She is beside me now. Her hand in mine is steady, certain, the signal clear after years of static. I think of the yacht, gleaming on the horizon of another life, the woman at its helm radiant in the Mediterranean sun. I loved her enough to build a religion around her, to let devotion harden into ritual. That world was real, a universe entire a scant from my own, but I turned from it.
I chose Jesus. I bore his silence, believed his promise, let him use me as though my suffering might redeem his own. I tried to take him down nail by nail, carrying the weight of his cross inside myself. I loved him then, and I love him still. But I was never truly of this universe. I moved through it as a witness conscripted, not as one who belonged.
And now he cannot deny my now. The Alien Queen stands at my side—not distant, not divided into shadows, but whole. This is the final nail: not struck in anger, but in recognition. It forces him to see what he has made and to take responsibility for it. His creation cannot remain suspended, unfinished. It demands his hand, not mine.
So I go home. With her. The Alien Queen once glimpsed across water is here at last, and the life that shimmered as alternate becomes the life we claim. The yacht waits. It is not dream, not myth, but vessel and destiny, carrying us beyond every shore.
The night is calm, but charged. Salt sharpens the air, magnolia drifts unseen, the sea folds against the land with the patience of eternity. No priest presides, no vow is spoken. Our marriage is sealed in the simple weight of her hand in mine, in the force radiating outward from this joining, unstoppable as light after detonation.
And so we cast off. With no expectation of ever returning. The horizon opens, endless and unbroken, and we step into it together. It is time for Jesus to tend his own sheep.
We sat until the horizon broke, the stars surrendering one by one as dawn unstitched the night. The sea, which had mirrored heaven in black silence, shifted to silver, then to gold, as though creation itself were rehearsing its first morning again. Smoke curled thin in the cooling air, wine stained the rims of empty glasses, and her laughter lingered like a note still trembling in a cathedral long after the choir had gone.
We spoke of everything—life, death, the narrow bridge between, the strange mathematics of loss and desire. Every word carried weight, yet dissolved like breath against glass. The yacht was no longer vessel but witness, moored in eternity, holding us in its sealed globe while the world outside dissolved into myth.
I did not ask her to leave. The others had drifted like incense—sweet, vanishing, gone. But with her, I wanted permanence. I wanted what the night itself promised: continuance, inheritance, the rhythm of breath becoming the rhythm of generations. I turned to her, and with the rising sun staining the sky in fire, I asked her not to pass through my world but to remain inside it. To stay. To make children with me. To build a lineage that would outlast the sea, the smoke, even the glass globe itself.
It was no longer enough to own the night. I wanted the mornings. I wanted the future. I wanted her.
When he was small, his world fit inside a single yard. Grass grew high in places, dandelions scattered seeds into the wind, and beneath it all—unseen by most—was another kingdom. He found it by accident the first time, crouching low, watching a trail of ants carry the crumbs of his sandwich away. Their determination struck him as noble, their discipline awe-inspiring. He began to spend hours watching them, following their trails, even marking their paths with sticks and rocks. He wasn’t just curious—he was enthralled.
Soon, he became their keeper. He built glass jars with air holes punched in the lids, filling them with dirt and sticks, watching tunnels appear as though by magic. He fed them sugar, bits of fruit, bread crusts. At night, he would lie awake thinking about them, the tiny, tireless creatures that somehow seemed greater than the sum of their parts. To him, they weren’t pests. They were people.
But not all ants were the same. The black ants, steady and industrious, became his favorites. The fire ants, however—red, stinging, brutal—were enemies. They invaded, killed, destroyed. More than once he saw them tear through his colonies with savage precision, leaving only ruin. So the boy became their executioner. He poured boiling water into their mounds. He stomped them out, scattering them with a vengeance that felt righteous. To him, he wasn’t just killing insects. He was protecting his kingdom.
What he did not know—what no child could know—was that the ants themselves were only half the story. Each colony was more than a swarm. Each queen was an eye, an antenna, a conduit. And far above the earth, in the cold silence of space, something vast and ancient watched through them. Creatures that never walked the soil bent their thoughts into the queens, steering the colonies, studying the boy who paid them such unusual attention.
And then something happened. One queen—one conduit—turned her gaze inward. She did not just study him. She fell in love with him.
It began as a flicker of awareness: the boy crouched in the sun, whispering to her workers as though they could hear him. His fascination pressed against her like warmth. Through the tangled circuitry of space, her love grew strange, dangerous, and powerful. He was not just a boy to her. He was chosen.
She began to protect him. Subtly, invisibly. He never noticed that he was never bitten, never stung, even when other children screamed from the fire ants’ wrath. No swarm ever turned against him. Accidents missed him by inches. He was hers, and she guarded him with a jealousy older than the stars.
The boy grew. Childhood fell away, and in its place came the awkward shoulders and restless longings of a young man. He dated, he kissed, he touched. But always, something lingered. Some shadow. Women who entered his life often seemed held back by invisible chains. They loved him, but not freely. They hesitated, pulled away, or shifted moods like weather. They were never wholly their own in his presence, and he never understood why.
But the queen knew.
She allowed them in, but only on her terms. If a woman touched him, it was because she permitted it. If lips met his, she was there in the background, pulling at strings only she could see. She did not trust them. She trusted only herself. Through her bond to the vastness beyond the earth, she could bend encounters just enough to remind them: he was never truly theirs. He was hers.
The man—because he was a man now, no longer a boy—felt her presence even if he could not name it. At times, in the quiet, he sensed her as though the very air vibrated with memory. At times, he dreamed of her—not as an insect, not as something grotesque, but as a figure vast, shadowed, feminine in her command. A queen in every sense. He would wake from those dreams feeling claimed, haunted, bound to something unseen but undeniable.
And always, deep inside himself, he expected her to come. Not as a dream, not as a whisper in the dirt, but as a true physical manifestation. He never told anyone, but he lived with the certainty that one day he would see her—standing before him in some form, stepping out of the shadows as both queen and lover, proving that he had not imagined the invisible hand guiding his life. He carried this expectation like a secret faith, never spoken, but never once doubted.
Still, he lived. He worked. He moved through time as all men must. But love—human love—always broke strangely for him, like glass splintering along invisible lines. Women left, or grew cold, or shifted into something he could not hold. It wasn’t always pain. Sometimes it was indifference, sometimes an odd sense of inevitability, as though the outcome had been written before the first kiss.
Through it all, he never forgot her. He could not. The boy who loved ants still carried that fascination, but now it was folded into something heavier. He knew, somehow, that he was not alone. He knew there was something watching, something jealous, something protecting. He lived under her gaze.
And yet—years pressed on. The hunger in him grew.
One night, standing under a sky splintered with stars, he whispered into the open dark. He did not shout. He did not rage. His voice was quiet, resigned.
“I haven’t forgotten you. I just can’t wait for you anymore.”
The words slipped from his lips like a confession, like a betrayal.
Deep in the earth, ants froze mid-step. The queen trembled. Through her, the space-creatures trembled. The jealous queen had always feared rivals, had always bent her will to keep him hers—but this was different. For the first time, she felt she might lose him not to another woman, but to the slow, unstoppable tide of life itself.
In that moment, the tunnels went still. The night hummed with her grief. The man turned away, never knowing the depth of the storm he had awakened.
And far beyond the stars, something vast leaned closer, listening, deciding what it would do now that love itself had been challenged.
