The Animal Inside the Animal

The fence post came apart in Aunt Reza's hands like wet bread.

Maya caught the smell first. Not rot exactly. Sweeter than that, and damp, the smell of something being slowly taken to pieces from the inside. The wood under the gray paint had gone soft and pale and full of tunnels, smooth tunnels, polished tunnels, as if a tiny river had run through the post a thousand different ways.

"Termites," Aunt Reza said, the way you'd say a swear word. "They eat anything wooden. Whole post, gone." She dropped the chunk into a bucket. "Dumb little machines."

Maya picked the chunk back out.

The termites were the color of milk. Soft-bodied, blind-looking, pouring away from the broken light into the dark of the tunnels. When she held the wood close, she could feel a faint warmth off the mass of them, or thought she could, the way a handful of seeds feels warm when there are enough of them together.

"They eat the whole post," Maya said slowly. "So they eat wood."

"That's the problem, yes."

Maya turned the chunk in the sun. Here was the thing that did not sit right, the thing she felt before she could say it. She had tried to eat wood once, on a dare, a splinter off a popsicle stick. It had gone down like a needle and come back up the same. Wood did not become a person. Cows could not eat sticks. Nothing she knew of ate wood and lived on it, nothing, and here was a fence post turned into a city of soft white bodies that ate nothing else.

Something did not add up. There was a step missing.

She carried the chunk to the back step and broke a single termite free with a leaf, gentle, onto the concrete where the light was good. It humped along, helpless. She pressed it lightly under a clear plastic cup and got down on her elbows until her nose nearly touched the ground.

Through the cup the termite was a soft tube. And through its skin, where the body thinned near the back, there was a darkness that moved. Not the slosh of food. Smaller than that. A churning. A whole weather happening inside a body the size of a grain of rice.

Maya went very still on the warm concrete.

"It's not eating it," she said out loud, to no one. "Something inside it is eating it."

She found her phone and zoomed the camera until the termite filled the screen, the focus swimming. The dark place near the back pulsed. She had seen pond water under a borrowed microscope once, the way a single drop was a crowd, things spinning and lashing and rowing through their tiny ocean. She thought of that crowd now, packed into the warm dark of a termite, turning splinters into food the termite could use.

The termite was not the animal. The termite was the barn. The animals were inside.

Aunt Reza came around the corner wiping her hands. "Why are you on the ground."

"How do they get it?" Maya said, not looking up. "The eating thing. The thing inside them."

"Get what?"

"If the wood-eating part lives inside them, the babies aren't born with it. A baby termite is just a baby. Empty." She sat up fast, the gravel printed pink into her arms. "It can't eat. The second it hatches it can't eat anything, because the part that does the eating isn't in it yet."

Aunt Reza opened her mouth and then didn't have anything to put in it.

Maya was already pulling the chunk apart along its grain, careful now, peeling the city open layer by layer. She did not know the word for what she was looking for. She only knew there had to be a way in. A handoff. Somewhere the older ones had to pass the inside-animals to the young, mouth to mouth, body to body, or the whole thing would have ended a hundred million years ago with the first hungry baby that nobody fed.

In the soft pulp she found them. A knot of the smallest termites, paler than the rest, almost clear. And the larger ones bent over them, and where they met there was a wet bead, a glistening drop passing from the back of an adult to the mouth of a young one. The young one took it. Took the drop, and the drop was not only food. The drop was the crowd. The drop was the churning weather, the spinning rowing lashing animals, ladled from one body into the next so that the new termite could become a place those animals could live.

Maya felt the hair lift on her arms.

Every termite in the post had been handed its insides by an older termite, who had been handed its insides by an older one, a line of warm dark handoffs reaching back and back with no gap allowed, not one, because a single skipped drop anywhere in that chain and the line below it would have starved in a city of food it could not eat.

"They're not machines," she said. Her voice came out strange. "They can't do the one thing they do. Not alone. Not a single one of them. They feed each other the part that's missing."

She thought about her own stomach then, the gurgle of it, the way her mother said yogurt was full of helpers, the way the doctor had once said most of you isn't you. She had nodded at that and not felt it. She felt it now. She was a barn too. Everyone walking past on the sidewalk was a barn, full of churning weather, full of borrowed animals doing the work the body couldn't. Aunt Reza was still holding the bucket. "So how do we get rid of them."

Maya didn't answer.

She lay back down on the warm concrete with her eye against the cup. The termite humped in a slow circle, blind, helpless, carrying inside it a crowd older than the wood, older than the fence, handed forward through a thousand thousand mouths to arrive, this morning, here, under a plastic cup, in her aunt's backyard.

Inside the soft pale body, the dark place turned, and turned, and went on turning.