fiction archives
BEES
It wasn’t John, it wasn’t her frustration with her life, it was the bees. She hadn’t found the hidden nest and now, everywhere she turned, was a bee. They seemed to meander aimlessly around the kitchen, not logically sticking to food. She would open the cabinet under the sink for Comet and there was a bee. She’d open a box of cereal and out would fly a bee like a small toy surprise. Once she even opened the fridge and there was a bee, drunkenly crisscrossing the lid on the butter.
She insisted noone kill them. John never gave them much interest anyway but when she was faced with squashing one or life, she chose life. To her they were just creatures trying to survive, do their job, get through their bee life. They were just doing what they could to get through their bee days. She felt them hover near the ceiling light, watching her and critiquing her dinner plans. She’d spread butter on her toast and grasp the knife harder in righteous frustration. Who were they to judge her cooking? What did they ever do to help?
Once she found three of them huddling together on the window screen, their front legs twisting like the hands of villains. She looked out the window expecting thousands of bees flying towards her. Word’s out. Big bee party in the house kitchen! After she was dead, all they would remember was she was the woman with the bees. Were she to slide a knife in the toaster and die of electric shock, her last thoughts would be if she’d ever find the nest.
John came in for something to eat before school. A bee was on the fridge handle but he merely brushed it off and pulled the door, taking out a can of Diet Coke and a bagel. The bees hovered above asking if she was allowing soda at this hour. Doesn’t Diet Coke have that bad sweetener? Didn’t you buy orange juice?
She watched him flip through the morning paper looking for comics while eating. No butter. No cream cheese. She studied him like a bug she’d found crawling on the lawn, with black shiny armor and menacing horns. She could find nothing that led back to her.
“Mom, I need some money.”
The bees dove and circled the scene like TV news with a car chase. She wished the bees could take her brain like nectar from a flower and climb inside of John to make honey. She would be doing her job correctly and the entire nest would praise her work.
“I just gave you a twenty.”
Buzz. Buzz. Buzz.
“I spent that. I need ten more for pizza after school. I get hungry.”
One bee had landed near her hand on the counter. It walked closer then away like a dog testing water. Perhaps it was a friend of John’s creeping up to remind her again how late she worked. She lifted her finger and the bee jumped back before slowly inching foward. It felt vibrations from her skin, the low humming leaking from the nest inside her head. Millions of bees circling around and buzzing like a neighbor’s chainsaw.
“You shouldn’t be eating pizza.”
She shook her head and the bees inside began swirling in a frenzy. Their weaving bodies formed a figure who was there but not there, pure Bee Energy. One who was home all the time, who shopped once for the whole week, who laid it’s Bee hand on John’s arm while listening to him talk about school. Outside she would pretend she was normal but inside her Bee Self constantly reminded her of who she couldn’t be.
She reached for her purse and it fell, loose change shooting out to spin in circles on the floor. The bees all arose and circled as well, surrounding her with things spinning out of control. She picked up her wallet and riffled through the green bills before setting a ten on the table.
John ignored the change on the floor and pushed back his chair and walked out. A bee landed on her thigh and she angrily slapped her leg, killing it but not before it stung her. She lifted her hand and it’s dead body fell to the linoleum. Where she’d been stung began to turn red and swell. The pain gave her an excuse to cry and tears began to well and drip down her face like honey from a comb.
She hid her face in her hands, not wanting the bees to see her this way. She’d failed the hive, she’d killed one of them. She took the morning paper and pushed the dead bee onto it before opening the back door and flinging it into the yard. The other bees accusingly ignored the open air and kept their distance.
She finally went to get ready for work, some of the bees lazily following behind her like pets. She heard the front door slam and John leaving for school. She sat on her bed and wondered what to do now that she’d been stung. What do people use to rid themselves of the tenderness, the pain? How do you hold still when you always feel them swarming around you like things you never get done?
Surrender, she thought, there’s no place to hide. The bees will always win.
