Ballad of a Bumble Bee Trapped in Honey

 

That dizzying last summer they explored the one billion possibilities of bumblebee assassination. They learned lacing the curb with Dr. Pepper to lure them under a false pretense of sweetness was easiest, most merciful, for the shadows of their black devil shoe soles were guillotine-swift, triple-quick to evict the poor souls from their black and yellow striped cages. What the hell is beeswax anyways? they wondered, watching the furry beasts writhe in Wite-out on paper plates, or rattle in plastic Tupperware tombs. They put them in ice trays in the freezer and waited, called it a science experiment while Count Chocula plinked into her cereal bowl and the milk sloshed everywhere and she ate it with a fork. She was just that kind of girl. Then she squeezed half a bottle of honey into the empty bowl and funneled a baby bee through a rolled up magazine, and for the first time in his life he felt guilty for their senseless sin. Don’t bees smell fear?  he said, and she shook her head. If they smell fear, surely they suffer fear themselves. He asked her to stop and she told him it was no use, it was too late. As he struggled to rescue their tiny prisoner from his undeserved fate with a pair of tweezers, he didn’t see her approaching with the hammer. All he saw were the gooey guts on the blunt edge embedded in amber ooze, a broken bowl wobbling across the tiles, her vile curvature of lips and teeth. Let’s go to your house, she said then, mentioning how her father would soon be home, and though he agreed he was secretly angry with her. So as they sagged their way there, dragging their bag of bones through the apricot dusk with its inferno flash sweating sugar-heat, he took flight through the tall grass, left her at the halfway mark on the hill. He thought he saw her sticky fingers waving goodbye the night she went home and never came back.

 

Forgive me, years later he would think: I was too young to smell your fear.