Paulina was surprised. This was the first time a bee had spoken to her. She wanted to run away and run towards. She thought of the moment Gustav lay next to her, brushing her long hair behind her ears when she looked into his eyes, the fullness of his lips, and back to his eyes. She would run towards. Surely he was more bee than wasp? Zeinab had been right. She wasn’t coming back.

  She had sought lodgings in a boarding house only a few kilometers from his home; the little drone always visited her, even when Gustav could not. There were many reasons, he said, that he could not. Grant applications. Academic Papers. And the little drone said: “I told you Honey Bee Drones don’t mate with the Queen of their colony.”

  He buzzed secrets in her ears about love and its nature, about the inertia of people, individual greed over communal wealth, and the terrible things that would happen if the wasps became the new honey bee. “Wasps cannot make honey and they don’t die after they sting. They don’t have the pure heart of the bee. Like you and me. Colony Collapse Disorder”, he whispered in a buzzing purr, “means more than the disappearance of just us. It also means the disappearance of you.”

  For the second month of summer, Gustav and Paulina saw each other more frequently. The little drone less. She had left the window open for him, left honeysuckle on the sill to welcome him in, but he didn’t come. Paulina was preoccupied with Gustav, their urgent lovemaking overwhelming her so that even she stopped hearing the buzz in her heart. They argued passionately about the wasps. How their honey could never match that of the honeybee. Of stringy bark or manuka and the rising price of oranges and orange juice.

  The visits were frequent but short. It made her frustrated. He would leave soon after lovemaking. That frustrated her as well.

  “Why don’t you stay a bit longer?”

  “I can’t. I’m supposed to be working. Wasps don’t wait.”

  She looked away and didn’t answer. She didn’t understand how someone that kept bees and loved the buzzing in her heart, would dedicate his life to the wasps. Why? But she knew what he had been thinking. The little drone had told her. Gustav was waiting for the right moment to tell her. She had hoped what the little drone had told her was not all true.

  Summer soon turned to autumn and Paulina had stopped asking him to stay. Stopped asking about the wasps. She did not understand the lure of money that made the research into the wasps an attractive option for Science PhD. Graduates. Now they made love with a sense of futility. The absence of words needing to be said created a sense of pointlessness. Of sweet stings and honey nectar, of the fallout between the reality of the situation and her feelings for someone that would betray the bees. Paulina had a beehive in her heart. By betraying the bees, he would betray her. But she said nothing. For she knew that if she left and walked away—just like the honeybee after he has stung, she would surely die.

  She loved him.

  So she stayed. Taking jobs waitressing and helping out with other urban bee keeping places. Word soon got out that she could enchant the bees. But she told no one of her beekeeper lover or of the little drone that came to speak to her about truths.

  She knew Gustav was leaving before he told her. He had been given a grant to spend a year researching the common wasp and genetically modifying them to make honey wasps. Wasps were common.

  He was going with his wife.

  His wife. The Queen of his colony.

  She’d co-wrote the proposals.

  It was quarter to midnight and they were sitting in a coffee shop huddled over a small round table in the right back corner.

  “I will miss you,” he said.

  “I will miss you, too.” She wanted to kick and scream, beg him not to leave, the bees needed him. She needed him. But Paulina knew the rule of the bee, to sting someone meant a piece of her would die. Honey is pure.

  “I’ll see you next week before I leave,” he said and called the waitress for the bill.

  He stood up, and tucked his chair in, leaned forward and kissed her on the lips goodbye. Then he departed. Quickly. He didn’t look back. She looked out the window and shivered. She was glad she’d packed a cardigan. The weather was getting cooler. More bitter at night. Her eyes welled with the sticky goo of honeyed tears.

  “Hey honey,” the waitress crooned as she picked up the dirty cups from the table. “You look like you’re getting a mean case of conjunctivitis.”

  She smiled at the waitress, left some change on the table and departed. Tonight the road seemed quiet, deserted and wider, even. She pulled her cardigan up around her ears and shivered. She felt alone. She couldn’t get warm.

