So you want to get a bit unsettled but for there also to be bees and, like, a climate apocalypse, or something? Well, dear reader, a break from my normal programming: I present the following short story. Welcome to (Re)Wild Imagination.
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The Bee Farm
The abundant eye watched from the ceiling as Claire turned her bedroom upside down and inside out again. She gave out an irritated sigh and flopped down onto the bed, head hanging so she wouldn't have to look at the eye set into the ceiling and partly in dejection.
The bees outside grew louder, and then just as abruptly changed pitch and softened again. Their sound had been streaming through her windows for as long as she could remember, surrounded on all sides as she was by the farm and acres of hives.
She twisted her hands together and flung them apart again, not really knowing what else to do. The diary was gone. She cursed herself for not having picked a better hiding place, remembering back to the first time it had gone missing, years before. She had been nine, and it had been an oppressive summer's day.
The water in the paddling pool in the garden, while still glittering in the sunlight, was turning brown and dotted here and there by bits of grass and muck as she had jumped in and out of it. She was lying back in the pool lazily watching the treetops move overhead when she heard a door slam in the house and sat up to see her mother storming onto the back porch.
"There she is! " her mother shouted down at her and was by the pool in an instant, yanking her from it by the arm and shaking the pink little book with the broken lock in her face.
"Y' cannot say shite like that about – " her mother broke herself off, heaving in a great gasp of air, dropping the diary to the earth. Claire knew the part her mother had read immediately, as if she had been there reading it over her shoulder. It crossed her mind then that the eyes could probably read her diaries over her shoulder if they had a mind to. If they had minds.
"'m sorry ma," Claire whispered at her parent, and ten years later, Claire blinked away the memory in her bedroom, as if it were just a piece of dust in her eye.
A shaft of sunlight fell in through the skylight to hit her in a rectangle of blazing gold. Blazing gold, clouded by bees. She remembered how the shock of the theft felt – how it tasted, even years later, like vinegar.
She looked up over her shoulder at the eye in the ceiling.
"Good morning, Claire," it chimed at the eye contact.
She didn't say anything back. She never talked to her eye anymore. She had learnt that, at least. She used to call it Clarance, when she was a baby. She could have asked it (Clarence?) who had taken her diary. She could have asked it where her diary was. She could have asked it any number of things. But she didn't dare. There were things you said to the eyes and things you did not. Everybody knew that.
The eye in the ceiling of her bedroom was no exception to this rule, no matter how much it whispered to her that they were friends, no matter how many times it lulled her to sleep with its night-time wave sounds. That unblinking cornea was the first thing she saw in the morning and the last thing at night.
For some people, they said, these eyes were the world. The eyes suggested things, and these people would do them without hesitation.
The eyes were supposed to only have goodwill and a bright intent inside them, but Claire knew that while both of those things were there, they perhaps weren't the only things skulking behind those metallic pupils.
She sighed again, feeling the eye zooming in on her, knowing that she was being scrutinised. She was sitting on one of her hands and suddenly grasped that it was out of view. She crossed her fingers and the act of doing something without surveillance was delicious. She wondered if this was how people in other cities lived.
If there were other cities.
Or, really, any cities at all.
Claire used to love listening to her mother telling the stories of how they'd heard about London, the eyes soothing them and telling them not to be afraid, and how she had been, not afraid exactly, but thrilled. Thrilled that something big and exciting was happening. An entire city under water. An entire city never to rise again.
When Claire was a child, she would sometimes envy her mother this experience. It was far away from her own experience of this tedious apocalypse. She would quietly long for a war to happen, for some colossal event that was bigger than her or her family or even all the people she knew, and even the whole farming peninsula, to sweep them all up and away out of their dull, ordinary lives.
She spent her childhood wishing for a war, but really what was coming to swallow her was the sea.
The eyes could have told her this, but she had long stopped really listening to them. She was not the only one in that household losing faith in their power. She had heard her mother whispering to her father's mistress that the eyes had been saying much of the same thing for a long time now... that they may have been on some kind of a loop. Like a jammed piece of farm equipment.
Wanting to abandon thoughts of her lost diary, Claire pulled herself to her feet and raked her fingers through her hair. It stood up from her scalp in reddish fronds. There had to be some way to know for sure.
"Ma do ya know where the screwdriver is?" She hung around the door of her mother's domain. Her mother, Anna, a round, bulky woman, was obscured in the gloom of the garage.
"Speak. Properly. Claire." her mother's unforgiving voice cut through the dust motes that twirled in the light from one of the high windows. Claire couldn't see her anywhere. A shape among shapes.
"Do ya or wat?" Claire demanded. She wasn't going to be brought down on a technicality. Not this time.
Anna pulled herself upright by the seat of the pickup truck, scrambling up from the creeper on which she'd been lying. Anna dusted off her hands on her apron and turned to face her child.
