Chrysalis – by Lachlan Plain
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I was raised on an island of rock surrounded by a sea of sand. Every evening a fine dust blew in from the coast, down the city streets, entering our homes through chinks in our curtains and settling on our tablecloths. Our skin was caked in it. Our lungs were lined with the grit of it.
I grew up in the capital of an empire that stretches into the dustiest recesses of our sun-scorched earth; whose fleet of formidable dune-breakers have circumnavigated the globe, conquering the tribes of Non, making pliant the kingdom of Toa.
I was born in what they call a golden era. Every second day a traveller returned with a new crop, new mineral, new way of doing things. Grocers were overflowing with fruits no-one had tasted before, painters adopted colours we did not realise were possible, and the emperor filled his zoo with the most implausible of beasts.
And, as the empire grew richer, its merchants grew wealthier. They wore watches on gold chains, drank champagne in clubhouses and chased women round the decks of the punts floating in the river. And the more there was worth stealing on the streets of Angles, the more thieves there were to try their hand at stealing it. Picking pockets at public events. Snatching bags in the market. And awaiting deportation in the sandblasted hulks docked in the wharves.
My mother died in childbirth and my father raised me as a son, despite there being no chance I would inherit his position as keeper of the worms. The other keepers shook their heads as I swept the yards, unloaded the carts, and fed the beasts.
They say it’s men’s work, I huffed at him one night over dinner.
And they’re right, he replied, the sows must love you. The hogs are easy, even you can throw one over your shoulder. But a fully grown sow is something to be reckoned with. They should shiver with pleasure when their keeper enters their pen, and pine for him when he is gone. Only a man can do that.
But why? I demanded. Surely a woman is as capable of tenderness as a man.
He just smiled, turning his gaze from me to the view out the window.
Worms are not like other domestic animals. They watched me as I carried their feed to the pen, not hungry like pigs, but wistful, as if they remembered a time when they too carried pails of slop down the passage between pens. And they laughed when I rubbed their bellies. And tears welled in the eyes of a hog when his sow died in the stall beside him, just as tears would well in the eyes of a man if his wife were to die in bed beside him.
Mem was the only worm we named. When my father whistled, she sang in response. One evening, while I was cleaning an empty pen, I heard my father speaking softly, telling her how happy he had been in the first few years of his marriage. I peered between the slats. She listened as if she understood, nodding thoughtfully at his words.
I coughed, and my father looked up. He opened the gate so I could join them. When you were small, he said to me, smiling at the worm at his feet, and I couldn’t find you in the house, I knew where you would be. You’d be here, snuggled into the crook of Mem’s body. I pictured myself as a toddler, pressed against Mem’s semi-translucent flesh. When I rested my hand on her gelatinous hide, I felt the same sense of security I had when I was small.
The thread produced by the worms of Angles is the strongest material known to man. It is stronger than any mineral mined from beneath the rock on which our city is built. Threads are used to weave the sails of the dune-breakers that carry the words of our god across the globe. They were used to construct the dome that protects the palace from the sands that surround our island home as well as the robes of our noble men.
Worms spend their days eating and nights spinning silk. When the moon was bright and I could not sleep, I would tiptoe to the pens to watch the worms at work. They used the hooks of their many legs to scale the walls of their enclosure. They used their mandibles to wind the end of the thread around a rafter. Then, over the course of the night, they would descend to the floor, leaving a trail of silver shining in the moonlight. Judging by their laboured breaths, or how they collapsed onto the cobblestones when they were finished, producing silk was no easy task.
After feeding the worms in the morning, my father would harvest the thread. He’d roll yesterday’s empty spools into the pen, climb the ladder, and cut the thread. He’d then wind it up before rolling the spool back to the yard ready for the delivery boy, Fin, to collect in his rickety cart. I used to climb the elm in the yard and watch Fin dart back and forth between the cart and the door, trolley wheels screaming as he went. I’m sure he knew I was there. He kept glancing in my direction.
Fin was the only person I ever introduced to Mem. He squatted in the pen and stretched out his hand. She nuzzled his empty palm, and he fed her an apple core with his other hand. Wow, he said, their eyes are so big. Like the ocean. That night I lay with him in the stable. His hands danced breathlessly across my skin. It was over quickly, but we lay for a long time afterwards, straw sharp against our backs, worms spinning thread in the rafters above, and a fine layer of dust settling over everything.