  And then it happened. It was a pain of a deep burn. She keeled over, the stinging behind her breastbone making it impossible to breathe; she fell down to the pavement, scraping the palm of her hands to endure the fall. Her heart throbbed with stings and soon its rapid rhythm fluttered at the bottom of her throat so she became light-headed and she choked for air. The bees inside her heart finally left their hive and stung her internally. Heart break.

  The little drone appeared. He buzzed worriedly around her ear telling her over and over: sorry, sorry, so sorry. He was sorry but couldn’t do anything anymore. That soon, he and his colony would be gone from Gustav’s rooftop, too.

  Paulina pushed herself up off the ground with her forearms.

  “Don’t leave,” she said to the little drone.

  He rested on her breastbone, where it hurt the most. She wondered how she would make it home. It hurt. Physically hurt. This wasn’t a pleasurable sting, but one that burned and then left her empty heart stinging of what felt like needle stings. The same sensation her school friend Nettie had described when being stung by a bee in the playground at netball practice.

  That night she lay awake tossing from side to side on her mattress. She couldn’t get comfortable; she couldn’t keep warm. The sounds outside the window of her small apartment were loud. The wheels of cars on the wet asphalt, the sound of a cat meowing, a child wailing. She heard everything, now that her heart had grown silent. The bees didn’t buzz anymore. All the ones that had lived there had died when they stung her. The little drone had gone with his colony, too, flying out the window when she arrived home. Sorry, Paulina, was all he could say. He didn’t say goodbye. Paulina knew that he wouldn’t be back. And when the sticky tears fell down her cheeks and sweetened her lips with the taste, she wondered . . . what if . . . what if . . . she would never be able to enchant the bees again?

  Drawn against her will, she saw him again. He had said he would see her again and he did. Gustav was leaning against the balcony balustrade of the rooftop garden. He chewed on his bottom lip and shook his head. “I find it so strange all my honey bees have departed. But the garden I harvested for them is still in lush abundance! It doesn’t make sense.”

  Paulina said nothing. The time had come. He was departing next week. She had promised that she would look after the bees in his rooftop garden for the year he was away. Promised.

  She looked at him and her lips parted. She kissed him. It was long and loving. She poked her tongue in and out of his mouth as if she was a bee searching a flower for nectar. He sucked her tongue hungrily.

  So much potential. For him. For her. For the honeybees.

  They said goodbye. He was cold. Callous almost. It was over quickly.

  She gathered the little jars of honey she had collected from the bees on Gustav’s garden over the last nine months of their relationship, all lovingly collected and labelled. Almond Honey. Lavender Honey. Apple Honey. Binding them up, she walked the ten blocks to his home, up the flights of stairs until she reached his front door. She knocked and waited.

  For a moment she wondered if she should run. What had brought her here? He had asked her never to come without an invitation. In case he was working. For a moment she turned to walk back but froze when she heard him shuffling through the hallway. It was futile. She knew why. She heard her voice behind the door. The little drone had told her, the honeybee drone doesn’t mate with the queen of his colony. The honeybee drone relies on the worker bee to feed him. The honeybee drone is only present during the summer. His wife was the queen of his colony, and the worker bee he relied on to feed him for this seasonal work had been Paulina. And autumn was coming: the season when the worker bees stop feeding the drones.

  She placed the jars of honey behind the door, hoping they would sustain him while he was away. The door creaked open. Paulina bolted behind the corner of the long corridor. Was it him? Had he come to her? He had been her hive, and she was drawn to returning to him. She pressed her sticky palms against the wall and peered around the corner.

  She felt as if something had caught in her throat. It was his wife. Paulina had never seen her before.

  She stared at the woman, almost twice the height of Paulina. It was her thin lips, large probing eyes and long fingers that caught Paulina’s eye. The way she snatched up the honey, eyes darting back and forth and then slammed the door shut. Paulina’s heart skipped a beat and it made her catch her breath. She didn’t expect his wife to be so waspish in manner.

