Volume 1: Proscenium

Issue 2: Home Sweet Home

Florian Reyes Honeywell

By Roach

I reached the end of the hallway. The swarm of bees eclipsed my silhouette. As I turned the corner, I spotted the school entrance. I halted. The swarm stopped when I did, their movements synchronized with my own.

I couldn’t go out like this. Although I felt safer with the bees than without them, being seen in public was a different kind of trouble. As I stared at the door, I noticed the security camera poised above it. Normally, I didn’t register it, but right now it was another obstacle between me and my way out.

Again, I concentrated on a part of the swarm. Cover the camera, I ordered. They didn’t budge. I tried again, less confidently: Cover the eye. This time, they seemed to pick up on the meaning. They flew towards the camera and perched on the lens. After they had covered up its view, I cracked the door open. I sent the remaining bees to block the opposing camera located on the outside.

Once the swarm had left my side, I pushed the door open. A bruising, amber sky greeted me. I started running, my feet carrying me across the empty walkways. The slope of the hill brought me to a sprint. I put Chapel High behind me, where it loomed from the very top of its namesake—Chapel Hill.

Outside of the security cameras’ view, I sent a new command to the bees. Join your sisters, I instructed them. I didn’t want them following me while I was outside, and they were better off helping the other scouts search the school than sitting on the cameras. I didn’t turn back to see if they followed my order.

On the contrary, I sped up. As panic spread through me, the churning sensation reached all the way to the brood chambers of my fingertips. But as I ran, I didn’t run out of breath. I had long since lost my need to breathe. My lungs had continuously degraded into honeycombs ever since the swarm took residence inside of me. I could keep going until I was far, far away from Chapel High.

Someone cursed at me where I barrelled down the streets. But as pedestrians side-stepped out of my trajectory, I only cared about putting as much distance between myself and the school. The memory of Mr. Howells flashed through my mind; lecturing about chlorophyll and photon interactions in one moment, gurgling blood in the next.

What do you think you’re doing, Hive?

The Queen’s words resonated inside of me. She continued, Assigning missions to my daughters, going blindly towards danger? Her pheromones flooded the air. Whereas the workers could only understand or relay simple messages, her signals were much richer in chemicals and complex in their meaning.

I skidded to a halt. I found myself by the dumpsters of an alley between a bookstore and a creamery. When I glanced back, I could see Chapel High in the distance, outlined by the sinking sun. The school’s bell tower gouged into a low-hanging cloud.

Well? the Queen prompted.

I searched for an answer, but my thoughts were pulled in a hundred different directions. Not just about Mr. Howells, but also others who could still be in danger. Had Holly gotten out? What about Max? Or Amber? As soon as it occurred to me, I realized the strangeness of my concern. Of course Max and Amber were safe. They would have left school long before me. It was an unexpectedly grounding thought. Maybe some clubs would be meeting in the evening, I reasoned, but most of the students would be gone by now.

I sensed the Queen’s pheromones fizzling around me.

I wanted to help, I said. Then, correcting myself, I want to help. Maybe there was nothing I could do. But the swarm could. The scouts I had sent were my best shot at discovering the culprit.

On whose authority? the Queen pressed.

I thought carefully about my response. If you care so much about expanding your empire or whatever, maybe this is a good place to start. We go here basically every day… your highness. I wasn’t naïve enough to think she would agree to my proposal. She wouldn’t care for the lives that could be lost, but maybe I could make her consider it in terms of expanding her territory. Then, maybe she would warm up to the idea that I was using the swarm in my own way. Or at the very least, let it slide. I just had to appeal to her twisted logic.

How inspiring. If only your efforts weren’t so futile.

While I didn’t want to entertain her, I couldn’t ignore that she was—at least partially—right. Even if my bees were staking out the school, bees alone couldn’t reckon with whatever force had torn my teacher apart. Discovering the culprit wasn’t enough if I couldn’t stop them. If I really wanted to help, I needed to take action. Warn someone, call the police, go back, anything. Now that I had retreated to safety, my mistake dawned on me. I should have called someone right away, instead of involving myself or the swarm.

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Sirens blared past me, pulling me out of my thoughts. Traffic slowed, clearing the path for two police cars. They sped in the direction of Chapel High. Someone else must have found Mr. Howells. At least I hoped that was the case, and not that they had run into his attacker. As if on cue, I started the journey home. I had done what I could—which was essentially nothing. All I had accomplished was abandoning a crime scene, releasing a few bees, and possibly endangering others. I dwelled on the Queen’s words. Futile.