The next time I saw him, he blushed. He was holding something behind his back. I asked him to show me, but he shook his head. I chased him round the yard and pinned him to the tree, prying the object from his clutches. It was a flower, though not like any flower I had seen before. I made it for you, he muttered. Layers of petals curling out to reveal a slender stamen, like a ballerina on a podium. The pearlescent surface glistened in the light. Silk from the worms? I asked. He nodded. Mem? He nodded again. I kept it safe in the drawer beside my bed. I never showed it to my father.
I lay with Fin once more before they took him away. He tapped on my window, gentle but persistent, until I let him in. He kept looking over his shoulder, though he wouldn’t tell me what he was afraid of. His hands were rough and clumsy, then he was gone.
The next day I joined my father at the kitchen window. He was watching a prison cart move slowly down the street. When I looked closely I saw Fin shackled to the railing at the rear like any other convict. Bread of deceit is sweet to a man, muttered my father, loud enough for me to hear, but afterwards his mouth shall be filled with gravel. So, my father knew Fin had been helping himself to our thread. It didn’t matter whether I told him about the flower or not.
My father was in the pen with Mem when he died. I’m sure I heard her weep as I opened the gate. When I found him, he was face down in the muck, right hand resting on the rump of her tail. The other minders buried him in the cemetery behind the worm yards. The night after his funeral, I woke to the sound of shattering glass. I raced out back to discover Mem’s pen was empty. Looking up I saw a hole in the skylight and, beyond the shards of glass, silhouetted against the moon, a slender figure skipping across the sky, like a ballerina with her wings outstretched.
With Fin captured, my father dead, and Mem transformed, nothing remained for me in the city of Angles. So I packed my bag, wrapping Fin’s flower in paper, dressed in trousers and applied to be a cabin boy on board one of the convict hulls due to set sail the following day. Our voyage was a round trip, delivering convicts to Non, acquiring worms in Toa, then back to the markets of Angles.
-
White below and blue above. Sand as far as the eye can see. Endless rolling plains, rippled by currents of air. Infinite particles whipped from the surface and pounded against the hull of the ship. The deck, sandblasted over decades to a perfect sheen. Despite the scarves pulled tight round our jaws, or the rubber rimmed goggles worn by all the sailors, it is impossible to keep the stuff from your throat or eyes. Our chests are sporadically wracked with sandpaper coughs. And every so often we lower our goggles to wipe the grains from our eyeballs, only to let more sand in behind the rubber.
Back and forth across the deck. All day, every day. Sweeping sand. Bowlegged, lest the boat should tip, and you should slide across the glass-like surface, falling silently over the railing, lost forever to the sands.
Of an evening, I sit with the crew in the galley, drinking soup, avoiding the sailor’s eyes, watching their lips instead on the rim of their mugs, clean-shaven chins and high cheekbones. See, you’re not the only girl disguised as a man on this ship, laughs the sailor beside me, everyone has something to escape. Some of us have been escaping it our whole lives. Whatever she says next is drowned out by the wind. When we finish our dinner, we descend to our sleeping quarters, where we are rocked to sleep in our hessian hammocks or kept awake by the snores of our companions and the distant flapping of a loose sheet of roofing over the convicts’ quarters.
At night I dream of Non. A bare flat rock, buffeted by wind and sand. The convicts who serve their sentence there, cover their faces with scraps of cloth, wrap their bodies in robes, bow their heads against the wind. They say a sentence to Non is like a sentence to solitary confinement. No-one speaks on Non, as no-one speaks on this ship, because the wind is so loud.
Then my dreams migrate to Toa, a kingdom enclosed by mountains over which the sand is never blown. Clear waters, not gritty, like the water in Angles. Giant trout suspended in currents. A dragonfly on the surface. A crane in the sky folds her wings and falls like an arrow, barely making a ripple. And in the royal stables, a thousand fat worms huddled together in a heaving mass of flesh.
