e r i k    l e a v i t t

Hive

The walls are dreaming bees. At night as the roof cools they slip out. Bees slit the ceiling above my bed and out-crawling. Someday mom and dad will sell this house. Someday the new people will split my bedside wall and bees will throb out, bees will wick the crawl space between studs and gush. There will be so many exterminators. Open up the wall and everything is bees.

*****

Brett worries about bees wherever we go. At recess he tells me killer bees are flying north from Mexico. They’re big as circus peanuts. He shows me with his fingers. Killer bees can sting over and over and not die like regular bees. If a swarm chases us we have to spray them with a fire extinguisher or go underwater. Bees can’t go underwater. Drop one in the toilet and it strokes around in circles but can’t get out. When they climb in my dad’s Coke bottle he puts his thumb over the top and shakes it, and when he stops shaking the bee is dead. I don’t know how long I’d have to stay underwater if bees chased me (I can hold my breath for forty five seconds). I don’t know if there would be so many of them on the top of the water that I couldn’t come up without bees climbing onto me and into my mouth and stinging. Brett doesn’t know either.

On the slide at the playground one stings me on the back of the leg. I skootch down and a safety pin pokes me, and when I lift up my leg a bee’s underneath. This is just a regular bee. Brett says stinging kills them so he must have really wanted to sting me. He says it to make me feel better. The sting makes a goose egg while we walk home and I keep touching it because it keeps hurting. The stinger’s poisoned and I bet if I could tug the stinger out the lump would go flat like an inner tube. Brett thinks so too. We stop and I feel for the stinger but I can only feel the hurt where it went in.

When we get to Brett’s house his mom cuts an onion in half and tells me to hold it on my thigh and the onion will suck the stinger out. Brett says she knows about medicine. In her car she makes everyone wears their seat belts even though it’s not illegal because she knew a kid who got in a crash. He was in the back seat and wasn’t wearing his seat belt and he shot forward and all his teeth dug into the back of his brother’s head. The doctors had to pull out all his teeth one by one and now this kid’s brother has got all false teeth even though he’s just a kid. Brett says he has to leave them in a glass of water while he sleeps. I hold the onion on real tight.

In the kitchen I wait for my mom to pull up and honk the horn. Brett waits too. He thinks I’m a baby for saying this hurts so much. He says last summer a bee stung him on the face. He puffs up his cheeks to show me how it looked.

*****

The room is always bees. I see them four or five at a time on the edge of my skylight. I don’t know where they get in or if they live in the walls. The walls don’t sound like bees. I push my ear up to them but I don’t hear anything. They come down one at a time. Bees fly slower then they should, like I could outrun them. In the movies no one ever outruns bees. Swarms fly in fishhooks shooting forward then wrapping back so bees are always in front of you. You can’t get away. But I might be able to run from one bee. They sneak though. I hear it first, and when I look around to find it sometimes a bee’s right next to my face. It’s worse if I don’t hear them. Bees are quite when they land, and maybe land in my clothes, or in my hair and if I stand up too fast they’ll sting inside my ear. I feel things landing in my hair. My hair moves and I scrape my hands over it to maybe knock off anything crawling in there. But it’s nothing. Then a bee’s flying again all the way across the room. My hands are empty.

*****

Everyone think’s I’m a baby. Matt Foley, someone tells me, does an impression of me apologizing. He wrings his hands. He looks at his knees. “Mrs Lynn, I’m really sorry. I forgot my homework.” He cracks my voice “I’m really, really sorry.” I didn’t know anyone was watching me. I went up to Mrs Lynn’s desk before class when everyone was still talking. I do this a lot. I try to remember the first time I forgot homework and how long Matt might have been doing this impression. I like Matt. His house is behind a golf course and at a sleepover we climbed the fence and ran around the green stealing flags and belly-crawling up to the club house. He made sure we’re quite so his parents didn’t know. In his bathroom there are show towels you’re not supposed to use and guest towels that you really wipe your hand with. In the morning Matt told me I’ve used the wrong towels and that his mom is mad but it will probably be all right. She made us waffles and she acted nice but I thought she was still mad.

Sometimes when I ride my bike home from Matt’s I look behind me to see if anyone is following. On the stairs to my house I say “there’s a murderer behind me” and I scramble inside before his hand can close over my ankle. Every time my heart races. Every time I’m sure I made it just barely.