My parents’ apartment was normally a fifteen-minute walk from Chapel High. But, as I half-walked, half-jogged through San Francisco, I reduced it to five minutes. Familiar surroundings passed by in an indistinct blur, and a cacophony of noise followed me home. The honking of a car appeared much closer than reality suggested, and a street musician’s clarinet pierced the air. Relief washed through me when I reached the apartment building. Vines crawled up the clementine walls, while a greenhouse brimming with vegetation topped the roof.

A wooden sign with Home Sweet Home carved into it hung on the apartment door. I entered.

Neither of my parents were inside. They wouldn’t be home for the next few days. As beekeepers, they distributed hives all across the country. Currently, they were delivering bees to a research facility in Oregon. Somehow it felt like I saw even less of them these days than during summer’s busy harvest. While their bees hibernated through the mild January days, my parents didn’t have much else to do but assist with research projects. While my dad was the primary caretaker for the bees, my mom had a fair amount of experience in ecology, with a specialization in entomology. Although the apartment sometimes felt empty in their absence, this time, I preferred not to deal with them.

As I leaned down to untie my Converse, I noticed the speck of red at the tip of my left shoe. Blood. Mr. Howells’ blood. I grabbed a damp paper towel from the kitchen and tried wiping it off. It smeared instead. I tried again with soap, which made it fade slightly. Finally, resorting to my fingernails, I started scratching at the stain. I scratched until my fingernail broke. The color had faded to a pink. I gave up and kicked off the shoe. I scrubbed my trembling hands in soap, rinsed them under the sink, then repeated the process. It took several minutes for me to snap out of it.

I went to the living room. The room dimmed as I closed the blinds. I cleared space on the table for my laptop, shoving aside a stack of my mom’s scientific journals. Then I seated myself on the mint green IKEA couch. While I waited for the laptop to boot up, I rested my face in my hands.

My control of the swarm slipped. Suppressing their natural instincts had become second nature to me, and normally, I could keep them still without putting any thought into the pheromonal signal. All things considered, we had achieved some level of co-existence. But when I finally had the chance to sit down, a sudden weariness overcame me. All the energy I had put into keeping tabs on the bees’ different signals and whereabouts at the school had been completely exhausted.

I put up no resistance as hundreds of bees exited from my ear canals. While some stayed behind to tend the hive, others swarmed the room. Overall, thousands upon thousands of bees resided within me. Counting them individually would be an impossible task. But, since the hive kept constant track of its own population, I knew there were around 20,000 bees at any given time—more or less. Now, they crawled all over the couch, the table, and my computer screen. They settled on my arms, my neck, my hair. Their writhing shapes distorted the photos on the walls. A humming swathed the room. I didn’t try to reign them in, but allowed them to roam the apartment.

One bee landed on the tip of my index finger. She gravitated towards my broken nail. Using her mandibles, she trimmed a piece of loose skin. She regurgitated a drop of wax over the damaged area, then smoothed it over with her tarsal claws. Once again, I felt her mandibles pick at the skin, patching it back in place. The injury had hardly been noticeable in the first place, but now, it was as if it never happened.

“Thanks,” I muttered. The bee flew off.

Once my laptop lit up, I waved a few bees off the screen. I realized that I had neglected to retrieve my chemistry homework from the locker—not that I would have been able to focus on homework, anyway. Instead, I clicked through various news outlets; the San Francisco Chronicle, Twitter, and lastly, PowerWatch. Due to the ruthless nature of the murder, I didn’t want to overlook that powers could have been at play. Although I knew it was too soon for any news to be issued, I excessively refreshed my tabs. But as I poked through different articles, my discoveries were sparse. I found that there was an upcoming book signing event at the local library and a concert at Dolores Park. Although there were some reports of petty crimes and one missing person, I found nothing which rivaled the bisection of a teacher.

A few hours of mindless surfing went by before I heard a knock on the door. I flinched at the sound. Bees still crawled throughout the living room, drifting aimlessly. Freeze, I ordered. Each bee stopped whatever she had been doing. The ones in flight found a surface to cling to, joining the rest in stillness. Others landed on me. Their low hum had become so ingrained in the background noise that the abrupt silence took me by surprise.

I crept towards the door with a sense of dismay. I had already deduced that it wouldn’t be my parents. They were too far away, and even if they weren’t, they wouldn’t be knocking. I hoped it was something stupid, like a missionary or mishandled pizza order. I moved as quietly as I could. Then I heard another knock. It grew sharper, more impatient.

I glanced over my shoulder. The hallway connected directly to the living room area, teeming with bees. They crawled over the walls and furniture, like the room itself had become a living thing, breathing with the restless fluttering and shifting of wings.

The knocking persisted.

The swarm bristled.

I peered through the peephole.