"Science Fiction" means—to us—everything found in the science fiction section of a bookstore, or at a science fiction convention, or amongst the winners of the Hugo awards given by the World Science Fiction Society. This includes the genres of science fiction (or sci-fi), fantasy, slipstream, alternative history, and even stories with lighter speculative elements. We hope you enjoy the broad range that SF has to offer.
Eric Horwitz is an aspiring writer and a librarian in Brooklyn, NY. He is on twitter under the pseudonym @ETZithrow
The Queen has an obsession with figs. She knew that wasps laid their eggs inside of them and that the hatchlings ate their way out. This gave her the idea for how to arrange the baby's nursery, in a way that her child could grow into the kind of creature she greatly admired.
She commissioned a bulbous dome to be built of gold and porphyry and partially lined on the inside with red velvet. Inside, her engineers spread a golden mesh to conceal a metallic pipe at the bottom. An occupant would spend his life on this comfortable golden net, fed by the clockwork above him which they designed to gently deliver spheres of peeled fruit. Any waste sluiced through to the bottom, to be promptly drained.
They sealed the baby within this cavernous contraption where he presumably still lives, for fruit still comes in at the top and shit still drains out the bottom. The Queen must intend for the boy's tutelage to be the escape from this dome, that his childhood will end when he figures out how to emerge from the nursery.
Quite frankly we are all terrified of what is going to come out.
The End
This story was first published on Thursday, November 9th, 2017
Author Comments
The narrator of this story waits in terror as his future king gestates. Whatever comes out of the golden fig will be illiterate, unsocialized, spiteful, malformed, and covered in his own shit. Someone much smarter than myself could probably find connections to the real world.
- Eric Horwitz
Become a Member!
We hope you're enjoying Fig Prince by Eric Horwitz.
Please support Daily Science Fiction by becoming a member.
Daily Science Fiction does not have a paywall, but we do have expenses—more than 95% of which are direct payments to authors for their stories. With your $15 membership, less than 6 cents per story, we can continue to provide genre fiction every weekday by email and on the website to thousands of readers for many years to come. You may also choose to support us via patreon.
Rate This Story
Please click to rate this story from 1(ho-hum) to 7(excellent!):