  Paulina jogged down the flights of stairs, her feet treading lightly, when a spasm of emotion contracted in her chest and she gasped at the memory of Gustav’s love. It came in sweet whirrs and buzzing and tickled beneath her breastbone. The memory of his tongue on her lips, him moving inside her. She knew what to do. She remembered that day she had showed him how she could summon the bees. She closed her eyes and held her breath. She would call them—the bees that had disappeared from Gustav’s colony.

  Out on the street it was already midmorning, a time when bees would be busy. She did what she did best as a child, stripped her clothes off until she had nothing but a petticoat slip on. Arms outstretched, head tilted back, eyes closed, Paulina stood frozen like a piece of holy stone and felt the beat of her beehive heart summoning them.

  At first, one by one they came, a gentle whirring, a fluttering; then, a swarm hovered like swallows in circular flight. They crawled inside her eyes and up her nostrils, over her lips, anywhere there was an opening to get behind that skin and breastbone. They crawled inside each orifice to make their way to their destination.

  And as each bee arrived to the hive of her heart, the buzzing began again. It was loud, but Paulina would never apologize for this, nor try to quell the noise. It was the part of him that could never betray her and a part of who she was.

  Originally published in Strange Little Girls, edited by Camila Bruce and Liv Lingborn.

  Angela (Angie) Rega is a belly dancing librarian and language teacher with a passion for folklore, fairy tales and furry creatures. She was raised in a multi-lingual household where nobody finished a sentence in the same language and still struggles with syntax. Her short stories have appeared in publications including The Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror, Crossed Genres, BellaDonna Publishing, PS Publications and World Weaver Press. She keeps a small website here: angierega.webs.com.

  The Hurrah (aka Corpse Scene)

  by Orrin Grey

  In the only photograph that I have of my mother, she is covered in blood. Her frizzy brown hair is flattened black with gore, her rosy cheeks now suffused with a redder hue. The only things spared from the Carrie-at-prom-night dousing are her brown eyes and white teeth; the former wide in terror, pupils expanding like black holes to swallow the irises, the latter bared in something that seems caught midway between a scream and a laugh, lips pulled back, teeth slightly apart. In the background, the gray trunks of trees form an out-of-focus wall. At the bottom, in the white border that surrounds the picture, are my mother’s name and the words “The Hurrah (aka Corpse Scene)” in bold, black, but unstylized letters.

  The photo is a glossy thing, a rare publicity still for a shot-on-video movie that probably never looked as sharp or as clear as this picture does. I paid a greasy-haired man in a black t-shirt thirty-five bucks for it at a horror convention. When I told him it was my mom he said, “That’s fuckin’ cool. If you sign it, we can probably sell it for seventy-five. I’ll cut you in for thirty.” I paid him the thirty-five dollars and left.

  Most people, even slasher movie junkies, have never heard of The Hurrah. From what I’ve been able to piece together over the years, from blog entries and write-ups in cheapie self-pubbed paperbacks about shot-on-video horror flicks and from the recollections, secondhand though they are, of my great-uncle, to say that it was made on a shoestring budget is to grossly undervalue shoestrings. One of a pile of similar fare that was made and lost during the early days of the 1980s slasher boom, when every kid with a camcorder and a bottle of Karo syrup and food coloring thought he was the next John Carpenter.

  Uncle Tomas—I don’t put the “great” in front, because he’s the only uncle I’ve got left—says that my mom always wanted to be an actress. “Ever since she was a little girl. She was in all the school plays. She was a pretty thing, which helped, I guess, but that wasn’t it. Plenty of pretty girls never get to be actors, but I think your mom would have. She had something. Something in her eyes, I think. Some people, you look in their eyes, and they’re just eyes. But not your mom. Her eyes always seemed like they were about to show you something.”

  I get that, from the picture. I keep it pinned up above my bed, and sometimes I stare at it, stare into the darks of those eyes, and wonder if I can see any of myself in her bloodsoaked features.

