Bee is for Boy
“It’s a sacred place. If you disturb it, you’ll anger the forest spirits.”
James Harris felt the satisfying crunch against the soft skin of his palms as he slapped his hands together. He blew the crumpled body of the bee out his son’s bedroom windows and slid it shut with the urgency of a man trying to seal the space off from a deadly contagion. Holding his hand up to the daylight, he searched his palms for the pinprick mark of a bee sting.
No holes. No redness. No swelling.
James had not realized he was holding his breath until he exhaled deeply and let his hands fall to his sides. He hated spring and the swarms of bees that danced among the flowers. It made him feel emasculated to carry an EpiPen with him everywhere. He swore he could always spot the bemused look on people’s faces as their eyes trailed to the back pocket of his jeans, the slim auto-injector filled with epinephrine, and the dawning knowledge that the burley, six foot-five former high school football star could be felled by his body’s allergic reaction to a sting from a bee, a thumbnail-sized insect. Time and again, his wife told him it was all in his imagination, but he knew the people in town snickered behind his back about his allergy.
After their son, Jaime, was born, James brought the child to an allergist who confirmed that the child had inherited his father’s allergy to bee stings. James was devastated by the news until the doctor assured him that Jaime’s bee allergy scored much lower on the allergen scale. While James had a life-threatening Class Six bee allergy, Jaime only scored on the high end of Class Three and was unlikely to manifest anything more than moderate swelling around a sting.
“I assure you, these things are very common,” the doctor explained to James. “Parents do not just pass along their physical characteristics to their children. While it is true that parents can pass along an allergy, physical infirmity, or even mental health issues through their DNA, they also pass along such wonderful things as musical talent, academic aptitude, and artistic abilities. Believe me, James, as Jaime grows, you will see that you have passed along to him far more than just your allergy.”
Jaime was now thirteen, and aside from a few swollen bites over the years, the boy’s allergy left him relatively unscathed. James looked around his son’s bedroom, the walls covered with posters of Marvel Universe characters, and frowned at the unmade bed.
Where had the boy gotten off to? James knew being a long-haul trucker for Stan R’s Rolling Rigs did not leave him much father-son time, but the kid was always up for a ride to Home Depot with his old man.
James looked down at his hand as he left the room and noticed a small, black filament sticking to his thumb’s side. One of the unfortunate bee’s legs had dislodged when he crushed it. He wiped his hand clean on his blue jeans with a look of disgust and closed the door behind him.
Thursday
Jaime sat in the back seat of his father’s Ford pickup truck and tapped on the side of the small cardboard box in his lap. He could hear the creature’s exoskeleton rubbing against the cardboard walls as a slender green leg tentatively touched one of the box’s air holes.
“That’s the first time I have ever seen a praying mantis for sale at Home Depot,” Jamie’s father’s dark eyes glanced up to look at him in the truck’s rearview mirror. “I’ve seen them selling ladybugs to eat the aphids but never praying mantis’”
“Yeah, it’s so cool,” Jaime peered through the airhole into the darkened box. He could see the long slender silhouette of the mantis with its small triangular head.
“Hey, if your mom asks, just tell her it eats lettuce and stuff like that,” his father smiled and winked at him in the rearview. “Let’s just keep it between us that it eats bugs. Your mother doesn’t need to know that there’s a dangerous predator in the house. ok, kiddo?”
“Ok, Dad,” Jaime replied without taking his eyes off the box.
Jaime reached out and lightly touched the slender, spiked raptorial foreleg that protruded from the air hole; a wicked smile crossing his face.
The praying mantis crawled up the stick, the only ornament in its new home in the old Folgers instant coffee jar. Its triangular head rotated upward to study the patch of window screening covering the jar’s opening and affixed in place by a rubber band, its antennas twitching.
Jaime sat at his desk watching the mantis as he quickly thumbed through his dog-eared copy of The Bees in Your Backyard: A Guide to North America’s Bees. It had been a birthday gift from his mother three years ago. He remembered how his father rolled his eyes and shook his head as Jaime held up the gleaming white with the picture of a giant yellow and black honey bee emblazed across the cover.
“Bees are amazing and fascinating creatures,” his mother had cajoled her husband. “It will be good for him to see they are more than flying stingers.”
“Bees are just mosquitos on steroids. They are vermin. Monsanto would do us a favor to eradicate both from the earth,” James Harris folded his arms across his chest.
“Well, if there were no bees, there would BEE no fruits, vegetables, chocolate, coffee, or nuts,” Jaime’s mother playfully poked at his father, trying to turn his sour mood around.
“I love it,” Jaime’s eyes lit up excitedly as he leafed through the book’s colorful pages.
Jaime did love the book. It was his favorite birthday gift that year. He loved it more than the video games, the comic books, Marvel action figures, and certainly more than the Thor pajamas from his grandparents.
