You're an Animal, Viskovitz by Alessandro Boffa

Author:Alessandro Boffa [Boffa, Alessandro]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, cookie429, Kat, Extratorrents
ISBN: 9780307430359
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T13:00:00+00:00

YOU’VE MADE A BAD NAME FOR YOURSELF, VISKOVITZ

It’s not an advantage to be named Viskovitz when the little life has to offer is handed out in alphabetical order. In our anthill that was the way they nourished us larvae. The only one worse off than me was Zucotic.

In return for giving us nectar, the nannies wanted our sugary fluid. Relationships were an exchange of secretions, not of affection. Because of this malnutrition and disillusion, my organs were atrophying. When I tried easing my hunger pangs by sucking my own exudations, day by day I found them more acid and bitter.

Take it from me—a larva with declining secretions is the most despised of all creatures. They began to say to me, “You’re rotten, Viskovitz.” “You’re disgusting.” Or “You’re a zero.” These are words that are very hurtful.

So one day I said, “It’s time to get moving, Zuco. It’s time to do something.”

“Do something?”

It’s not an easy concept to grasp for a larva without legs, wings or sex.

“Precisely,” I said. “We have to plan our future, take our fate in our own tarsi.”

“Tarsi?”

“Figure of speech! We’ll make do with our mammiform prominences—our bulgy parts. We’ll use our orifices if we have to. The important thing is that we get to the royal larva nursery. If we eat that nectar we’ll become queens, brother, and we’ll rule the world. The gruel they feed us here isn’t even food enough to make us asexual worker ants. We’ll stay larvae the rest of our lives, Zuco. Have I made myself clear?”

“I wouldn’t mind staying a larva, Visko. However things go, I’ll always be an ant. So it’s better to keep on being a formless plasm. I believe it’s just for that reason that fate put me here and gave me this name.”

How could I reason with that acephalous creature? Contracting every fiber and gripping every bump with my buccal apparatus, I dragged myself to the way out of the chamber. Then, sticking myself onto the walls with my fluids, I began to climb, to gain the first millimeters of my progress up the social scale. After a week of those furious gymnastics I was exhausted and famished, but I reached the chambers of the upper story. I collapsed on the floor, panting and moribund.

My dehydrated body didn’t have any secretions to barter for food, but some larvae agreed to release a little something to me in exchange for the story of my adventure. Restored, I abruptly fell into a deep sleep, but what I’d eaten wasn’t royal jelly, and when I woke up I found myself with legs but no crown. I had a horny exoskeleton, and my scythe-like mandibles were weapons. I was a soldier.

At the first assembly, when I had a chance to observe myself alongside the fellows in my unit, I was rather disappointed. Malnutrition had harmed me in a conspicuous way. Entire somites of my body were atrophied and deformed. The overall effect was that I was an underdeveloped little guy. I was a gnome.

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