WONDER BOY
I remember when my father told me Indians called it a "Giant Bird". Even though I was only six, I still smelled a whiff of TontoSpeak about that tidbit. Giant Bird? Oh brother. That was the thing about my father, even when he was feeding you a party line he was so damned earnest. It's one thing we shared, except with me, when I'm earnest it sounds like I'm feeding you a party line. My father, the closet scientist, would begin his lecture on aerodynamics and the nature of currents. I pretended to listen, nodding in the right places and acting perplexed now and then while watching the hair on the back of his hands flow like seaweed across his wrists. Finally he'd finish his great musings on the nature of flight and the two of us would gaze at the "Great Bird" on the runway, full of awe and resignation how after all our talk about aerodynamics, we'd never really understand what flying is.
I often went with my father to the conventions he attended. My mother insisted and every time we came back from one, she'd have redecorated the entire house. My father would be in meetings all day while I'd sit in our hotel room watching TV and flipping through the local yellow pages noting sex-related businesses. Occasionally I'd wander down the hall to the ice machine where I'd bury my G.I.Joe under all the cubes pretending he was Walt Disney. The day we were returning home from Atlanta, the weather was perfect. We boarded our flight uneventfully. I was not a noisy child in public, more interested in appearing angelic so as to attract the interest of passing movie stars. "My, how beautifully you've colored that firetruck. Let's be best friends."
After the plane left the ground, I promptly fell asleep. Not until I was shaken awake and saw magazines scattered up and down the aisle did I realize something was different. My father kept looking out the window, his head bobbing up and down as if there would be a difference in the view between the top and bottom. I wasn't scared, I was used to Father's resourcefulness in these situations or the ones I'd imagined. The plane lurched and my box of crayons slammed against the seat across from me, colors bursting free like quick bright birds.
I stared as Father removed his shoes, old, thick Oxfords he bought precisely twice a year, holding them in his lap as the plane jolted and growled like a bear in a trap. We suddenly tilted to the other side and began a rapid descent. To the pilot's credit, when we hit water we didn't nose dive or skitter like a thrown stone. We seemed to just land and were it not for the panic and confusion, you'd have thought we'd arrived at our destination. Stewardesses began pulling orange vests out of compartments and throwing them to panicked hands along the aisle. The plane lurched again and then we were in another world. The window was above us and we dangled in our seats, limp dolls strapped at the waist.
My father, calmer than ever, took one of his shoes, put his hands in the soles where the shiny leather had molded to his black-haired toes and pushed out the window. The entire glass popped, like a contact out of an eye. I was impressed. I suppose planes were built different then but the whole thing was a super-human feat like you read in line at the supermarket. "MOTHER LIFTS CAR OFF INJURED BABY", that kind of thing. There was a huge gust of sea air, sticky and chilled. My father undid my seat belt, shoved his life preserver through the hole and lifted me through after it. I went without question, he was still so resolute and earnest. I think I expected him to follow behind me, sliding through the small opening like a trick monkey. I was now sitting on the plane's side, lone inhabitant of a smooth silver island. There was another lurch and water drenched my shoes and socks.
"Thomas, put on the life vest."
"Ok."
"You'll have to get away from the plane. I know the water's cold but someone will be here soon. Go on."
As I slid feet first into the Atlantic, the plane lurched and began to sink. I paddled fast as I could away from this thing, this great dying beast. I turned for one last time to see my father's head sticking out of the window like a newborn chick out of some great egg.
"Goodbye Thomas. Say goodbye to mother. I love you."
With one last lurch, the entire plane sank into the sea. Two or three minutes later there was a huge eruption and the water was suddenly littered with suitcases, trunks and loose clothes. I dog-paddled my way to several larger boxes, making a small island where I sat waiting in the sun.
I was a media freak for awhile, though at that time there wasn't the feeding frenzy there is now. No Hard Copy, no Connie Chung. I still have a newspaper photo of me looking at the camera, the grass stretching behind me to our empty front porch. WONDER BOY, the headline screamed. The neighborhood kids constantly prodded me for information. Did I see a dead body? Was there blood? Finally, they tired of hearing the only response I would give, "I did what my father said". My mother never asked what happened. One day after being sent to my room, I decided to never tell her the message my father sent. I never did. Eventually, the whole incident took it's place on the list of my life's events until all I recalled was my father's shoes clutched in his thick, dark-haired hands.
THE LOVE LETTER
“What are you writing?”
“Nothing.”