Most ten-year-old boys would have groaned at such an educational gift, but not Jaime. He loved it because it told him everything he needed to know about bees- his arch-nemesis.
Earlier that summer, Jaime had made two important discoveries, both because of his father. When the elder Harris switched the family’s cell phone plan from Verizon to T-Mobile, a free subscription to Disney+ and its treasure trove of movie properties was an added perk.
Jaime sat up in his room, watching hours of Marvel superhero movies. He loved the superpowers, the battles, and the eye-popping special effects. But most of all, Jaime loved the villains. Thor, Ironman, Spiderman, Captain America, and all the rest of the Avengers seemed boring and lame to the ten-year-old. However, Jaime reveled in the cackling Green Goblin, the scheming plans of Loki, and the raw power of Thanos. He spent his weekly allowance buying comic books at the local Walgreens and hanging their posters on his walls.
Villians had a plan, cool weapons, and almost always had a score to settle with someone. To Jaime’s immense disappointment, every movie ended the same way, with the heroes ganging up on the villain to win the day. Lame. Boring. Why shouldn’t Loki rule Asgard? Why can’t Thanos be all-powerful?
Jaime’s second discovery that summer was that his bee allergy was not a myth. He was sitting cross-legged in the grass, waiting for his turn to rotate into the soccer game at the Bight Summer Day Camp his parents had sent him to, when he felt a sharp pain on his upper lip. He frantically swatted at his face, crushing a black and yellow bee across his mouth and cheek.
His sudden cry of pain was loud enough to stop the soccer game and bring the camp counselors and children alike running over to where he lay sprawled on the grass. As if sobbing uncontrollably in front of the other campers was not embarrassing enough, his top lip reddened and swelled to the size of a golf ball at the site of the bee sting.
As one of the camp counselors led him off to the nurse’s office, Jaime could hear the laughing and joking starting to ripple through the assembled children.
“I hope you’re ok Jaim-Bee,” called a large red-haired boy, followed by a chorus of laughter from the other children.
Jaime could hear one of the counselors scolding the boy, but he also heard several children giggling as they referred to him as “Bee Boy.”
As Jaime lay on a cot in the nurse’s office, waiting for his mother to pick him up, a zip-lock bag filled with ice pressed against his lip, the two discoveries gelled in his mind. He envisioned himself as cunning as Loki, as ruthless as the Green Goblin, and as powerful as Thanos as he waged war on his arch nemesis, the bees.
After begging his parents not to send him back to summer camp after the embarrassing episode, Jaime began his war of extermination on the bee kingdom. Armed with a rolled-up newspaper, he stalked his mother’s flowerbed and garden, swatting hapless bees from the air and stomping them underneath his sneakers.
Jaime’s mother stormed out of the house and took the newspaper from him. She scolded him that none of her tomato plants would fruit if he kept up this behavior. However, when his father came home that night and witnessed the bee carnage on the walkway, he nodded to his son and told him it was a good start, just be careful not to get himself stung again. Jaime smiled with delight at his father’s praise, even though it made his swollen lip ache terribly.
“I was just like you as a kid,” Jaime’s father stared at his son for a long moment, eyeing the child curiously.
Later that summer, his mother’s birthday gift of The Bees in Your Backyard: A Guide to North America’s Bees became the battle plan for his war on bees. The book said dandelions were an essential first food of spring for bees, so Jaime stomped every dandelion he could find. He stalked the woods behind his house with his super soaker filled with white vinegar from the kitchen and gleefully sprayed a beehive nestled in the branches of a pine tree after reading that vinegar was lethal to bees.
Jaime slipped a six-pack of Pepsi from his father’s stash in his sleek, black Peterbilt Model 389 semi-truck. He discovered the sodas a week earlier when he spied the corner of the blue soda box peaking out from behind the red and white Make America Great Again flag hanging over the bed in the back of the truck’s sleeper cab. When he lifted the flag, Jaime found three cases of Pepsi stacked on the over-the-bed shelf alongside a box of Hershey bars, a gallon of Clorox bleach, a bottle of Nailite acetone, and some Walmart dish towels.
Jaime poured all six sodas into an old white bucket behind the house after discovering in the book that unattended sodas posed a hazard to bees. They would mistake the sugary scent for a blossoming flower, swoop in, and drown.
The morning after he set the Pepsi trap, Jaime rushed outside and was delighted to find five bees floating in the dark liquid. The trap worked so well that he began to keep track in a black-and-white notebook of his daily tally, reaching a kill count as high as nine in a single day before his father discovered the bucket and poured it out, mistaking it for dirty water. After that, Jaime moved his trap into the woods with a fresh six-pack of Pepsi and enjoyed even high rates of daily bee mortality. He especially liked when a bee would still be wriggling its legs, trying to free itself from a sugary demise, and he would continuously dunk it under the dark waters with a stick until it floated motionless.
