A Pair of Megalibgwilia ramsayi Hibernate During the Ice Age
My mother was a great beauty. Her spines were pale as spinifex, and deadly sharp. Any predator to take her into their maw would bleed to death before she broke even one. Her tongue could whip up an entirely ant colony into her beak quicker than you could see. When she mated, twelve strong men pursued her for seven weeks. When they fought for her, they wore a rut into the ground as deep as the twelve of them piled one on top of another.
My father, the victor, was not who she expected. He was smaller than the others; not a good hunter, she thought. Our kind is inherently solitary, but he would disappear for months on end, even in the summer, and return smaller and tattered, his claws cracked and bleeding. She could smell the mould in his quill-fluff, no doubt the odd mite burrowing into his skin.
Rotting roots pierced the roof of his burrows, termites dropping and writhing across the floor. He told her that he was scared of the dark; even the thought of hibernation, that long dark sleep, set him aquiver. Our kind can't dream in the cold, so for thirty years he had dug deeper and deeper to the warm earth to nest. She told me she never understood what made her stay. Her passions had always come in flickers, from tongue to mouth, and no more. They hibernated together, and when they woke, twelve families had frozen to death, puggles in pouches. In early spring, my eldest sister was born.
Twenty five years of hard winter, and I still wish I had known him, the coward who saved us all. He died before I'd broken my egg.
My mate nudges the maggots towards me. He has lost so much weight his quills almost tip him over. There is blood on his beak. He ripped the skin on his tongue licking the ice from the burrow's mouth.
“I've already eaten.” He says.
“I can see you drooling.”
“Well, you are especially becoming today.”
I shake and puff out my quills. “We share.”
“Fine.” He scratches at the floor with back feet and stretches.
Food, after a lack-thereof, is a powerful narcotic. My body floods with endorphins, every part of me blushes and flutters. The air sweeps over my skin in technicolour, cool bursts and hot pulses. I am new and pink again, licking milk from my mother's pouch.
The nausea sets in. The acrid stench of the torn maggots is sharp in my throat. Below my beak, they squirm and squelch in the remnants of their rancid feast, painted in gluttony and gore. They live their lives to the rhythm of chewing, the song of the open mouth. Blind, white wrigglers knowing only to survive. I choke them down, my eyes wet.
My mate flattens his spines and blows the dust from his nostrils. “When the spring comes, I will bring you sugar-ants, fat as you ever saw. My grandfather told me he found a colony once, each one was as long as your foot.”
I don't ask him what will happen if the spring never comes, but the question is there, I can feel it change him.
High above, the wind drones over the burrow mouths: a dull, hollow roar with with high, brassy overtones. I used to love it, the burrows come alive with breath. Now I worry about ice freezing over our ventilation, or a gale ploughing a tree through them. I worry about so much these days. I don't know if I will ever see sugar-ants, or the spring, or my child hatching. If we sleep now, there is every chance we will hibernate through the last weeks of my life. There have been more impressive species passed over for mercy or luck.
We nest together in the deepest burrow. It is rounded, so that we may lie with our underbellies against one another, a united ball of spikes. Let us be a fortress, and dream ferociously. I close my eyes and his body-heat is a patch of thick summer sun. Rain carves channels through the snow. The ice crinkles and cracks over the river. Trees teethe with new shoots, their roots moaning and quaking. The soil sweats, its seeds splits, soon it will be churning with worms, plump and pink, with slaters, dark and sleek as river rocks.
Dream fierce, my love, stay warm. Make the Spring remember us.
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