*****

Mom tells me to go down to the basement and get a bag of peas out of the chest freezer. The stairs to the basement are the worst. The light switch is all the way at the bottom and the kitchen light only makes it around the corner of the stairs. When I run my hand along the wall I never know if it will punch through right into the hive. Brett says two hundred bee stings could kill me. I see my hand trapped in the wall, a sleeve of bees stinging every inch of skin. I hit the switch, I get the peas. When I turn the lights off I run upstairs to get to the kitchen. I don’t pretend Murderer on the basement stairs, not until I’m right at the top. Not until I’m sure I can get away.

*****

I don’t think I hate school. In homeroom Patrick asks me to say hey you guys. “No,” he stops me, “you got to say it more retarded. Like that guy from Goonies.” He means the big guy, the one everyone calls a mutant. I like when people talk to me so I do it and everyone laughs. Patrick calls over Nik and Nathaniel and Matt Foley and makes me do it again. They all laugh. “I told you guys he was retarded,” Patrick’s laughing too hard and he can barely talk. Later Matt tells me that Patrick had a dream where I was the guy from Goonies with my face all smooshed up and my voice all dumb. When they pass me in the hall it starts all over again. In the back of the class they whisper it to each other: hey you guys.

Before recess I’m sad. Mrs Lynn asks what’s wrong and I say my mother forgot to pack my lunch. She takes me with her to the front of the class. “Erik just told me his mother forgot to pack his lunch. His mother. Children, you have to do things for yourselves. You can’t expect your mothers to do everything for you.” As she talks she makes me stand next to her and look at the whole class. Later, when I go home, I don’t say anything to my mom. I go to my room and between the screen and the window: bees.

*****

Dad propped up a ladder and looked around at the skylight, but he didn’t see where bees could come in. He doesn’t think they’re living in the walls. “No sense in calling an exterminator” he says. “Summer means bees.” He brings in a can of bug spray from the garage: Ortho Hornet and Wasp Killer. Guaranteed kill. Twenty foot spray radius. When I see bees on the skylight I spray Ortho and it mists down onto my bed. I do this every night. Ortho makes a bee heavy. Its wings can’t keep it up but it doesn’t want to land. It spirals down to the carpet. If it’s still alive I cut it in half with scissors and flush the cuts down the toilet. I’m sure to look for the stinger. Always always always.

I spray the skylight so much poison bleeds through the wall and bees just die on their own. Sometimes they die and fall into bed with me. My neck rolls onto one and it stings. This scares me; that things might be crawling over me while I’m asleep. Bees dead and curled like question marks around my bed—everywhere my feet would go. I start awake and shake out my covers in case they’re full of bees. I stand first on my bed then I check the ground. If there are bees, I take a blanket and sleep on the couch. There are always bees. They’re stinging inside the walls. The walls might be swelling with them.

******

When I am sleeping the bees are never sleeping. I wake up and the bees are never sleeping. Bees crawling over bees crawling over the inside of my walls, next to my pillow and my head. Everywhere bees. Bees in the garbage—throw a rock and they fly around. Bees trying to land on my potato salad. I say go away but they don’t listen. I wave my hands over them but they don’t listen.

I pretend murder but I never pretend bees. Murderer might hit me and drag me out of the bathroom at the mall, might throw me in the trunk of his car and drive me away. In JC Pennies I hide in the middle of the clothing racks and murderer’s legs walk past. If he grabs my arm I can wiggle out, I can scream and someone can help me. No one can save me from bees. They are swarm and angry and crawl in my ears and sting and everywhere is hurt where I brush them away is hurt and blood cries out of my hands. I never ever pretend bees.

*****

Bees are noise before they’re bees. If I try hard I can make myself hear them. I listen hard and it sounds like they’re flying, and when I turn on the lamp I can’t see them. At night everything sounds like bees. Sometimes if I leave the window open bees try to fly outside and I trap them between the screen and the window. I have to wait for them to starve. They live for days. Their wings hum against the window and I always look over; I can’t tell which side of the glass they’re on. At night I can’t tell trapped bees from free bees. I’m almost asleep and the buzzing wakes me. I can’t let them out once they’re trapped, even just to kill them, because they’ll be angry and I won’t be able to control them. They’ll sting me and I’ll have let them. I put my face up to the glass and watch them crawl belly up like they were crawling over my face. I tap the glass, and if they don’t buzz I tap harder.

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ERIK LEAVITT is a graduate student at Columbia University studying nonfiction and holds a masters degree in poetry from Boise State University. His work has appeared in AGNI and New York Quarterly, and is forthcoming in 1913 a journal of forms.

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