By the time he was thirteen, Jaime had honed himself into a supervillain that he had imagined bee mothers had warned their children about at bedtime. When he swatted a bee near the house, he liked to think these were bee superheroes sent to defeat him but failed and died.
Jaime still made his Pepsi traps, which he named Sweet Death. He also added new variants to his arsenal, including one that lored in specifically yellow jackets with meat and drowned them in soapy water that he called Meat Death.
When he spotted the boxes of praying mantis’ by the checkout counter at Home Depot, a plan that would make Loki proud caressed the corners of his mind. Now, he could feel the mantis’ bulbous eyes staring at him from within the jar as he turned the book’s pages. Jaime found what he sought with a triumphant laugh and tapped the picture on the page. The image took up a full half-page of the book, showing a large, green praying mantis clutching a bee in its raptorial forelegs.
Jaime looked from the picture to the mantis in the jar, a malicious smile crossing his face. The archvillain now had a monster to unleash upon the bees.
Friday
For most of the day at school, Jaime sat thinking about how to employ the mantis that weekend. Last weekend, he spotted a bee nest forming on an oak tree in the woods. The worker bees were still building the honeycomb structure, and he fantasized about the mantis tearing its way through the thin walls of the nest to get at the plump queen.
The nascent hive nestled in the crook where a low-hanging branch met the old oak’s trunk, ideally located for the morning sun to heat the nest and the shade to keep it from overheating in the afternoon. Jaime had contemplated taking it out with the vinegar in the super soaker on the spot but decided to let the worker bees toil away for another week. He had read that it takes up to fourteen days for a new nest to become fully populated, so he felt another week would make it ripe for conquest.
He envisioned the mantis descending upon the hive like an insectoid Godzilla emerging from the waters of Tokyo Bay to lay waste to the city. Jaime mulled over the problem of the mantis in his mind. The bees provided an easy and ample food source, but the mantis had wings and could fly off once released. He thought about clipping the mantis’ wings with a nail clipper, but in the end, he decided to tie a kite string around the insect and affix the other end to the ground. Just enough line to reach the hive, so the mantis would have to go for the bees to feed. Jaime supposed the string would inhibit the mantis from successfully evading a crow that saw the long insect as a quick and satisfying meal; however, if Loki or the Green Goblin never scraped a plan because of the risks, then neither would he.
So all day at school, Jaime occupied his thoughts with his self-ascribed cunning plan. He had a few friends at school, more acquaintances than friends, just some other boys he sat with at lunch and chatted with about movies, video games, and school gossip. However, he never shared his plans with them.
School rarely held Jaime’s attention for long, though his grades were consistently above average, and this day was the same. The only exception was Mr. Kriaris’ sociology class, which focused the afternoon discussion on the phenomenon of serial killers in society. On most days, Mr. Kriaris seemed as bored by discussions of social change and the impact of human behavior on society as the rest of the class. However, the ordinarily sedate teacher seemed electrified by the recent storm of media coverage of the hunt for the “Sixty-Six Strangler,” a serial killer responsible for the murder of at least thirty-two homeless people along the stretch of highway between Chicago, Illinois, and Santa Monaca, California.
“Serial killers often start their careers by torturing or killing small animals,” the rail-thin teacher tapped a cigarette-stained finger on the laptop’s keyboard and the PowerPoint projected onto the screen at the front of the darkened classroom toggled through a series of grim-faced mugshots.
“They choose animals because they are weak and vulnerable,” Mr. Kriaris continued as a picture of a handsome, smiling, dark-haired man appeared on the screen. “Ted Bundy was known to derive pleasure from torturing cats and dogs. I suspect that once the Sixty-Six Strangler is apprehended, similar details will emerge about him.”
“Or her,” Seol-Hyun raised her hand and added from the back of the room.
“Or her,” Mr. Kriaris nodded and smiled at the correction, apparently thrilled with the rare class participation in a lesson.
Jaime was disappointed his teacher arrived at such a simplistic solution. He had spent hours dissecting live bees, watching them slowly suffocate in enclosed jars, starve on glue traps, or react when sprayed with various chemicals. While Jaime admittedly enjoyed it, he did not think it was fair to say he did it for pleasure. He did this to hone his knowledge of his foe. “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.” That was straight out of the mouth of the Chinese tactician Sun Tzu from the sixth century BC.
Jaime imagined it was the same for serial killers; they did these things to increase their understanding, not for pleasure. Whatever his motivation, the Sixty-Six Strangler was abducting and killing homeless people, so Jaime thought it would be logical for the killer to start with animals to perfect his craft and lessen the chance of making a mistake that could get them caught.
Jaime attributed this to a need for more critical thinking to reverse a dumbing down of people that started with fairy tales and continued in every movie, book, and television show. The bad guys are cruel and evil, and the good guys are pure and innocent.
