She had a thing with queens. Not necessarily current queens with specific

personalities, but the idea of queens, organic queens, females surrounded by

workers, coalesced in orbit servitude. They were in service to their queen only insomuch as she captured

their vision, made manifest in flesh, something above them, beyond them.

She liked the queen as conduit, a place to lay one’s love, at a queen’s feet.

Queens, feet… people needed these.

She liked that he called her his queen, thought it was sexy as hell.

When Aleister Crowley worked on the Thoth tarot deck, he changed the court-

except for the Queen. The King was demoted to a Knight. And the Knight was promoted to Prince. What did this mean? She was always asking things like that.

She was talking about them that night in Jim’s bed, about the nuptial flight of ant queens, whose wings transport the virgin, who mates in flight- landing at a new location freshly fucked and ready to roll as empress of a new, emergent colony. If she lived.

“Only the fastest males can catch her,” She explained. “They remove their wings and get to business with a belly full of sperm that can be used for years.”

“What happens to the males?” He knew the answer. He liked hearing her tell it, though. It made her feel entitled to her demands, this idea of earning sex. He liked the dynamic of needing to please her, he liked the whole damn thing. It was hot to fuck a queen.

“They die, baby.” He rubbed her feet. “But you know what? Those poor bastards are gonna die anyway. They might as well try for a spot in that belly.”

Is that what drove them? Maybe it drove everything.

He realized that he wanted a spot in her belly, then. Perhaps not literally, but he wanted her pregnant. The idea was powerful and new to him, and made him quiet. She was on her side, her back to him, thinking. He didn’t want eye contact. He had to give her something else to consider so he could buy some time.

“Ants have swarm intelligence. They are capable of reasonable things even though none of them are in possession of reason. They have ways of communicating about mistakes, ways of solving things, problems they don’t even know they have in their own minds. And yet, in groups, they solve them.”

This did get her mind going.

He wanted to tell her about his idea. What would she say?

He would just do it, he wouldn’t pull out and he wouldn’t wear a rubber and he wouldn’t stop, he would just do it, and that would be that. He had chased her, he had served her, he would fuck her and he would finish. He would let the cells of his body do what they wanted, in aggregate, to do. None of them knew it, but he knew it. Together, they knew it.

Like the queen, he was the manifestation of their collective vision, unrealized, and there was nothing more urgent to these cells than to perpetuate themselves.

And he fucked her with the force of 75 trillion cells, their hopes in his sweat, the culmination of years of being driven to this very task, only none of them knowing it. They were driven, regardless, to something beyond themselves and they moved in unison, as a society.

They moved as a colony.

He didn’t stop, and 400 million sperm cells found their spot that night, inside her, on his bed.

It didn’t change a damn thing.

Lynn Alexander is an indomitable force in the Underground Literature Scene. She is described by the Literary Underground Wiki as “an American writer, artist, poet, and independent producer of publications and web content” but she is so much more than this. She is a defiantly independent individual who, amazingly in this day & age of apathy, actually retains a spark of the Radical Press. She produces one of the best fiction & poetry ‘zines out there – the mighty FULL OF CROW , which was an inspiration for the ‘zine that you’re reading now, as well as being a regular contributor to the non-fiction political opinion ‘zine ON THE WING.