the smell of honey.
MOTHER, you shout. MOTHER.
Foolish girl! Mother can’t hear you. Mother lives in the big shell you see before you, gorgeous undulating gleaming shell that it is on the sacred ground (that the other you, from the other place, remembers only as hostility and bad bad bad energy). Mother. You have brought treasure home for her. You’re going to make her so proud.
Here as well you are in a herd of other girls. All around you, sisters, buzzing industriously, laden with pollen and nectar. Your bodies are barely separate from the air. You are part of the always-flowing stream of scents and movement. You have been on your foraging flights and you have found the treasure chests glowing UV-purple and hot hot pink, and you have pillaged them and you have brought them home. Fly now to that you-sized orifice you know to be the entrance to paradise, to home, to mother’s embrace.
The hive is hot and close inside. Your home sisters, beloved sisters, reach for you. Welcome. Welcome home. They take your load from you (you throw it up), they undress you of your garments (they turn to dust), they show you to the inner sanctum (all hexagons, all heady honey scents), and there she is, waggling obscenely, depositing generation after generation of sisters. She is enormous. Her eyes reflect the hexagons into infinity. Her mandibles drip with nectar. She says,
G O O D G I R L
And you could die from the pleasure of it.
The outside is bright and fiercely warm but inside, here inside the hive, your mother and your sisters have made an Eden. A women’s place, a girl’s place, a place of industry and reward. Rest a moment. Eat some bread. You’re near the end of your days and you’re treated as the venerable explorer you are, you deserve your rest and the attention of your sisters, how good it is to be one of the daughters of a mother as large and wise as she.
A thought, a treacherous tiny other-timeline’s thought rises up in you. Could you be the mother? To a small hive, perhaps? A few thousand daughters, no more? Treachery. Traitorousness. Not in this life, not in this universe. But you want it. You want him. You want to find him.
Mother is here again. She has read your thoughts. Her many-faceted eyes find yours and she says
H E I S N O T H E R E