Many people were troubled by the growth of homelessness in America; he had heard his father go on endlessly about the topic. Jaime felt he was one of the few people cerebral enough to consider that, whether misguided or not, the Sixty-Six Strangler was one of the few people doing something about the growing homelessness epidemic. However, society ascribed serial killers as the bad guys, just like in movies, so their only conceivable motivation was to do evil.
Jaime imagined raising his hand and pointing out this flaw in society, and since this is a sociology class, is that not what we should be discussing? He would rest his case with the profound statement, “What if Loki wanted to rule Asgard because he thought Odin was doing a pretty crappy job of it, and Thor only stopped him so he could look like the hero and bang a harem of valkyries? History is written by the victors, after all.” Jaime envisioned the class staring at him with awe-struck faces and Mr. Kriaris nodding thoughtfully at his revelation and keen observation.
It occurred to Jaime that serial killers were no different than supervillains, and he imagined a classroom full of bees looking at his grinning picture on a screen and shrinking back in terror. The thought made him smile.
A crumpled-up paper ball bounced off the side of his face and landed on his desk, jolting him from his daydream.
“What are you smiling about Jaim-Bee?” a blonde-haired kid with the buzz cut smirked at him from the next row of desks. “You gay for Ted Bundy?”
Jaime glanced over at Scott McNulty; the boy had been there that day on the soccer field when he got his bee sting and was singlehandedly responsible for spreading the nickname around the school. Behind Scott, Jenna Wilson, a gangly blonde girl with large blue eyes, snickered and laughed.
“Freakin weirdo,” the voice of T.J. Edwards, a new student whose family moved to town from Sierre Leone only two weeks ago, whispered in a thick West African accent.
Jaime swatted the ball of paper from his desk and stared at the projection screen at the front of the room as Mr. Kriaris droned on; his smile was gone. He imagined what it would be like to have Scott McNulty suffocating in one of his jars, eyes bulging and face reddening as he gasped for air. Jamie pictured Jenna Wilson struggling to stay afloat in a life-size version of Sweet Death, blonde hair matted to her face as her limbs desperately sought purchase.
He glanced sidelong at Scott and Jenna, who continued to whisper and snicker. How easy it would be to become their supervillain. The comic book of his origin story would start on that soccer field with their mocking laughter. It would cover the years of name-calling and shoves in the hall juxtaposed with Jaime mastering the ways of revenge and end with these two teenaged Ken and Barbies covered in dirt out in the woods.
Maybe one day.
Saturday
Jaime carefully cradled the jar containing the mantis as he walked up the dirt path from the subdivision into the woods. Ultimately, tying the kite string around the mantis proved easier than he expected. The insect proved very docile as he held it in his hand and affixed the line around its upper body, just below its raptorial forelegs, to not interfere with the mantis’ ability to extend its wings. He winced when he tied the string tight and heard a subtle crack in the insect’s exoskeleton; however, the mantis seemed still functioning normally.
Kelly Burns, a small dark-haired girl in a flowery pink dress, casually swung an old blonde ragdoll as she exited the woods in front of Jaime. Her eyes immediately went to the jar in his hand, and he reflectively covered it.
“What’s that, Jaime?” the ten-year-old girl craned her neck to glimpse the jar.
“It’s nothing,” Jaime covered it with his hand as he walked past her.
“Aw, come on, Jaime, let me see,” disappointment crossed her young face, and then it lit up with joy as an idea struck her mind. “I can take you to something cool in the woods if you show me.”
“What is it?” Jaime was annoyed at how interested his voice sounded.
A broad smile crossed Kelly’s face, “Show me the jar first.”
“Fine,” Jaime moved his hand, and Kelly peered at the jar. He saw the questioning look on her face, “it’s a praying mantis; they eat other bugs.”
“But why is a string tied to it?” she tapped on the glass jar, and the insect turned its triangular head to study her.
“So it doesn’t fly away,” Jaime tried to mimic his father’s look when telling his son something he thought was obvious.
The young girl contemplated his words momentarily and nodded, apparently content with the answer.
“So what is it you wanted to show me?” Jaime covered the jar back up with his hand.
“C’mon, I’ll show you,” Kelly turned back toward the woods. “It’s so cool.”
Jaime followed her into the woods, watching her doll’s blond yarn-like hair bob up and down with each step. Walking behind her, he was reminded of sitting on the couch and watching the movie My Girl with his mother one afternoon. In the film, a young boy, played by a bespeckled Macaulay Culkin, stumbles across a bee’s nest while walking in the woods and is repeatedly stung until he ultimately dies of anaphylactic shock. Jaime imagined bringing Kelly to the old oak tree and throwing her little doll over by the branch with the bee hive and then striking the nest with a thrown rock when she went to retrieve it. If the bees stung her repeatedly and she died, the whole town would recognize the value of his bee-killing expertise. However, he quickly dismissed the notion after surmising that Kelly would likely survive the bee encounter since she did not have any bee allergy that he knew of, and tell her parents and get him in trouble.
