Photo by Kai Wenzel on Unsplash
A whole damn yard full of wildflowers and the bees chose Lacey’s swingset. I mean, it ain’t anything fancy but it also ain’t made of wood, it’s made of plastic, but they got a whole cluster of them hanging out on the two-seater swing where Lacey likes to sit facing her imaginary friend Beth, or Bev. Why Bev? Like my daughter’s imaginary friend is a member of a weekly Bridge game or some shit.
I was standing out by the swingset, wildflowers all around my ankles, and I pointed down at them while I looked at the bees, all snuggled up together like a Bee King. And it wasn’t like one of the big swarms, all thousands of them growing like a tumor on your rain gutter, just a dozen or so, the fuzzy kind that was kinda cute unless it was pissing you off. Cute until Lacey came inside screaming because the entire goddamn thing rose up all at once, buzzing louder than anything I’d ever heard, then smacked all together into the screen door but didn’t even scatter, just kept hovering there, all smooshed in. She cried for like an hour and made me shut and lock all the windows, and I told her it’d be gone by tomorrow, except it wasn’t, and I think it even got a little bigger.
I looked it up. I guess it don’t matter that we got a yard full of wildflowers, because they’re just clustering together because their house got too small.
“I mean, I get that,” Lara had said that night, and patted her belly. Lacey’s gonna have to share a room, which is gonna make Bev all mad, I’m sure. “So it’s like a bee moving van?”
“They’re protecting their queen,” I told her. “She’s in there.”
And normally I don’t condone being violent toward women or girls but that queen was making my daughter have nightmares every night and Lara wasn’t sleeping either because of it. Me, I had three beers and slept like a baby, except, babies don’t sleep so good, they don’t sleep much at all when other people sleep. So I slept like a six-year-old, because when Lacey ain’t having nightmares she’s out cold like I’m out cold after three beers, because I’m thirty now and I can’t pack ‘em in like I used to.
I pushed the double swing with the sole of my sneaker. It creaked and moved a bit, but the bees stayed put. Lacey said she’d tried to swing it real high by pushing it with her hands, which I guess had been enough to make the bees mad and protective, because that’s when they shot up and chased her. I know I heard something about how bees were mad important, and we should try our best to save them, but there were only like a dozen or so and I figured in the grand scheme of shit that ain’t too many bees, so I shook the Raid can then covered my nose and sprayed the far seat of the swing. More than the can said you’re supposed to, but I was sure the good people at Raid weren’t making suggestions based on a whole-ass cluster of bees.
They didn’t move once I stopped spraying, but I figured that was just their way of being about to die, so I turned around and I went back inside to tell Lacey the bees were gone.
Next day Lacey comes in covered in little red bumps, crying her damn head off, telling me I lied to her. She shut herself in her room and Lara gave me that look.
“I sprayed ‘em,” I swore up and down.
“Why didn’t you check?” she asked.
I shrugged. I’d never really killed anything before, so I didn’t know if it was normal to check and make sure it was dead. I’d gone on hunting trips with dad when I was a kid but I ain’t never killed anything. I missed on purpose, even though, maybe, I dunno, I might not have been able to hit anything even if I’d tried. But Raid, that shit was hard to miss with.
“I’ll try somethin’ else. Tomorrow,” I promised, then I knocked softly on Lacey’s door. Lara handed me the calamine and said good luck.
I put little pink dabs on her bee stings. She wasn’t crazy allergic, and we knew that because she’d gotten stung once on a camping trip, which was probably why she was so freaked out now. So she was fine, and not really hurt, and could go to school the next day, but I told her she didn’t have to. I think that made her like me again, and I read her a story that didn’t have any bugs in it, because she said so.
Sid came over next day and said we could smoke them out, so he rolled a J and every time we exhaled we leaned forward toward the bee cluster, which I was now absolutely sure was growing, and blew the smoke all over them.
“I mean, if you just wait until fall, they’ll go away,” Sid said to me.
“You ain’t got kids,” I said. “Lacey wants her swing set back, she’s gettin’ her damn swing set back.”
“Ain’t got kids,” he repeated. “Amen to that shit.” But Sid loved Lacey in his way. Uncle Sid who wasn’t nobody’s brother, just some guy she called Uncle who brought a different guy to every summer cookout because he couldn’t get shit to last. Try explaining that shit to a kid. She took it okay. Better than Sid’s family, who could fuck right off.
