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-Andy (Cover art by Kayla Stern) (Music by: Dar Saltos de Alegria (ID 129) - Kielokazwww.musikbrause.deCreative Commons (BY-NC-ND 4.0) )
It was a quiet afternoon in the verdant hills of North Carolina. Bob laid there daydreaming, thinking how beautiful and peaceful the Blue Ridge Mountains looked set against the grass upon which he laid. Flowers dotted the landscape around his picnic spot, and happy little bees were poking and prodding them peacefully, collecting pollen for their delicious honey. Bob began to fall asleep to the droning white noise of little bee wings.
Unfortunately for Bob, the mosquitos in the area were out in force. Bob had the unfortunate circumstance of being from a family line that was, apparently, irresistible to mosquitoes. Bob felt he could probably spend no more than five minutes outside before being covered with hundreds of little bumps all over his skin. Bob began slapping at mosquitos and realized that he needed to reapply his insect repellant. Bob was using an aerosol brand of repellant quite liberally when he heard a far-off voice yell at him “Hey! What the fuck are you doing? Stop that!”
Bob stopped spraying himself down with repellant and whipped his head around, half expecting to see some college kid and his frat brothers jovially jocking their way around nature. He was surprised to see that there was no one there, however, and as far as he could tell from atop his little hill, there was no one around for quite some distance.
Hearing was never Bob’s strongest suit, having been born with an ear infection. He was totally perplexed by what he heard and could not fathom any sort of explanation for it. “Well,” he thought to himself “I am in a valley, which could amplify an echo; thing is, that didn’t sound like an echo.” Bob tried to brush off an uneasy feeling that began to crawl up his throat and continued applying his repellant. “Are you fucking kidding me right now?!” he heard the same voice say, but this time, it was a lot closer. He stood up, ready to defend himself from whoever was berating him, because at this point, he was sure it was a personal vendetta.
“Who’s there?” Bob shouted.
“Down here, you giant ass” he heard the voice say from below knee-level.
Bob bent down to look at the flower near his feet and saw a bee.
“Okay” Bob thought to himself “I guess those brownies were a little extra special.” He laughed at the thought that, instead of going insane, he must simply be very high. He decided to continue his weed-infused nap and laid back down on his blanket. Bob was allergic to bees but had always been taught that if he didn’t bother bees, they wouldn’t bother him. He figured that, regardless of any hallucination with voices, he hadn’t done anything to the bee on the flower, and that there was no way in hell it was the bee that was talking to him. Bob had no reason to suspect he had hurt or offended the bee, he assumed he could lay back down on his picnic blanket peacefully.
Bob began to do a deep breathing exercise his ex-girlfriend had taught him. He closed his eyes and allowed himself to sink into the warm ground as he let go of – something was crawling on him! His eyelids flung open as he tried not to panic and looked down past his chins and towards his chest to see a little bee walking towards his face.
“Shoo!” Bob gently told the bee “Shoo! I don’t want to hurt you!”
“Yeah, yeah,” the bee coughed. It wasn’t a normal cough, either, but the cough of someone who has been smoking for the majority of their life. “It’s a little late for that now.”
Bob’s mind began to spin and twirl as he was now certain that this bee was talking to him. But that was impossible, wasn’t it? “Dude, you can talk?” He asked the bee, feeling dumber and dumber as every syllable left his lips.
The bee let out a wry chuckle, “Yes. Yes, I can talk. Clearly, I can talk, you’re hearing me, aren’t you?”
Bob had experimented with quite a few drugs in his time. Ecstasy, Acid, methamphetamines, various opiates and large sampling of hallucinogenics had all coursed through his blood stream, fat cells, and urine in the past few years. In fact, if you could name the drug, there’s a good chance that he had either taken it, sold it, or knew where to get some. In most cases, the three would be true simultaneously. Bob was perhaps uniquely gifted with a free spirit, lack of real, meaningful connections, and a complete disregard for physical health. Yes, Bob considered himself to be a psychedelic spiritualist who had contemplated realms of thought that others had dared not touch, and it was this calling that led him to seek new realms of truth at the cost of his physical body. Through every trip, he had never talked to an animal, however, nor had one attempted to communicate with him. He began to sweat, not so much from the heat of the sun, which did seem altogether more intense to him now, but from a slow and steady panic that made him tingle as if somehow, he had lost blood flow to his entire body. He did not dare to move, having no idea if the bee was going to sting him or not.
“Yes, I can hear you. I just don’t understand how.”
“Ah, yeah. That. So, have you ever heard of Esperanto?” Bob simply gulped and attempted to shake his head without actually moving. “Okay, well it’s a made-up universal language.”
“And I somehow… speak it?” asked Bob incredulously.
“What, no, I just said it was made up. But there is another language that’s far more primal, and that’s what you can speak.”
“Incredible!” Bob let his head relax back down onto the ground for a moment before looking back to the bee “I knew that I had reached a depth greater than others had managed in my spiritual searching.”