“There it is,” Kelly turned to him, beaming as she pointed at a small patch of grass between two trees a few feet from the dirt path. “Isn’t it cool?”
Jaime squinted his eyes, staring at the area between the trees but saw nothing of note. He looked at her questioningly, and she rolled her eyes and threw her arms up in the air in exasperation.
“C’mon,” she walked off the path toward the two trees and glanced down at her doll. “I would never have found it; Mrs. Beasley told me where to look.”
“Who’s Mrs. Beasley?” Jaime glanced down at the jar to check on the mantis, and the insect seemed unfazed by the jostling as its spiky legs clung to the branch inside.
“Mrs. Beasley,” Kelly held the doll out. “She was my grandmother’s; she tells me all kinds of things.”
Jaime stared at the cloth doll; the eyes, nose, and mouth were sewn from faded black string, and she wore an equally faded red and white checkered dress. The graying, once-white cloth of her arms and legs ended in non-descript round ends without any discernable hands or feet. “Your grandmother tells you things?”
“No, silly,” Kelly pursed her lips in annoyance. “Mrs. Beasley tells me things. Here it is, see.” She pointed down to the patch of grass between the trees.
Jaime stared at a perfect circle three feet wide, ringed by a perimeter of white mushrooms with plump rounded caps atop thick stems. The grass inside the ring was an even darker shade of green than the grass outside.
“Very cool,” Jaime eyed the circle. “Something must have died between the trees; I bet it was a raccoon or maybe a fox.”
“No,” the look of exasperation had returned to Kelly’s young face. “It’s a fairy ring. Mrs. Beasley told me the forest spirits put the mushrooms there so they had a place to sit after they got tired of dancing inside the circle.”
“I don’t think Mrs. Beasley knows what she is talking about,” Jaime reached down to pluck one of the mushrooms. “I’m pretty sure these grow on dead things.”
“Don’t do that,” Kelly’s voice was shrill and panicked as she grabbed his hand. When he looked at her, the young girl’s eyes were wide and full of fear. She spoke in a low, hushed tone. “You never mess with a fairy ring. It’s a sacred place. If you disturb it, you’ll anger the forest spirits.”
“I’m sick of these baby games,” Jaime yanked his hand out of her grasp. “I have more important things to do.”
Jaime turned and left her standing there as he headed back toward the path and the old oak tree. He looked back to ensure she was not following him and saw she was still there, looking down at the ring of mushrooms. However, how she held the old doll made it appear that the doll’s faded black eyes were watching him over her shoulder as he walked away.
Jaime had perfectly judged the distance between the beehive and the heavy branch on the ground; he was sure of it. He praised himself for his ingenuity, there was just enough kite string for the mantis to reach the bees’ nest, and with the other end tied to the branch, the insect would have no choice but to attack the hive.
Behind him, the audible buzz of the bees filled the air with a steady thrumming, like an idling motor. There was a lot more activity around the nest than he expected. The bees seemed agitated by his presence close to the oak tree, and Jaime smiled as he took that as a clear sign the queen was inside.
He should have kept an eye on the beehive as he tied the kite string, but he was too busy picturing the mantis grasping the queen in its spiked forelegs. The pain in the back of his neck had been as sharp as it was sudden; he lost his balance and fell backward as he swatted the bee and felt its body crunch against the skin just above his collar. His foot had toppled over the jar, and he watched the mantis fly off into the sky. Jaime’s eyes widened in horror as the loose end of the string fluttered behind the mantis as the insect climbed toward the tree’s upper branches. He leaped and tried to catch the kite string, but his fingers only grasped air as the mantis flew out of reach. He cursed as he realized the bee had stung him before he could tie the end of the line to the fallen branch.
He paced angrily around the clearing, eyes fixed upon the length of string that dangled down from the mantis perch high up in the tree. The mantis would come down, and when it did, Jaime would grab the line and secure it to the branch. He would wait all afternoon if necessary.
However, the number of bees flying around the hive steadily increased, and Jaime swatted at them to keep them away as he backed further and further out of the clearing. Anger and frustration surged through Jaime’s body at his foiled plan, stoked further by the burning pain of the bee sting on his neck. A bee landed on his pants leg, and only the thickness of his jeans saved him from another sting as he mashed the bug with his hand.
It was only a matter of time before another one of the angry insects landed a lucky sting, but another idea returned as he turned from the clearing and headed back down the path. He would throw Kelly and her ugly doll into the clearing; with this many bees as agitated as they were, she might be stung hundreds of times. He knew enough bee stings could be fatal, even for someone without an allergy.
