At the Mouth of the River of Bees: Stories (20 page)

Linna stands as well and notices for the first time that the river is gone, leaving only the lake of bees, and even this is smaller than it was. “Can you heal Sam?” she says suddenly.

“He cannot stay with you and stay alive.” The woman pauses, as though choosing her words. “If you and Sam chose, he could stay with me.”

“Sam?” Linna puts down her cup carefully, trying to conceal her shaking hands. “I can’t give him to anyone. He’s old, he’s too sick. He needs pills.” She slips from her seat to the dry grass beside Sam. He struggles to his feet and presses his face against her chest, as he has since he was a puppy.

The queen of the bees looks down at them both, stroking Belle absently. The cat purrs and presses against her black-velvet thorax. Faceted eyes reflect a thousand images back to Linna, her arms around a thousand Sams.

“He’s mine. I love him, and he’s
mine
.” Linna’s chest hurts.

“He’s Death’s now,” the woman says. “Unless he stays with me.”

Linna bends her face to his ruff, smells the warm living scent of him. “Let me stay with him then. With you.” She looks up at the queen of the bees. “You miss company. You said so.”

The black heart-shaped head tips back. “No. To be with me is to have no one.”

“There’d be Sam. And the bees.”

“Would they be enough for you? A million million subjects? Ten thousand lovers, all as interchangeable and mindless as gloves? No friends, no family, no one to pull the sting from your hand?”

Linna’s eyes drop. She cannot bear to look into that fierce face, proud and searingly alone.

“I will love Sam with all my heart,” the queen of the bees continues in a voice soft as a hum. “Because I will have no one else.”

Sam has rolled to his side, waiting patiently for Linna to remember to scratch him.
Live forever
, she thinks, and wills his twisted spine and legs straight and well.

“All right then,” she whispers.

The queen of the bees exhales sweet air. Belle makes a tired cranky noise, a sort of question. “Yes, Belle,” she says, and touches her with what might be a long white hand. Belle sighs once and is still.

“Will you—?” the queen of the bees asks.

“Yes.” Linna stands, takes the cat from her black arms. The body is light as wind. “I will bury her.”

“Thank you.” The queen of the bees kneels and places her long hands on either side of the dog’s muzzle. “Sam? Would you like to be with me for a while?”

He says nothing, of course, but he licks the soft black face. The woman touches him and he stretches lavishly, like a puppy awakening after a long afternoon’s sleep. When he is done, his legs are straight and his eyes are very bright. Sam dances to Linna, bounces onto his hind legs to lick the tears from her face. She buries her face in his fur a last time. The smell of sickness is gone, leaving only Sam.
Live
, she thinks. When she releases him, he races once around the little field before he returns to sit beside the queen of the bees, smiling up at her.

Linna’s heart twists inside her but it’s the price of knowing he will live. She pays it, but cannot stop herself from asking, “Will he forget me?”

“I will remind him every day.” The queen rests her hand on his head. “And there will be many days. He will live a long time, and he will run and chase what might as well be rabbits, in my world.”

The queen of the bees salutes Linna, kissing her wet cheeks, and then she turns and walks toward the rising darkness that is the last of the lake of bees and also the dusk. Linna watches hungrily. Sam looks back once, confused, and she nearly calls out to him, but what would she be calling him back to? She smiles as best she can and he returns the smile, as dogs do. And then he and the queen of the bees are gone.

Linna buries Belle using the spade in the canvas bag. It is almost dark before she is done, and she sleeps in her car again, too tired to hear or see or feel anything. In the morning she finds a road and turns west. When she gets to Seattle (no longer gray, but green and blue and white with summer), she sends the canvas bag back to Officer Tabor—Luke, she remembers—along with a letter explaining everything she has learned of the river of bees.

She is never stung again. Her dreams are visited by bees, but they bring her no messages; the calligraphy of their flights remain mysterious. Once she dreams of Sam, who smiles at her and dances on young straight legs, just out of reach.

—for Sid and Helen

Story Kit

Six story types, from Damon Knight:

1. The story of resolution. The protagonist has a problem and solves it, or doesn’t.
   
2. The story of explanation.
   
3. The trick ending.
   
4. A decision is made. Whether it is acted upon is irrelevant.
   
5. The protagonist solves a puzzle.
   
6. The story of revelation. Something hidden is revealed to the protagonist, or to the reader.
   

It has to start somewhere, and it might as well be here.

Medea. Hypsipyle. Ariadne.
Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Madame Butterfly. Anna Karenina.
Emma Bovary. Ophelia.

Dido.
The Aeneid.
Letter 7 of Ovid’s
Heroides.
Lines 143–382 of
The House of Fame.
Lines 924–1367 of
The Legend of Good Women.
A play by Marlowe. An opera by Purcell.

Wikipedia:
Dido. Aeneas.

The pain of losing something so precious that you did not think you could live without it. Oxygen. The ice breaks beneath your feet: your coat and boots fill with water and pull you down. An airlock blows: vacuum pulls you apart by the eyes, the pores, the lungs. You awaken in a fire: the door and window are outlined in flames. You fall against a railing: the rusted iron slices through your femoral artery. You are dead already.

I can write about it if I am careful, if I keep it far enough away.

The writer is over it. It was years ago.

