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
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