I knew he was lying because even as I asked, I watched his words fill the screen. I tried to read them from my side of the room, squinting and holding my magazine neglected in my lap. The words on the page seemed leaden compared to those springing from nowhere while his fingers tapped the keyboard. I knew he was writing about me, about my death. He was trying to mold something you could not touch into something to observe closely, hold up to the light and twist while examining all sides.
I wished I could create like he did. I wanted to extract my thoughts from air and produce a rabbit, a bouquet, a bright silk scarf from nothing. I wanted to look at a blank page and see land, look at dark and see light, look at the long days and see hope.
I was good at other things. I could tell a joke because I was good with a map. I could start with an entrance - a parrot walking into a bar, an arrival at heaven’s gate - and navigate my way to the punch line. It wasn’t creation but it was patiently crawling along the floor and feeling the cracks of the wood leading to the door.
He saw the whole house - the floor, the windows, the roof, the nails. He was like living with God in his way, and being around God was a blessing and a hard thing. Only God, I thought, saw the whole house and to those of us pressed like a turtle to the ground, the picture was too big to carry.
Once I watched him tear up when cars were sold on the TV screen.
“Why are you crying?”
“Because”, he said, “so many people just walk.”
Feet marching across Earth, mothers carrying children across fields for food. I could not imagine the sun on an old man’s back while dust buzzed like gnats around his shoes. I could not see anything unless it was placed before me like a Blue Plate Special at a roadside diner. I was faithless and it’s why I was reluctant to let go. I could not see anything beyond the life we made ourselves.
He was God, I was the skeptic. I asked questions. “What are you thinking about?” “What do you want?” “Why should we go?” I begged him for a story about my life, to produce a fable about how to accept death. I wanted God to show me how to pray.
One night we were laying in the dark and as his breathing become more and more measured like crickets, I asked “What would you do if I died in my sleep?”
Just when I thought he had forgotten me, he said “I would wait until I died and we could both wake up together.”
I wanted to hear about tears, my family and all my old clothes being taken away by the Salvation Army. Instead his answer lulled me asleep with thoughts of walking through the night to morning when we’d open our eyes and begin our day.
THE MUMMY
“Have you ever felt like you need more sleep?”
“Only all of my life” she replied to the TV and the sound of her voice made her jump away from the open fridge. She knew the TV was on but still turned her head like Banjo does at sounds of neighborhood dogs. There was laughing in the yard, the kids playing frisbee with Brian while she was supposed to make lunch. Banjo looked up at her, torn between alert and his constant search for fleas.
She wondered if slamming the door hard enough would trap her exhaustion inside the appliance. Her secret would become lethargic from the cold and settle in the butter like a dozing fly. If she never opened the door again, the words might stay there forever. She could keep how tired she was of everything in her life from those who needed her - her husband, the children, her mother.
Her mother would call and tell her she had “issues”, a word she’d learned from daytime TV and now waved like an angry banner every time they talked on the phone. She would stand listening in front of the open refrigerator door, feeling the cold creep up her legs while staring at the rows of jars on the shelf. Her mother had become the William Hearst of Issues, a tycoon of her new domain and she felt like Patty, foiled in her attempt to escape her life. After her mother finished, she’d leave their conversation inside the fridge next to the Juice Boxes and go recover in their bedroom.
When she was a teenager, she went to an exhibit of traveling Egyptian artifacts with her class. She always liked Egyptian things, especially the clay jars holding make-up which she pictured lining a Tomb like the rows of perfume on her dresser. While her mother was at work, she’d stand in her bedroom and lift them one by one, a Royal Princess choosing which dark kohl would line her eyes. She turned up the radio when the song “Walk Like An Egyptian” came on and bent her arms like swan necks . The secret to walking like an Egyptian she decided was not bending your legs. She was technically a drawing of an Egyptian and her goal was to be two things at once, one that moved and one that didn’t. Like an eager magician’s assistant, she would dance alone and demonstrate the illusion.
At the museum, she lingered behind. Since she wasn’t really friends with anyone, noone seemed to mind and their voices were like distant coins hitting water at the bottom of a well. She slowly cruised along the cases, deliberately trailing her finger on the glass and leaving a pale smudge. Here was a pot of rouge. This was used for the eyes. This was a statue of a cat. When she reached the end, she’d point through the air like a guided missile until she’d land on the next one and continue her inventory. Milky green. Milky blue.