I guess the bees looked a little tired, but they still didn’t go nowhere.
Now Bev, who I think now, for sure, is actually Beth, but Lacey’s six so she can’t make the sounds quite right, is really upset about the bees. She’s allergic. Lacey said she puffed up all big and wouldn’t come play, which ruined her whole day off from school. I told her we could play while Beth rested, which was alright, but the whole time we played wiffle ball in the backyard she kept turning to look at the swing set. Now normally she could hit the ball real good every time but because of those damn bees she kept fucking it up, and got frustrated, and cried again.
I wanted to cry a little, too, but I ain’t done that in a long time so I kicked the damn swing like a dumb kid, and the swarm got frustrated too, and chased me like a six year old running toward her bedroom. I made it to the screen door in time to watch the whole mess of them smack into it and, like last time, all stay stuck together.
“Motherfucker,” I said.
I talked on the phone that night with Sid and both of us were drunk.
“God damn,” Sid said. “Wish you’d shut up about those bees.”
“S’like I can hear ‘em from in here,” I told him.
“Bullllllshit.”
“You know what I mean. Not really hear ‘em. Just know they’re there.”
Sid was quiet for a minute.
“Then call a god damn exterminator, shit.” I heard him sip something on the other end of the line. “You think about pourin’ beer on it?”
I was out of beer, or all the beer I had was inside me, so I decided to try and kill the bees with recycled beer in the form of piss. All it did was get them wet and mad. I swore it had grown since the afternoon.
Lacey wouldn’t leave her room no more. Lara had to call the school and try to explain, then she needed to lay down because she was worried we’d get CPS called on us for being suspicious. I mean, bees? I’d think she was on meth too. Almost everybody is, so I guess the school’s used to it. But we weren’t on no meth, just on bees. I fell asleep to the sound of buzzing every night, woke up to it, heard it low beneath Lara’s voice when she talked to me. Lacey opened her mouth to cry and bees came out. They were in the toilet. I felt them in the walls so much I squeezed my ass into the crawl space to find the hive. Lara’s belly was full of bees.
My dad left me one thing when he died, and it sure as shit wasn’t no fortune. It was just some piece of shit rifle I kept in the attic with all the other shit we didn’t use, or used maybe once a year, like Christmas decorations. I thought, if anything was gonna get rid of the damn bees, a fucking gun would be it. And I couldn’t afford no damn exterminator. Sid knew that.
I didn’t even really know how to load the thing, but I ain’t a complete dumbass, so I was able to get the bullets down into the hole, or whatever it’s called. Lara was sleeping, for once, and Lacey had taken to covering her ears with her pillows at night. I think she could hear them, too. Some father-daughter bonding shit, hearing the bees together so bad we needed to plug our ears up. She told me Beth was still all puffed up. I didn’t know what to say to that, because all I could think to say was that the bees were all up inside of her, and that was why. They were inside of me, too.
I seen my dad use the rifle when I was a kid, so I kind of remembered what levers to pull, where to rest the butt of it on my shoulder. How to aim. I was point-blank with the swarm, but I still decided to be careful with them tricky motherfuckers. I aimed the barrel right at them, aiming through the cluster, toward where I imagined the queen might be.
That shit that comes out of dead bees, I looked it up, it’s called hemolymph. Bastards ain’t got the decency to have blood like other things, so they explode into this yellow-colored paste you might think is honey if you don’t know better.
I rubbed my shoulder, sore now from the recoil. The swing was all covered in bee bits. I hosed it off like watering a garden, and it all fell down through the slots in the swing, into the dirt, to decompose.
Manny was born a week later, full of bees. Lacey came out of her room to hold him, Lara right next to her, making sure she didn’t let his head hang loose.
“I love you, Manny,” Lacey said. “Now that Beth is gone I’ll be able to spend lots of time with you.”
“Aw, honey,” Lara said. “What happened to Bev?”
“She left with the bees. I think they apologized for making her puffy.”
Lara and I shared a long glance, trepidation mixed with the glow of a brand-new baby made outta both of us.
“Well, when Manny’s old enough he can use the swingset with you in her place,” Lara said.
Lara laid a blanket in the wildflowers. Manny squirmed on his stomach for the first time I’d seen. The wind pushed the swing on the other side of the yard. It was almost Fall.
Aaron J. Muller lives in Poughkeepsie, NY with his husband and their two cats. He is an MFA candidate at Bennington College, and his horror novella “Bone” is available from Weasel Press.