“It takes approximately nine stings per pound of a person’s weight for bee venom to be fatal,” Jaime’s thoughts raced as he stalked down the path.
As small and skinny as Kelly was, this could work. He would throw her back in again if she managed to leave the clearing. As long as no one heard her screaming, Jaime felt confident she would be stung enough times to die. Then it would be open season on bees; he smiled at the plan.
The smile quickly faded from Jaime’s face as the path wound around the bend, and he saw the two trees with their odd patch of grass. Kelly was gone. He searched further up the trail and in the woods, but the child was nowhere to be found.
Jaime screamed in frustration. Everything had gone wrong. Then his eyes glanced down to the ring of mushrooms that circled the grass between the trees.
“Her precious fairy ring,” Jaime imitated the girl’s voice as a wicked smile crossed his lips.
He raised one foot, brought it down on the first mushroom, and reveled in the squishing feeling of the fungus beneath his sneaker. Jaime squashed another and then another, stomping his feet up and down on the mushroom until it appeared like he was dancing wildly on the little circle of mushrooms. He roared with laughter as he crushed the mushrooms, and in his madness, Jaime thought he detected an answering howl of wind among the trees.
Sweat poured from his brow and down his back when he finished. Jaime laughed and smiled from ear to ear as he surveyed the devastation he had wrought on the circle of mushrooms. Not a single stem stood; all that remained of Kelly’s fairy ring were chunky smears of white and brown amidst the dark green grass.
“That felt good,” Jaime panted from the exertion. “that felt very good.”
A strong, cold wind blew through the woods, and the branches of the two trees beside the defiled fairy ring creaked dangerously. Jaime breathed deeply, trying to fill his lungs as the adrenaline of his chaotic dance of destruction among the mushrooms ebbed. However, the air stung his lungs, and his breath became a hacking cough that left his mouth tasting bitter and ashy.
Jaime tried spitting several times to get the taste from his mouth, but it did nothing to alleviate the acrid flavor on his tongue. His mouth tasted like he had been gnawing on a charred piece of wood. He sniffed the air, but it smelled fresh and clean, with no hint of smoke or fire.
The bee sting on his neck began to throb, and he reflexively raised a hand to the inflamed area. He grimaced and frowned at the feel of the golf ball-sized lump forming behind his head. Spitting another bitter-tasting wad of saliva onto the ground, Jaime started toward his house to get some hydrocortisone cream for the sting and maybe grab another of his father’s Pepsi sodas to wash the terrible taste from his mouth.
Jaime lay in his bed, glowering at the ceiling. He slid his hand behind his head and poked the swollen bee bite on his neck. The skin was tender to the touch, but Jaime pressed on it until the pain almost brought tears to his eyes. He gritted his teeth at the pain, letting it feed his anger.
“Stupid,” Jaime closed his hand into a fist so hard his fingernails dug into his palm. “Stupid, stupid mistake.”
The mantis was gone, and the bees had won the day. The thought infuriated him. Tomorrow he would fill his super soaker with lighter fluid, douse the nest, and roast the queen bee inside. The idea made him smile; he envisioned the queen hearing the popping sound of the worker bees exploding as they were immolated by the flames eating their way through the hive walls to her resting place.
Jaime laughed out loud, a malicious sound filled with scorn, as he pictured Kelly’s distraught cries at finding her fairy ring destroyed. “Mrs. Beasley didn’t tell you about that, eh?”
His laugh turned into a cough, and he winced at the return of the acrid taste in his mouth. It had subsided some since he got home, but he could not wholly get the bitter taste from his mouth; even the pizza he had for dinner tasted ashy. He eyed the half-full cup of Coca-Cola, his mother’s beverage of choice, on his nightstand but dismissed the thought of taking a sip when he saw the dark liquid had gone flat.
To make matters worse, his father caught him sneaking into the sleeper cab of the Peterbilt to grab a Pepsi and was furious. His father grabbed Jaime’s arm so hard that he cried out in pain as he pulled him out of the truck’s cab. Jaime had gotten in trouble with his father before but never saw his father’s face so red and contorted with anger.
“This truck is my space,” spittle flew from his father’s mouth as he screamed. “You have a whole goddamn house and yard to play in, but you keep your ass out of my truck. Do you understand me?”
Jaime almost wet his pants as his father shouted the last four words just inches from his face, and all he could do was nod in response.
He loved his father; at least, he thought he did. However, Jaime often fantasized about his father becoming the Sixty-Six Strangler’s next victim, his dark eyes bulging from his blue face as the killer choked him. He pictured being interviewed by all the news outlets about the loss of his father and the sympathetic look on CNN’s Erin Burnett’s face as he told her about the GoFundMe page he had created. Jaime bet he could get at least a half million dollars, maybe even more.