All the cases led to The Mummy which is what she wanted to see most of all. It was in a sarcophagus whose lid had been left ajar and she saw the ratty shoulders and head lying in the box. It looked dirty and she imagined bringing it home, her mother complaining about the mess. “You got Mummy all over the carpet.”
She walked behind the case, between the wall and the glass, the tight space like forts she built in her room when she was younger by throwing sheets over chairs and making a nest to protect herself. She bent close to the Mummy face, looking for a sign of who was inside the wrapping. “Who’s there?”, she thought, “How do you walk?”.
Through the glass she saw the other students disappear around a corner. Now she was standing alone next to the mute figure, like a bedside nurse with a coma patient. “I’m afraid, Mr. Tut, your family member has died. We aren’t able to bend the legs at all.” There would be a huge funeral crowded with mourners. A tomb would be built of chairs and sheets and she would lie inside, her perfume bottles lining the nearby shelf.
She sat on the museum floor behind the case and then laid down on the marble. It was cold like fish skin on the back of her legs and she straightened her limbs. She looked up to the ceiling and pictured the lid sliding shut, blocking the voices of the other girls gossiping down the museum hall. She folded her arms across her chest like a monarch and closed her eyes, adjusting her breathing like a radio to the stillness.
She didn’t know how long she’d been sleeping. She awoke and there was a guard standing over her, asking if she was all right. She quickly pulled down her top which had risen to reveal her soft stomach and apologized before fleeing. Her arms had fallen asleep and were useless, flinging themselves stiffly around her body as she tried to find the others.
She still dreamed of The Mummy, late at night after the kids were asleep. She’d lay on their bed in the dark, arranging herself like a corpse and crossing her arms over her breasts. Banjo would watch from the floor, a silent mourner. The sounds of the night wrapped themselves around her body like cotton strips, encasing her before she’d gratefully close her eyes.
She would love some Mummy Sleep right now while everyone was outside. She wanted to close the curtains before lining her eyes and placing herself on the bed. Banjo might howl and her family would run in to find her immortalized, a secret enclosed in ragged cloth. While they watched, she would close the lid to keep out the noise and keep them from disturbing her . She felt the sheets, cold like marble, against her neck and she was no longer forced to rule. She could sleep and dream and, if she desired, rise to open one of the jars lining her private place of rest.
They were coming inside now and hungry. She heard the refrigerator door slam and Brian handing out Juice Boxes. Soon they would want her to give them food, rouse her from her muffled box to provide for all who asked. Banjo was waiting to follow and when she finally stood, she put on her flip-flops and walked stiffly down the hall, the dog licking the ground after each step she took.
GAMEBOY
“Show and Tell’s
just a game I play
when I want to say
I love you.”
He hated this song because it reminded him of trains whistling far away. When he was a small boy and spent the night at his grandmother’s house, she would leave the radio on in the room where he slept and he heard trains wooing in the background like a lonely off-key singer wanting to join in the current hits.
Gary, on the other hand, loved it and because Gary was dying he had aural rights. Gary owned the 45 and played it on his ancient Hi-Fi over and over, laying in bed and swooning over the crooner’s bravado. When he was taking care of Gary, he would be forced to listen and not think of trains carrying people away to some other place.
“Play it again.”
Gary couldn’t get up to change the record and while Gary laid in bed, he’d sit next to the phonograph and routinely replace the needle without being asked. He’d lift the clumsy arm and place it on the outer edge of the black vinyl like a weaver with a loom, like a mother patting her baby after a meal. Again. Again.
“How do you even play Show and Tell?”, he once asked Gary. “What kind of a game are we talking about?”
Gary would pause and he wasn’t sure if it was because Gary was having trouble breathing or if Gary had even heard him.
“Well,” Gary would finally answer,”I’m pretty sure it involves dice.”
He rolled his eyes and looked out the window at the pigeons who’d gathered outside, pacing back and forth like fat attorneys in a courtroom foyer debating the validity of this claim. Yes, they’d seem to be weighing, dice would be logical.
“So”, he asked,” you roll the dice and then what? Is there a board?”
Again, Gary would pause and seem to go away, imagining (he assumed) a couple sitting around a table, dice in hand, and whether they were also hovering over a board.
“No board.”
One time in the middle of restarting the song, Gary’s wheezing stopped and he was so startled, so aware was he of every breath Gary took, he dropped the needle. It skittered and made a sound like a large cloth being ripped in half. Gary gasped and opened his eyes, shocked back into life over his concern for the safety of the record. There was a long silence as he gently replaced the needle to it’s perch and examined the record for damage. The yellow plastic disc in the center hole made an “Oh” of surprise as they all waited tensely for the prognosis.
Nothing on the surface. He replaced the record and gently lifted the arm and sat it with utmost care on the revolving black plastic. With the first roll of the drums, they all sighed in relief.
How, he wondered, could a Love Song make him so sad? Sometimes when Gary slept he’d play the song hoping it could keep them both alive. Gary would breath softly, dreaming (he hoped) of dice and games while he’d listen and softly cry, chewing his sobs like Flintstone vitamins in his mouth, the chalky sweet taste coating his tongue. The cooing doves helped him swallow and he’d reach over to start again.
“Here is the man
who used to know where he’d stand
Don’t you know
I’ve done all I can”
SPUR
“I’ve got spurs that jingle, jangle, jingle...”
That was the only line she knew, so she assumed spurs were like charm bracelets. She watched her mother stand in front of her dresser and lift the top of her satin jewelry box. First were earrings, giant beaded clip-ons, then one of her watches and finally her spurs. Her mother would lift her hands in the air as if donning surgical gloves, shaking them so her spurs slid down her arm. Like loose coins, like an ornament falling from the tree, they’d delicately jingle, steely jangle then the grace of jingle again. She’d find her mother’s spurs on the kitchen table in the morning. She’d slide them on, surprised at their weight, and fan out her fingers so the spurs wouldn’t drop to the floor.
When her mother realized her ignorance, she told her about bracelets. “Spurs”, she said as she pulled out a chair and lit a cigarette, “go on your shoes.” She left her mother in the kitchen and snuck upstairs to examine her father’s shoes. She thought of the way he rolled change in his pocket, a habit proving he liked things that jangle. Surely, she thought, her father would have spurs. She inspected his soles but found them free of noise, his steps were bags of potatoes not sleigh bells, not spurs.
She stayed up late to watch The Ed Sullivan Show and Sammy Davis Jr. His were the only shoes she knew that made noise. The next day, she went out to the garage to her father’s toolbox. She opened the lid and a shelf unfolded to reveal a cardboard box with thumbtacks. She arranged some on the garage floor in a pattern the size of her feet and carefully stood on them all at once. She worried the spikes might sink through and prick her toes, like an Indian lying on a bed of nails. When she felt them sink into her rubber soles without reaching her, she rocked back and forth.
She started to walk, slowly at first, like she was wading through water. The tackheads made an awkward clack, clack, clack. Soon she began to shuffle her feet, scatter them over the ground like jacks, like there was music. Her spurs began singing a song about her legs. They twittered. writing notes in chalk on a blackboard. Click, click, click.
She would put spurs on all her shoes. She took out an old class poster she’d made (Birds of Florida) and laid it face down on the floor. Using her shoes as guides, she outlined each foot and marked where to set tacks. The heads would rest on the ground with the sharp points sticking in the air like umbrellas abandoned in the street. Maybe there was a secret pattern to spurs, an ancient way of arranging tacks which enhanced the effect. There would be a chart in National Geographic next to pictures of primitive shoes. Maybe an article, under S for Spurs, in her World Books. Here is how Aztecs made Spurs.
She walked out of the garage to the kitchen where her mother was still sitting at the table, coffee cold and her third cigarette. She tried shuffling silently across the floor, hoping her Spurs wouldn’t mark the linoleum. She wanted her Spurs all to herself, at least now, until she was confident their power was real. Her mother watched and squinted slightly as if trying to hear a telephone far away.
“Why are you walking like that?” she asked. Her eyes scanned her daughter’s body until they rested on her small shoes. She froze in front of her mother, feet flat on the floor, the thumbtacks mute as snails under a rock. She forced the soles of her feet to press them against her body like keys in her pocket.
“I’m doing something.”
Her mother seemed ready to doubt her answer, raising her eyebrows as her cigarette smoke snuck around looking for the truth. Finally resigned to the statement (she was, after all, doing something) she smiled slightly and cut off her questions like stray limbs off a tree. This is going nowhere, she decided, and ended the wandering with a swift clip.
