The Burning Bees
The bees took over.
Months ago, Craig affixed a big birdhouse to the side of his house with the hopes of attracting barn owls. Instead, he got bees. One day. he went out to do yard work and they were just there, like they moved in overnight. Dozens of bees flying in and out of the wooden birdhouse that Craig built with his hands and went through great pains to add pretty little flourishes like Greco-style cornices and a replica owl on top.
At first, Craig was disappointed. He wanted owls, not bees. But then he read about how bees are declining around the world, possibly facing extinction in the next few decades, and then he didn’t mind anymore. He felt like he was doing a small part in helping bees survive.
Besides, the bees were harmless honey bees and did nothing but congregate and pollinate. Craig liked to joke to his wife, quite often she’d remind him, about how they were his favorite neighbors. It was, indeed, a harmonious relationship. Craig had become a bee guy.
Meanwhile, the beehive was getting bigger. The bees expanded their comb so that it completely covered the entire front of the birdhouse. You couldn’t see any of Craig’s handiwork anymore. You only saw a big, sloppy bump-shaped mass covered with thousands of bees.
Craig felt a bit miffed that his woodwork skills were no longer visible. But he figured the bees in there must be doing very well since they’re expanding so much. And hey, he was doing his part to save the bees! Thinking of that made his heart feel full.
But then Craig had one of those days. We’ve all had them. A day where nothing goes right. No catastrophic events, just a day that reminds you that you mean nothing, and once you die, you will disintegrate into nothing because you are, in the end, simply nothing.
It went something like this:
Craig started out the day stepping in his dog’s shit, which caused him to drop and shatter his favorite coffee mug. His wife got angry at him for that, which made him angry because it was obviously an accident, which turned into a fight about the dog she’d always hated but he’d always loved, which then became a fight about paying for their daughter’s college tuition he thought was too damn expensive for the shit-quality of school it was but that she thought it was worth it to make their daughter happy, then the daughter got upset about Craig not wanting to see her dreams come true, so he just left the house in a bad mood, sick of his wife, sick of his daughter, sick of how spoiled and sensitive they both were, wondering how he fucked up so bad, but he loved them, dammit, so he went to work to earn money to make them happy and comfortable, but his idiot neighbor was blocking his driveway again with that monstrosity of a utility van that seemed to never move from the idiot neighbor’s junk pile front yard unless it was to block Craig’s driveway, and Craig had to ask him to move it, and the neighbor - a piece of shit who never wore a shirt to cover up that disgusting beer gut, actually gave him shit about it, and Craig had to plea - plea! - for the fucker to move that goddamn stupid van so he could get to work, and the neighbor finally did but then things got worse at work because his boss, who was 15 years younger and made twice his salary, started complaining about a project being late even though it wasn’t Craig’s fault because he didn’t have the budget for another graphic designer and the one he had was swamped and about to go on maternity leave so what the hell is he supposed to do about that, but it was when the 15 years younger boss pointed his finger at Craig that made him nearly explode, made him use up every drop of self-control he had accumulated throughout his entire life just to restrain himself from grabbing his worthless boss’s neck and snap, crackle, pop that motherfucker once and for all.
Instead, Craig went to the bathroom, sat in a stall, and stared at the door for 20 minutes, breathing slow and deep, trying to ignore the aromatic cocktail of industrial perfume and shit.
When Craig got home, he didn’t want to talk to his wife or daughter just yet, so he went out to look at the bees.
He sat there, opened the flask of whiskey he kept hidden in the yard so his wife wouldn’t give him a hard time about drinking, and sipped, enjoying the alcohol burn his throat as he watched the bees. He enjoyed himself sitting there, admiring their dedication and cooperation to their task, wishing he had that kind of purpose and camaraderie in his own life. He chuckled to himself as he imagined being one of them, flying around town, filling his stomach with pollen, flying back to the hive and vomiting up honey so that he and his fellow bees can survive - a purposeful and joyful existence, beautiful in its simplicity and meaningful in its outcome.
Craig closed his eyes and saw the bees’ world, the thousands of others who looked just like him, buzzing around him, protecting him as he protected them. He heard the constant buzz of his brothers, saw the comb’s bright orange glow all around him, and tasted the sweet honey gushing out his stomach. Everything felt good and right. He just wanted to be a bee.
And then something stabbed his forearm, rudely yanking him out his whiskey-buzz daydream. He looked at his arm and saw a large bee stuck in it, still buzzing, angrily. He could feel the bees’ stinger in the meat of his arm and it hurt bad.
“Sonofabitch!” Craig said, and smashed the bee with the palm of his hand.
He looked up at the beehive - that big, contorted glob hanging off the birdhouse he built with his own hands.
“After all I did for you?” he said out loud, half-jokingly.
But then he said it again, not joking.
“After all I fucking did for you.”
