The Living by Anna Starobinets

the House of Correction and the entomologist.’
    They obviously discussed it immediately in deep layers: the staff entomologist appeared about ten minutes later and set off for the termite room. He looked away as he passed me. He looked annoyed, almost angry. The entomologist soon came back, holding a small cylindrical plastic container with a single termite inside. He set it up on the Available Terrace, next to my mosquito’s cage. Still not looking in my direction and twisting his mouth in irritation, he told me that the termite ate cellulose, that the termite was blind and asexual, that the termite could not tolerate sunlight and that the termite was a social insect. He told me everything I needed to know about my new pet. Then the entomologist gave me the feed – a silvery packet filled with damp shavings that smelled of mushrooms and woodland . I asked about the light – wouldn’t my termite suffer in his transparent container on the Available Terrace – and he explained with hostility that the walls of the container were made from a special light-filtering material. Then he left without even saying ‘no death’. I was surprised: before the entomologist had got on well with me and always been pleased with the health of my pets.
    I remember how, after he left, a crowd of correctees gathered on the terrace and swarmed round the container with my new pet – it struck me that the container was a little like the Son’s transparent chamber. I remember they were all silent for a long time, either shutting their eyes or looking round in agitation, discussing my insect on
socio
. And a correctee with the nickname Foxcub – he was pretty dumb and couldn’t keep second layer well, often verbalising his deep answers – exclaimed in a loud, monotonous voice, ‘Poor soldier!’
    A week later I understood everything: their looks, Foxcub’s outburst, and the entomologist’s irritation, and what Ef had said about ‘a useful experience for me’. The termite that wasentrusted to me had been a member of the ‘warrior’ caste in the termite mound. The upper part of his body was encased in a hard brown shell, as if he were fitted out in armour like a knight. For a weapon he had huge sickle-shaped mandibles the same size as the rest of his body – so enormous that they prevented him from feeding himself. He spent the whole week in an awkward defensive pose, his blind, armoured head turned to face me and his back to the termite room, as if he were hoping to ward me off and save his home castle. He ceased living on the seventh day, from hunger, on a heap of the aromatic food shavings which I had, without fail, continued to throw into his container all this time… Cracker said that he had been doomed from the start, my new pet.
    Cracker said that there, in the mound, worker termites would feed soldier termites like that with the contents of their intestines : they would carefully place digested cellulose right into their mouths.
    Cracker said that every correctee knew that, anyone who had watched the live feed even once – anyone, but me.
    Only then, as I looked through the transparent plastic at my unliving pet, did I realise that Ef had, of course, known in advance how me looking after this termite would end up. And the entomologist knew too – that’s why he had got angry, he had felt sorry for him… Ef wanted to teach me a lesson: loners are doomed. They can’t survive outside the mound.
    They can’t survive outside the Living.
    I learned my lesson well. I felt humiliated, pitiful and helpless, like that soldier that could not swallow his own food. When Ef came to visit me a day after the end of the termite, I couldn’t bring myself to look at him: not because I was offended, but because I was ashamed to see my reflection. And when Ef, in a conciliatory, almost affectionate way, offered to let me choose a third pet again (‘I think you like that stag beetle, don’t you?’) I was horrified to hear my own reply: