The refri­gerator had been moved from its usual place, and I was vacuuming up great banks of dust from the space that had been under­neath, worried about whether the dust would fit inside the vacuum, and I noticed the kitchen floor had crumbled away in parts, revealing an enormous, humid cavern beneath the house, where conical mounds rose from the muggy depths, and to the sides of these mounds clung hundreds of larvae that looked like bright green beans, writhing in some advanced stage of devel­opment, and I feared that a swarm of locusts was breeding beneath the house, and then I saw perched on one of the mounds what must have been the queen, she was huge and steel-grey in colour as though plated in metal, and at the moment I observed her I saw her wings twitch and she rose from her station, and I reached for a can of insect spray which I knew to my distress to be only half-full, and surely not enough to repel an insect overgrown to such a scale, but I shot a jet of spray into the air as she buzzed toward me, and the bright green larvae twitched and curled as the spray rained down upon them, and the queen of the locust-things twisted her body in bitter distaste as the cloud of spray enveloped her, and I was safe.