The back of his neck throbbed, and Jaime’s countenance darkened as he imagined Scotty McNulty approaching him in the hallway and pressing the bee sting like a button as the other kids laughed.
If the Sixty-Six Strangler got his dad, he might take the Peterbilt and drive it straight through the schoolyard. He drifted to sleep, imagining the terror on their faces as the big, black semi truck barreled through the schoolyard — thumping their bodies against the grill and crunching their bones under the giant wheels.
Sunday
Jaime awoke pleased to find the throbbing in his neck and the bitter taste in his mouth gone. He looked up at the poster of Loki above his bed and blinked. The poster of Loki, played by actor Tom Hiddleston with his long, black hair, shining armor, and red flowing cape staring down at Asgard, looked incredibly huge. It looked billboard-sized, and he noticed Loki’s red cape was now a dull black.
He looked around the room, and everything seemed to have grown impossibly large overnight. Jaime tried to rub the sleep from his eyes and froze. His arm looked long and dark, with long straight hairs sticking straight out. Not looked, his arm was long and dark, narrowing to a skinny point that ended in a claw. Jaime’s stomach sank, not just a claw but the thin tarsal claw bees used to grip and taste. He raised his other arm and saw a matching appendage.
Jaime’s head swam as he looked down at his body, the segmented body of a bee. Six legs protruded from the round middle segment of a body covered in yellow and black hair. He saw the four pairs of wax-producing glands in his lower abdomen section, and then he leaned further forward and groaned. No stinger. That meant this was in the body of a common drone bee, not even a worker.
“This is the lamest dream ever,” Jaime shook his head and ran one tarsal claw over the pointed mandible of his mouth. “Yep, definitely a drone bee.”
Jaime rolled over and stood on his six legs surveying the vast field of white that it took him a moment to realize was his pillow. He flexed the muscles in his back and was pleased to feel his wings flap in response.
“Well, if I can’t sting someone in my dream, I might as well enjoy a little flying,” Jaime took a running leap off the pillow.
The cold feel of fear surged through his body as he plummeted the cavernous drop from his pillow to the bedroom floor. He worked his back muscles feverishly, trying to get his fluttering wings to engage. Jaime’s bee body had fallen half the distance to the floor before the wings proved some lift, slowing his descent and then soaring up into the sky.
The initial sensation of flying left him feeling dizzy and nauseous as his eyes adjusted to the rollercoaster view of his room swooning before him. However, Jaime was quickly buzzing about the room with skill in no time. Posters and furniture zoomed past his eyes, and he reveled at the ability to land on the wall and upside down on the ceiling.
His antenna twitched, and he felt a surge of pheromones release within his body as he sensed nectar nearby. A sensation he took for a bee’s version of hunger filled his body, and he swooped down from the ceiling toward the source of the nectar.
Jaime felt the air brush against the hair on his body as his antennae guided him toward the the nectar. His mind struggled to process the messages the bee’s antennae collected and sent to his brain as the room flew by in a rush.
His flight suddenly stopped as he splashed into a dark, viscous liquid. The bee’s six legs moved frantically as its wings dampened. Jaime felt panic rise as he struggled to keep the dark sea from rushing into his mouth. The messages his antennae sent to his brain seemed to be misfiring in confusion or overload; he was unsure.
“Wake up, wake up, wake up,” the words echoed in his mind like a mantra as he tried to rouse himself from this nightmare.
Jaime bumped into a transparent wall, and his eyes caught sight of a man with long, dark hair staring down at him. He struggled with recognition momentarily and then realized it was the Loki poster on his wall. His legs paddled below him, trying to keep the insect body afloat.
With growing horror, Jaime realized that his antenna had guided him into the half-drunk glass of Coca-Cola by his bedside. The thought almost made him laugh, trapped in a Sweet Deathtrap.
“Wake up, wake up, wake up.”
The legs desperately tread water and moved the little body around the glass like a boat in a small lake. Every time Jaime saw the scowling face of Loki, he knew he had circumnavigated the cup again. His attempts to move his wings again proved futile as the dark, sticky liquid held them close to his body. Inexplicably, the legs on the right side of his body seemed to be tiring faster than those on the left, so he began to list to one side and struggled to keep his mouth from submerging.
“Wake up, wake up, wake up.”
Something splashed in the water to his left, and Jaime struggled to turn the bee’s body to look. Had the bee had eyelids, they would have opened wide in surprise at the thick white rope that descended into the glass. With the last bit of energy he could muster, Jaime willed the six paddling legs to propel him through the liquid to the rope.
When he reached it, he sank his tarsal claws into the soft white rope and lay still, his energy wholly expended. Jaime had no idea how he would muster the strength to climb the rope to escape the glass of soda.
“Wake up, wake up, wake up,” his voice screamed inside his head. “I don’t like this anymore.”