“Can you love anything?” her daughter suddenly asked. She loved Spurs. She loved the way they jingled, jangled, jingled. She wanted Spurs all the time. She wanted to pretend to listen while she shook her Spurs in her pocket.
Her mother paused like a gypsy reading a crystal ball, her young daughter stiffly waiting for an answer. She had stopped reading this girl’s mind but even in the face of questions about Love, she felt she was still hers. Always, that’s what Love felt like. You could lock the door and take the key where you wanted, feel it pressing into your skin while waiting in line at the bank, in a store, smiling and nodding to people passing by. Love is a door to a house.
“I suppose.” she finally replied, still unsure of what they were talking about. “After all, I love you”, she said before rolling her eyes. “Come here.” As her daughter walked over to her waiting arms, to wrap her and take her back, she could hear the faint clicking of the clock on the stove.
SPRING
Before spring arrived, Bob’s ex-wife took their children and moved out of their house. They were two different creatures, he and she. She was like a raging storm while Bob was like the gutters that lined the roof. She was not kind to him and had filled Bob’s life with the force of her anger. While Bob suspected he was better off without her, it was a tough blow. When she left, the sudden emptiness of his house was a surprise. Bob had reached the age when things stopped coming and started going and he was unprepared for his life to feel so empty.
The events made Bob think. Bob thought about things alot and the sudden absence of people and plans left more room to wander. He walked through his house, through his garden, past the birdbath by the window where the showy birds preened and down to where water leaked from the end of the hose. There stood a ladder which he climbed and could see further than ever, like an empty lighthouse on a cliff. Bob looked over the fence around his house to other people’s yards. Here high above the ground, his life seemed far away and next to other buildings, his house was small indeed.
Bob collected ladders, building each one in his basement. His wife thought building ladders was a mindless task, each just a larger version of the last. To Bob, every ladder led to a place of it’s own and it’s measurements were unique. He leaned them against a wall in the basement like crutches waiting to help people walk. He’d compare their heights, each one proving how tall he’d been. He remembered he’d once been scared to climb but now each step filled him with pride at how high he’d gone. They were tall but not tall enough to see his sudden loss. Soon, Bob thought, he’d begin another ladder, one so tall he might never reach the top. Certainly that would be the last ladder he would build. It would stand so high his house would seem lost below him.
At night, Bob would walk down the garden and climb his ladder to look at the stars. Once he thought he saw another person perched on a ladder like him. He would have waved but was too scared to let go of his wooden seat. Instead he sat and wondered how many Ladder People walked through the streets never knowing about the others. They’d pass and nod while quietly carrying their secret heights.
The room where his children had lived was dark behind the shades. From his ladder, they were like blank screens of drive-ins at night. He’d looked at their photos until his memories became like snapshots. He thought of them looking out at him, their waves frozen mid-air. That night he gathered their pictures and sealed them in a box. In the basement, Bob slid the box under blankets his mother had given him, smoothing the worn cloth and wrapping himself in dusty warmth.
When he was sad, Bob took his grief to the top of his ladder where he nursed it like a bird with a broken wing. Perhaps closer to the sky he could teach it to fly again. He’d cry and his sobs would leap from his mouth before falling to earth in great lumps of pain. At the bottom of his ladder their bones would sink like dinosaurs into tar around him. His sorrow would harden, the land itself rising towards his perch above the flowers and grass.
When Spring came, his garden burst into leaves. His ladder stood from the bushes like the trunk of a dead tree. When he climbed now, it would creak and sway under his weight like the prow of a ship at sea. The lawn lapped the base and he set course by the stars above, hoping the sky would lead him home. On shore would be those he loved, waiting for his safe return.
Finally, when the lights around him all turned dark, Bob wearily came down step by step. Past the perennials, past the grass, his house was waiting. He folded his ladder and carried it over the porch and through the back door. He turned off the kitchen light and took the ladder to an empty room where he laid it down like a sleeping child. Another night, another Spring, another year, another day. Bob dreamt that night of his house and his garden. He dreamt of climbing and climbing before releasing his past from his cupped hands to fly away and vanish in the dark.
Last update: 9/27/06; 7:46:35 PM .