"You know I do," she said, pushing past Claire to the workbench behind her where she started rifling through the drawers. Her hair was tied back severely, making her appear even older and rounder than usual. A crackle of wrinkles pasted at the corners of her eyes.
"Whadya want 'em for anyways?" Anna asked without turning around.
"My skylight," Claire lied, “it’s stuck. Sorry.” She was surprised at how easy it was to lie. She expected her mother to whinge at her for breaking the skylight again by climbing out to the roof, but the rebuke never came.
"Somethin' happenin' out there," Anna said, jerking her head towards the high window, "somethin' ain't right."
"It’s just the bees going home." Claire ascertained after a brief hesitation.
"It ain't. It's somethin' differen'." Anna turned and looked down at her youngest child. "Be sure and keep yourself close to the house now, wontcha."
"Alright ma."
"Goodun. Now here." She thumped the screwdriver into Claire's hand with an unexpectedly warm smile. "Go you now and fix that skylight...or whatever it is."
Claire frowned at herself, unsure how her mother knew that she was lying about the skylight. A stray thought came into her head that it was a mother's instinct but she pushed such childish things aside. Her mother relied on her wits and her cunning, not on some mumbo-jumbo about gut feelings and notions.
She stuffed the screwdriver into the pocket of her camo pants and slammed the porch door – again, by accident, as always – as she left the house.
Outside it was late afternoon leaking into early evening. The birds were doing their last circles around their territories, and the bats were starting to do their circles to say hello. There was a quiet lilting feel in the air; was the season changing already?
She had the sense this would be a snapshot moment, a moment she would keep tucked away in the corners of her mind until it was so old and faded with care that it barely resembled anything at all except a golden glow to the west.
Claire resisted the urge to sit on the porch steps and watch the lazy circles of the airborne creatures, which is something she had done on many other evenings besides. No. This evening had a meaning to it.
She went through the side track from the barn to the shed at the far corner of the homestead plot – her father’s domain. Its slightly off-kilter chimney and neatly kept thatched roof. She didn’t know how she knew her diary was in there, but she knew it in her bones the way water knows to flow downhill.
She pictured his desk in her mind, all the drawers elegantly labelled with subjects and dates, the row of notebooks above the desk on the narrow shelf, stored in chronological order. She peeped in through the crack in the door and saw nobody. No smoke rising from the chimney either. A good sign. She looked around, and seeing nobody, bit the inside of her cheek and tried the doorhandle. It wasn’t locked. A jolt of vinegar in her throat.
“Who’s there?” the quick, sharp voice of her dad and the breath jolted out of her like she’d been winded. She stepped back, running on electricity and insinct, and hid around the side of the shed as the sound of his chair being roughly pushed back from the desk filled her universe. The door opened and she heard him on the porch – his wheezing breath, but silent for all the rest. She looked at the daises on the ground between her feet to take the pressure off. The door closed again and she waited, listening for any other sound – maybe he was waiting too, silent on the porch.
After a long time, Claire made the half circle around to the back kitchen door, following a little path that snaked through carefully tended shrubs and bushes until she reached the rear gate of the property and looked back at the house. It smiled down at her, gilded on one side by the fading light, evening encroaching already with open palms.
She was gone down already into the first beehive enclosure, but it wasn't the bees she was out for this evening. Gripping the screwdriver in her pocket, digging painfully into the soft palm of her hand. She bared her teeth and wanted to throw it away at the sky, but looked around her instead. Maybe someone would hear her.
The hives closer to the house, the skeps, were only ornamental. They’d been in her family for generations. Further away stood a cluster of an 1800s model, the Langstroth beehive, revolutionary for its time; they had belonged to the family of her grandmother and had come as part of her dowry.
Out further still were the last of the special family hives, horizontal top-bar things with moon-shaped handholds, painted with eyes and mermaids. Her father had built them himself. These were hers; her child-hives, a tradition that her parents had come up with that she knew she would carry on.
Here, she had learnt about bees, and about family, while she painted her designs on her hives. They'd still be there when the paint had washed away in the rains. If the rains ever came again.
In a cloud of dust she made it to the fence, sliding into it so hard that the barbed wire stabbed through the thin soles of her shoes. Coughing and spluttering she got herself to her feet. She tried to clean the dust off and it was a moment or two before she really grasped where she was.
Beyond the fence there was nothing but sunflowers as far to the flat horizon as she could see. In all directions, nothing but the slightly hostile-seeming stiff stalks, the great discs staring out over the land much the same way the metallic eyes watched the inside world.
She wriggled her way through the looped fence, catching a piece of her camos on the barbed wire and suddenly was out beyond the bounds of everything she had ever known. She clutched the fence, her eyes round as the discs of the flowers, dizzily coughing up another puff of dust. After a moment her mind cleared, and she took a deep, clean breath.