I didn’t admit to myself, but I left Angles because of Fin. I embarked on this voyage in search of the boy who used to deliver the thread produced by my father’s worms. Why have I not seen a single convict in all the days I have spent sweeping the deck? The door to their quarters is kept locked and barred. No one goes in or out. Even when I press my ear to the steel surface, I don’t hear a single voice inside. All I hear is an indeterminate crunch and grind, muffled by the heavy door between us.
One morning, after a couple of weeks at sea, I am alone on deck, sweeping in endless circles, when I notice the door to the convicts’ quarters has been left ajar. I put my shoulder to the metal and heave it open. I blink as my eyes adjust to the low light, then stifle a gasp when I see what is inside. I look around to ensure that I am alone, squinting into the light reflected on the deck, before slipping into the convicts’ quarters and closing the door behind me.
I walk slowly through the shadows. The air is moist and sweet. It takes a while for me to focus on the things that hang in the rafters. I want to turn back, but I don’t. I want to vomit, but my stomach is empty. I cough a wad of grit and spit it on the floor. There are twenty-six of them, each encased in a translucent skin. Some twitch a little. Others sway, spiralling like pendulums. All of them in different states of metamorphosis. Some are still quite human, while others are in the process of folding in on themselves. Some have hands where they should have legs, one has eyes in his stomach, and another has ears on his thigh. The most advanced have no features at all, having turned to amorphous lumps of flesh.
The ones with eyes watch me as I walk between them. I see their lips move and can almost decipher their whispered words. I stop before one and squint in the low light, studying his features. It’s Fin. His eyes, which had only days before danced restlessly over my body, drift away from one another as his head expands.
I lean in and press my lips against the translucent skin that covers his face. It’s cold, like leather. He looks at me desperately. Is it a cry for help? Or is he trying to tell me that I have been followed, that someone is standing behind me?
Curiosity kills the cat.
I turn to see the captain; her girth partially obscured by one of the hanging mutants.
Are they becoming… I can’t finish the sentence.
Worms? she raises an eyebrow. Yes, they’re becoming worms.
But I thought –
You thought worms came from Toa?
Of course.
We get our worms from Toa and send our convicts to Non. Is that what you were taught?
I nod.
Silly girl. Nothing exists beyond the shores of Angles except the sands.
She doesn’t look crazy, though it’s possible that long periods spent adrift on the sands have made her lose her senses. So where do the worms come from? I demand. The fruit? The animals? The pigments the artists use in their paint?
We cultivate them on our ships. The kinetic energy of a trillion grains of sand has a transformative power. If you lay anchor here, you get worms. But, with a different set of coordinates, you might get an elephant. These convicts are providing an important service to our society. Without them, we would have no thread to lash the sails to the mast.
I hang my head, letting her drape an arm over my shoulder. I can’t make eye contact with Fin. The thing hanging from the roof bears little resemblance to the boy I fell in love with anyway. I think of the apple he fed to the worm we called Mem. Where did that apple come from? Was it also grown in the hull of one of these ships? I can’t bear to think of Mem’s large grey eyes, or the mother I never knew. I can’t bear to think of the little girl I once was, buried safely in folds of worm flesh.
The captain leads me from the room, bolting and locking the door behind us. You want to join your beau in his transformation. I know. I can see it in your eyes.
I shake my head. But I don’t make eye contact.
In the evening, I join her in her quarters. I drink wine and listen to her explain the process of metamorphosis, complain about the merchants back in Angles, and extoll the virtues of the empire. She calls her dune breaker the last refuge for the lost girls of Angles. They’ll remember me, she says, for keeping you all gainfully employed. Then her voice is drowned out by the howl of the wind, but I don’t mind, I’m thinking of Fin. She’s right, I do want to join him. I imagine my body collapsing in on itself, becoming something different. I picture the dock worker hoisting my unrecognisable form out of the hull of the ship and tossing me onto the back of a cart. Does pain feel different when you’re a worm? Finally, I imagine my soft hide pressed against Fin’s soft hide in a stall lined with straw.
I realise the captain has not spoken for a while. Her head is slumped on her chest, and she is snoring. I stand quietly and lean over her. I lift her necklace over her head, careful that the keys tied to it do not jangle. I step from the room and close the door quietly behind me. The corridor is empty as I make my way to the convict quarters, and for once the wind has died down outside. ▼
Image: Francisco J Villena - Unsplash
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