“Yeah, calm down there, that’s n—”
“Can any other human speak it, or am I the only one who has made it this far?”
“Ugh, stop flattering yourself kid, you’re not some kind of god, you’re just an asshole that happens to have one, singular talent.”
Bob suddenly felt heartbroken, but quickly asked, defiantly “Well, why haven’t I ever heard of anyone else being able to talk to animals?”
“What, Dr. Doolittle doesn’t ring a bell?”
“Well that’s just a made-up story, it’s not real.”
“Then where did the story come from?”
“Well, someone’s imagination, I guess” Bob responded.
“Well,” sighed the bee “almost every piece of imagination is based on fact in some way.”
“Dude” Bob’s eyes seemed to be moving around against his will “you are blowing my mind in like, multiple ways”.
The bee let out another wry chuckle, “Yeah, I get that a lot”. The bee began coughing again, the same cough Bob had heard in any movie where a main character had cancer and was about to meet an untimely end.
“Can I stand up real quick?” Bob asked the bee “I didn’t want to startle you so—”
“Sure” the bee said trying to catch his breath. As Bob stood the bee took flight and landed on his shoulder.
“Are you alright?” Bob asked, attempting to add a layer of concern and care into his voice, “You don’t sound so good.”
“Well gee-willickers,” the bee continued to hack and sputter “I wonder why that would be Mr. Aerosol”.
Bob was a little taken aback by the bee’s statement. “Oh gosh, I didn’t… I didn’t think it would hurt you! Does it hurt you?”
“Well” started the bee “not so much hurt me as just make me really sick. Also, the aerosol is just terrible for the environment, don’t you ever read?”
“I… I’m sorry, look clearly I need to leave, I –”
“No!” shouted the bee “No, you don’t need to leave you need to listen. You need to clean up your act and tell the humans they’re hurting us.”
“I… Mr. Bee, I’m only a cashier at a 7-11. Also, I’m a college drop-out. I don’t have any skills or ideas or really…” Bob paused to think for a moment “really any redeemable qualities other than an intense awareness of the other side.”
“what’s your point?”
“Well, I don’t think people are going to listen to me. You need to pick another person”
“Aw, c’mon, you’re not completely useless” the bee said, trying to sound encouraging “humans can be very useful if they’re properly motivated.”
“Boy, you really don’t know me very well, do you Mr. Bee?” Bob laughed.
“Don’t get smart. I might sting you.”
Sweat began to flow with alarming speed down Bob’s forehead. “I would… very much appreciate it, if you didn’t sting me” Bob said, slowly and with purpose.
“Yeah, I figured. How allergic are you? I can smell the allergies, but I can’t tell how strong.”
“I… why do you need to—wait a second, are you?” Bob was incensed. He was mortified. He was confused. “Are you holding me hostage?”
“Yeah, guess I am” the bee said flatly. His tiny voice had become normalized to Bob, but, he suddenly felt as if the bee had become more hostile.
“Well!” Bob started, trying to sound sure of himself “If you sting me you die too, y’know. And besides, I got my EpiPen in my backpack.”
“Yeah?” The bee said condescendingly “and where’s your backpack, sweetheart?”
“In my car” Bob mumbled.
“Ooh, I hate those things!” Bob felt the bee grip harder through the thin cotton shirt “I mean they’re death traps! I can always find my way in, but god help me, I can never find my way out! Some of us never make it out of those things. That’s how Jimmy died!”
“I’m sorry” Bob tried to sound sympathetic.
“You should be, those things kill. If the inside ain’t bad enough, the exhaust is awful for the ozone layer.”
Bob huffed slightly “You’re really well-educated for a bee, you know?”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“Well, I mean you guys don’t have science or anything do you?”
“Oh, so a bee can hold a conversation, but can’t know how the fucking ENVIRONMENT works? It’s where I live, asshole!”
“Jesus, alright, I’m sorry, just go ahead and sting me if I’m that much of a pain.”
“No, you’re not worth it” said the bee, sounding defeated.
“I thought you said I could be very useful!”
“That was before I knew you were a fucking idiot.”
Bob and the bee sat in silence for a moment.
“I wish we could fight back” said the bee.
“Can’t you?”
“Yeah” the bee said bitterly “like we got the bodies to throw at that. You said it yourself, I sting you, I die too. And not everybody’s allergic.”
“Can’t the other animals help?” Bob asked.
“I mean, yeah, we collaborate, but it’s kinda like you humans. We have groups, and though it’d be easier if we put our heads together, it just doesn’t click very often. Though, we did kind get mosquitos to make some noise.”
“Dude, you sic’d those assholes on us?” Bob asked angrily.
“Hey, don’t act all high and mighty! You’re the one who said we should collaborate, and you’re also helping kill us all at this point.” The bee sighed heavily “But yeah… mosquitos are dicks.”
“Well, we agree on that much” said Bob. “We agree on that much.”