Craig couldn’t sleep that night. The bee sting gave him a thick, dull pain that stayed in his arm like a narcissist squatter. But it wasn’t the pain that kept Craig up. It was the betrayal.
The next morning, dark circles around his eyes like weights tied to his face, he slurped his coffee and pet his dog without saying a word to his wife or daughter. They said things to him and he nodded or grunted. He didn’t hear them. He only heard a buzzing sound. The bees. Loud and constant. A calming sound. He looked at his wife and daughter and their faces were blank - no eyes or nose or mouth, just smooth skin with hair on top. Craig realized this wasn’t right. Something was wrong. But he didn’t panic. He concentrated on the buzzing sound and thought about the bees who took over his birdhouse and took advantage of his kindness.
When he left to go to work, his neighbor’s utility van was blocking his driveway again. Craig saw the van, but he didn’t think about it. He pressed on the gas and slowly drove into the van, putting a large dent into it as he nudged it out of the way.
At work, Craig sat in his office, hidden behind his computer. His boss called an impromptu meeting, but Craig said he wouldn’t be able to make it. He didn’t give a reason why. Just said he wouldn’t make it. It wasn’t a lie. He was in no shape for a meeting. He had to think about the bees, listen to the buzzing in his head, imagine the growing hive and the taste of the honey and the sonofabitch who stung him. It still hurt. Worse since last night. This was what he had to do.
Craig’s boss walked into his office and said something, but Craig couldn’t understand him. His boss’s face was blank, too, a sickening mass of flabby flesh with nothing on it but pores and hair. It spoke, a voice coming form somewhere, but the voice was drowned out by the buzzing sound of the bees.
Craig stared at him, his eyes darker and heavier now, he could feel they were, and knew they must look bad. But that thought was far away from any feeling part of his brain. He only cared about the bees.
Craig stood up and walked past his blank face boss, past everyone else in the office with their blank, empty faces, and savored the buzzing sound, which was now in tune with his pulse, his heart, his blood.
Craig waited until night.
He leaned a ladder against his house and climbed onto the roof. He held a canister of gas in his hand and a lighter in his pocket. He didn’t want to do this, but he had to. He had to take back his birdhouse.
Crouched down, Craig tiptoed toward the beehive. It was quiet. But the life and energy inside the hive was still apparent. Craig felt like what he was doing was murder. And when he tilted the gasoline over the beehive, he stopped himself and cried.
What the hell was he doing on his roof at 3 am with a canister of gas? When did he lose control of his life? When did everything become so blank?
His sobs grew louder, like a desperate wail, something he never heard come out of himself before, like it was somebody else. He clenched his fist and hit the roof. He hit it again. He sobbed more. And hit the roof again.
The buzzing of the hive intensified. It shook. The buzzing sound got louder. It shook harder. Craig saw it. He stopped hitting the roof and controlled his sobs. But the hive kept shaking, kept buzzing, harder and louder.
“Shit,” Craig said.
And a swarm of bees gushed out of the hive and shot at him like a bullet.
Craig grabbed the canister and flung the liquid at the bees. A few got hit and dropped to the ground, but the swarm as a whole was undeterred and kept coming.
Craig threw some more gas, but now the swarm busted through and completely engulfed Craig, thousands of bees stabbing his face, his neck, breaking into his mouth, his ears, under his clothes. The pain was violent, a flood of boiling water drowning every part of his body, but was still not as powerful as the shock of being attacked by thousands of tiny creatures and feeling their legs and their hair and their hellbent intent on destroying you.
Craig took out the lighter and flicked it. One single bee set alight, a tiny flame on a tiny wing, and like dominos, the entire swarm was on fire. And so was Craig.
He dropped to the rooftop and rolled, trying to put out the flames on his clothes. As he stamped out the last remnants of fire on his t-shirt, he watched the swarm turn into a furious fireball zig zagging in the night, somehow getting bigger and brighter, the furious buzz of the bees getting louder, the loudest sound Craig had ever heard.
The swarm kept getting bigger, the fire brighter, wings fanned the flames faster, and the burning bees became one giant fireball. Craig watched in awe as the most powerful and beautiful thing he had ever seen appeared like a miracle right in front of his eyes. Inside that fire was life, hate, death, love, frustration and happiness, nothing and everything. And it shot up in the air, stayed still for a moment, illuminating the entire sky, and came crashing down, smashing through the roof and swallowing the entire house in flames.
Craig fell down with it. He saw flames erupting everywhere. He called for his wife and daughter and dog. The dog came first and jumped into his arms. The others came, confused and terrified.
They all ran out of the house and across the street.
The bees kept going. They went next door and set everything, including the van on fire. And they kept going and going and going. The entire street world was on fire.
Craig watched the flames and smiled.
This was just what he needed.
Most appropriate run-on sentence of all time.
Hell. yeah. I loved everything about this. The blank faces of just pores and hair really freaked me out.