  For those who do know about The Hurrah, it’s considered, maybe not a holy grail, but certainly something that you wouldn’t mind undertaking a quest for. A few people say that they’ve seen parts of it. Pirated copies, recorded onto decaying VHS tapes. From them, I learn that the production still I carry around—kept in a plastic sleeve when I’m taking it to conventions—is probably from the film’s final moments. After the killer has been dispatched, as my mom waits for the police cruisers to show up, to paint her with cherry red and popsicle blue light, provided, I’m told, by a single pair of spinning bulbs, covered by red and blue filters.

  “The thing about Corpse Scene,” one guy tells me at the Guts and Garters convention in a rundown Best Western outside of Lubbock, Texas, “is that it cuts out all the filler. Gets right down to the good stuff, y’know?”

  We met in the fart-smelling elevator, when he saw the photo tucked under my arm in its plastic sleeve and said, “Holy shit, is that Marybeth Conner?” We pulled up uncomfortably warm plastic lawn furniture next to the pool, and he proceeded to tell me what he knew about the movie that he insisted upon calling by its alternate title.

  “I’ve never seen it,” he said, “but my friend went to a convention one time where they screened it, the whole thing. He said that it started out where most slasher movies stop. That it was all just one long corpse scene, hence the title. Just this long montage of the final girl finding the bodies of her friends stacked up like cordwood. I mean, there were kills, too. She’d stumble across another survivor and they would stick together just long enough for him or her to get dispatched in some manner as bloody as the special effects budget would allow.”

  The guy was heavy and bearded and his stomach bulged against his Suspiria t-shirt, but he never tried to touch me or lure me to his hotel room, so I liked him better than most of the men I met while making the convention rounds. He said his name was Bill Teague. I told him mine was Katie, and asked if this friend of his knew where I could find a copy of the movie.

  “The whole thing?” he asked, incredulous, trying to stifle a sort of scoff when he saw the expression on my face, which I appreciated. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t think anybody knows where you can find the whole thing, not anymore. But some people have bits of it, y’know? A five minute clip, or a sizzle reel or whatever. It’ll look like shit, like a copy of a copy, or something recorded off of a pirated channel, and it’ll cost you way more than it’s worth, but I can probably help get you a hook-up, if you want.”

  Here, I thought, was the invitation up to his hotel room, or, worse, out to his car, but no, he took me to a table in a corner of the dealer’s room, where a kid who couldn’t have been more than a minute out of high school sat behind a table stacked high with VHS tapes in clamshells and cardboard boxes, hidden behind gaudy covers that made them look a hundred times more graphic than their contents could ever match.

  “Trev,” Bill said. “This is Katie. You will never fucking guess who she’s related to.” And that was my introduction to Trevor Canton, who apparently sold VHS tapes to collectors online most of the time, and every now and then brought overstock out to conventions like this one.

  “Show him the still, man,” Bill encouraged me, and for whatever reason I didn’t even mind being called “man.” I showed Trevor—who apparently preferred to be called Trev—the production still, and he asked if he could hold it, rather than just snatching it out of my hands, which I also appreciated, so I relented, though I usually had a pretty hard-and-fast policy against precisely that.

  To my pleasure, he handled it reverently, as though he had some idea of what it meant to me, or maybe as though it meant something to him, too, and he didn’t even try to take it out of the plastic. Just held it for a few minutes, looking close, and then turned it over, saw there was nothing on the reverse side, and handed it back to me.

  “I didn’t even know they’d done publicity stills for it,” he said. “Kinda seems above their pay grade, y’know? No offense.”

  “So do you got any of it?” Bill asked on my behalf, because the two of them were too excited by who I was to give me the time to gather up my thoughts enough to ask myself. Trev dug around in a couple of paper grocery bags under his table—as he hauled them out to get better traction, I saw that they were filled with VHS tapes, hand-labeled with names like “Skulltaker III” and “The Lawnmower Murders.”

  The thing he finally dug out had a neon green sticker like the kind people use at yard sales on the corner, with $40 printed on it in sharpie. The label said “The Hurrah, 15 min,” written in blue ballpoint pen in a shakier hand.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7