Excerpt from "The Colony"

When I was fourteen years old I was escorted to a queen’s cell for the very first time. To enable population diversity, a typical colony of over 1900, had about fifty different queens, whom not only bared children, but held office as head of government. She laid in her bed of satin, surrounded by deep, red walls that displayed an artful arrangement of vines, roses, and honey suckles. The queen was much older than myself and she looked much older than she probably was. Most queens, if lucky, gave birth to a child a year. If she had been birthing babies since twelve years of age, I suspected by now she had birthed over thirty babies in her lifetime. She was large and barely moved from her lazed position on the bed. I wondered if she was my mother, but there would be no way of knowing.