She turned in a complete circle, looking and looking everywhere at all the things she could see: the sunflowers closest to her and their hairy leaves, the yellow dirt at her feet, and beyond the escarpment, the honeybee stragglers speeding home before dark. Over everything hung the vast skyscape that seemed bigger than her entire life had been up until then.
She couldn't hear the bees anymore and the silence felt sour with meaning, before she remembered that it was evening, and they were hive-bound. But then, if she took the time to hold her breath – actually, she couldn't hear anything. She was hearing the lack of noise. She snapped her fingers close to her ears – yes, her ears were working. It was like a dream.
She took a few steps into the sunflowers, and a few steps more until she was completely enveloped by them. It was like clawing your way through a bitter forest, she thought, just like adventurers in comic books.
Grasping stalks in her hands, she tried to push them aside, trying to see back the way she had come, a wild swooping feeling rushing up through her chest. The stalks parted easily, and there was the fence, and over there beyond the flat land were the beehives.
She came back out of the flowers and leaned against the fence. Maybe she'd come far enough now. She didn't need to go any further; she was already further than she'd ever been in all her life. The last inklings of sun were warm on her shoulders and the part in her hair, and she looked at her feet, trying to think.
She felt like there was something she was not quite grasping. The eyes back at home told her so without needing to speak. Their mere existence suddenly struck her as just a little bit odd, now that she was out beyond the scope of their influence.
Then it hit her.
There were no eyes beyond the bee farm.
She blinked.
Maybe there were no eyes anywhere else in the world.
She counted the eyes in her house on her fingers. Each room had at least one – the barn, being big, had two. Even the barn had eyes. But there were none out here in the wilderness? Did the sunflowers watch themselves, was that it?
How did the eyes know what she was doing right now? She almost asked herself aloud, feeling silly and half-mad.
Her ears were adjusting to the heavy silence that weighed over the miles of flowers. She saw the comforting outline of the beehives, silhouetted against the night, their endless clamour quiet now, and her heart knew warmth and safety. She looked over her shoulder at the flat escarpment she had scrambled over, at the ditch that lay beyond it, at the barbed wire.
She closed her eyes and pointed her hand in what she thought was the direction of the house. She knew her hand must be right. Her own fingers wouldn't lie to her would they?
Home.
Home was where the sun was. A whirling compass pointing every direction loomed in her mind but she turned from it. She thrust her hand out in the direction it was pointing, insisting her decision was correct, that yes, she knew where she would have to go to be back at the beginning.
She stepped out into the edge of sunflowers again, liking the hoary feel of the stalks and broad leaves in her hands, her feet kicking up dust out in the open. In the shade of the gigantic blossoms was a cocoon of gloomy silence. I can get used to this, she thought, hugging herself happily; I have a secret place now. She felt self-conscious then in hugging herself and assumed a stance of nonchalance, crossing her fingers until she felt a bit better again.
She pushed her way through the towering flowers, sneezing once or twice. She kept her eyes on her feet, her worn shoes scuffing the earth. Even the earth seemed different here: brown, malleable, luxurious even. She was surprised at how the world seemed to be flourishing, when all she had really thought of it was that it was some sort of desert. She wondered how much life there really could be after all, if this was a desert with flowers.
She poked her finger deep into the soil and recoiled when it revealed a long, reddish strip of flesh? (no, a creature!) wriggling around near her hand.
She studied the writhing thing as it calmed down, as it continued its sloping slide to wherever it was off to. It was the only living thing aside from bees and humans that she had ever seen, and the realisation jolted her. She sat back on her heels and gazed up at the sky. It peered back down at her through tongues of leaves.
She crouched closer to the earth, nearly rubbing her nose in it, and she imagined what her floating eye must seem like to the whatever-it-was right in front of it. A looming planet.
Her hands scrabbled in the dirt but revealed nothing more. The creature had nearly disappeared on her, but she cupped it in her hands, holding it carefully like water, and brought it up to her face.
"Hey!" she breathed at it. It whispered nothing in return, just looked up at her calmly in a pellucid gaze.
She laid it down gently back onto the soil, sitting back on her heels to watch it as it churned its way through the dirt much in the same way her hands were rooting through the pockets of her camos.
Something cluncked in her mind as her hand found the handle of the screwdriver. She liked to imagine sometimes that there were other people out there in the wilderness (or in cities? If there were cities?) who had felt this cold concord at least once in their lives.
She raised the screwdriver over her head like a magic wand, pausing a second to admire the little thing a moment longer before slashing the screwdriver down, cutting it neatly in half. Both halves wriggled, and after what seemed like a long time, lay still.
Made it this far? Thanks for reading!
If you liked this story, please share it on. If you’d like to read more of my writing on bees, here is some nonfiction:
The end
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ádh agus grá, & tot de volgende,
Jessica
This was creepy and good!
The Bee Farm. atairsagudn