Then Jaime heard another voice in his head, a girl’s voice that he somehow knew was that of the doll, Mrs. Beasley. It spoke to him in a sing-song tune, “You never mess with a fairy ring. It’s a sacred place. If you disturb it, you’ll anger the forest spirits.” The voice trailed off in laughter that chilled his soul.
Suddenly, Jaime’s bee body hoisted high out of the water and into the air as the rope took flight. The rope yanked his small body so severely that he feared his tarsal claws would rip from his limbs. He fluttered chaotically through the air as the line bucked and swayed.
The rope dipped suddenly downward, and he saw bright daylight streaming through his open bedroom window.
“Wake up. Wake up. Wake up,” Jaime’s voice whimpered inside his head.
The rope struck the white wooden window sill, and Jaime’s body came to a crashing stop. He felt two of the tarsal claws on his left side separate from his body, and one of his wings bent with a loud crack.
Jaime freed his remaining tarsal claws from the rope, and he lay on his side, trying to assess the damage to his body. Remarkably, he felt no pain from the damaged limbs; however, he was sure the wing was broken.
A cool wind blew in from the window, and he felt his antennae twitch. Maybe sunlight would rouse him from the dream? Remind his mind that it’s time to wake up. Then the doll’s words echoed in his head, and he wondered for the first time, could this be real? Some punishment from the forest for his transgression against it?
Jaime refused to believe this could really be happening to him; he pushed his body forward toward the sunlight. It was time to wake up.
A long, dark shadow fell across his body, and he turned his head to find the source. He stared up into the triangular head of the mantis, its raptorial claws rubbing together in a gesture that reminded him of a man rubbing his hands together before a big meal. Jaime’s eyes trailed down the long, green body of the mantis to the string that remained tied around its waist.
Jaime could have laughed if he was not so tired and scared; the loose end of the kite rope had saved him from the soda. Was it a coincidence, or did the mantis intentionally pull him from the drink? He did not know but suspected it was the latter.
The creature moved slowly toward him, and something about the look in its insectoid eyes told Jaime that the mantis knew he was more than a common drone bee. Jaime knew what came next, the grasping raptorial claws, dismemberment, and decapitation. He hoped the mantis started with decapitation so that this nightmare could end. Jaime hoped he would wake up; he was not so sure anymore.
The mantis took another step forward, and Jaime thought it was toying with him, prolonging the anticipation of the kill.
“I should have left you to die in that box at Home Depot,” Jaime thought as the mantis took another step. “You’d be dead and discarded in the dumpster by now.”
The mantis stopped and swiveled its head toward the open window as a shadow blocked the daylight. Jaime watched incredulously as a large, black crow swooped down onto the ledge, the bird’s weight cracking the mantis’s exoskeleton as it landed on the giant insect. The bird stared at the broken body of the bee curiously with jet black eyes, cocking its head quizzically. Then almost as quickly as it landed, the crow was flying off again, the white line affixed to the mantis body fluttering after it.
Jaime lay there in the sunlight, broken and exhausted. After a time, he tried his wings and found that even with the damaged wing, he could manage a short burst of flight. Though where he would go and what he would do was a mystery to him.
He heard a voice calling his name in the distance and realized it was his father coming down the hall to his room. Hope sprang into the darkness of Jaime’s mind as he watched his father enter the room. His father was looking for him. Jaime tried to call out, but no sound emanated from his bee mouth.
A plan formed in Jaime’s mind; he could spell something out like that spider in Charlotte’s Web. Jaime just needed to get his father’s attention. As his father passed by the window, Jaime mustered all his strength into his failing wings and leaped into the air.
James Harris felt the satisfying crunch against the soft skin of his palms as he slapped his hands together. He blew the crumpled body of the bee out his son’s bedroom windows and slid it shut with the urgency of a man trying to seal the space off from a deadly contagion. Holding his hand up to the daylight, he searched his palms for the pinprick mark of a bee sting.
No holes. No redness. No swelling.
Police searching for missing California boy make grim discovery.
By Anna Levinson, CNN
Updated 9:57 PM EST, Thu January 12, 2023
Police searching for Jaime Harris, who disappeared from his home last Sunday, made a gruesome discovery in the sleeper cab of a semi-truck parked on the family property.
Blood evidence recovered from the 2020 Peterbilt Model 389 semi-truck has been linked to two victims of the Sixty-Six Strangler. Police executing a search warrant of the premises also recovered bleach and acetone, key ingredients in homemade chloroform, from the vehicle. Police Chief Andrew Platt also revealed that specific food and drink were located in the vehicle that matched previously undisclosed evidence discovered in the stomach contents of all the Sixty-Six Strangler victims.
Police took James Harris, the owner of the vehicle and father of the missing boy, into custody late last night on suspicion of murder…
A very good ending. I like this.