Dido’s a smart woman and she should have predicted his betrayal, as Aeneas has always been driven before the gusting winds that are the gods. His city Troy falls to their squabbling, the golden stones dark with blood dried to sticky dust and clustered with flies: collateral damage, like a dog accidentally kicked to death in a brawl. Aeneas huddles his few followers onto ships and flees, but Juno harries him and sends at last a storm to rip apart his fleet. He crash-lands in a bay near Carthage. His mother—Venus; another fucking god—guides him to shelter.

Dido is Reynard; she is Coyote. No gods have driven
her
, or if they have, she has beaten them at their own game. She also was forced from her land but she avenged her father first, then stole her brother’s ships and left with much wealth and a loyal, hard-eyed army. Rather than fight for a foothold on the Libyan shore, she uses trickery to win land from the neighboring kings. They cannot reclaim it except through marriage, so she plays the Faithful Widow card, and now they cannot force her into marriage, either. If she continues to play her cards well, the city she founds here will come to rule the seas, the world. The neighboring kings understandably resent how this is working out.

She begins to build. When Aeneas arrives on her shores, Carthage is a vast construction site threaded with paths, its half-finished walls fringed with cranes and scaffolds, and hemmed with great white stones waiting to be lifted into place.
[A textile metaphor—Ariadne’s thread leading Jason through the labyrinth—she also was betrayed and died.]

Aeneas comes to her court a suppliant, impoverished and momentarily timid. He is a good-looking man. If anything, his scars emphasize that. The aura of his divine failure wraps around him like a cloak. Dido feels the tender contempt of the strong for the unlucky, but this is mixed with something else, a hunger that worms through her bones and leaves them hollow, to be filled with fire.

There is a storm. They take shelter in a cave where they kiss, where for the first time she feels his weight on her. Words are exchanged.

And afterward, when they lie tangled together and their sweat dries to cold salt on her skin, he tells Dido that Jupiter has promised him a new land to replace his lost Troy. Italy. He is somewhat evasive but in any case she does not listen carefully, content to press her ear to his breast and hear the rumble of his voice stripped of meaning.

There is every reason to believe he will be no stronger against the gods this time, but Dido loves him.

Some losses are too personal to write about, too searing to face. Easier to distance them in some fashion: zombies or a ghost story. Even Dido may be too direct.

She kneels on the dark tiles of the kitchen floor and begs: anything, anything at all. She will die, she tells him. She will not survive this loss. Her face is slick with snot.
There’s blood on your face
, he says. Her tears are stained red from where she has broken a vein in her eye. Her heart is skipping beats, trying to catch up to this new rhythm that does not include him. She runs to the bathroom, which a year ago they painted the turquoise of the sea. He kneels beside her as she vomits but does not touch her, as though he wishes he could help but does not know how.

She cannot figure out what has happened. It seems he cannot either, but the wind fills his sails. He is already gone.

1,118,390 words before these. The writer’s craft is no longer a skill she has learned but a ship she sails. It remains hard to control in strong winds.

Aeneas will be tall and broad-shouldered because heroes and villains usually are. Probably in his thirties. Scarred from the Trojan wars and a bad sleeper. He thinks he has lost everything, but he still has his health, his wits, some followers.

Aeneas is from the eastern Mediterranean. He will not be half-French. He will not have blue eyes, nor wear horn-rimmed glasses. He will not have a tattoo that says caveat emptor on his left shoulder, nor a misshapen nail from when he caught his finger in the car door when he was ten; nor sleep on his right side and occasionally sleepwalk.

Perhaps he will have survivor guilt.

• the sound of the words
  
• what the words mean
  
• how they string together into phrases, like the linked bubbles of sea wrack
  
• the structure
  
• the plot
  
• memories and lies
  
• the theme
  
• the feeling she wants to inspire in readers
  

Lost her wallet. Lost her virginity. Lost her way. Lost the big game. Lost his phone number. Lost the horses. Lost the rest of the party. Lost the shotgun. Lost the antidote. Lost the matches. Lost her brother. Lost her mother. Lost

Wikipedia:
Carthage.

Though the real Carthage is on the Libyan shore, for purposes of this story it will look like a Greek island. There will be a cliff breached by a narrow road that hairpins up from a harbor to the city’s great gates of new oak bound with iron. Carthage will someday be a great seafaring nation so the writer adds wharves and warehouses by the harbor, but they are unpeopled in her mind, wallpaper.

It was March when she stayed on Ios—not the season for tourists, so she saw no one beyond two scuba divers and a couple of shivering Australians pausing in their wanderings. Ios was mostly stone-walled fields with goats and windmills and weeds, but Virgil’s Carthage did not have fields and neither will hers.

She hiked a lot, and climbed down to the water. The sea was clear as air. She saw anemones and a fish she did not recognize. The rock looked gray until she came close and its uniformity broke into rose and white and smoke-colored quartz crystals, furry with black and gold lichens.

It was cold on Ios. In the mornings, her breath puffed from her like smoke. When she climbed the cliffs, mist rose from her sweating skin and caught the sun. Her feet were always cold.
[Perhaps I am mixing up Ios with some other place I have been: Oregon or Switzerland. But these rocks, these anemones—they are real.]

There needs to be a bay just up the coast, because Aeneas will land there. It is a horseshoe tucked between stone arms, a lot like the little cove where the scuba divers would spend their days. His ship will ride at anchor, the torn sails laid out on the dark sand; the sail-makers will shake their heads but mend them anyway because these are the only ones they have.

Aeneas will climb the cliffs. The air will smell of wet earth and the bright salt sea, so far below. The writer can use Aeneas’s responses to the forest—which will be of short, slim-needled pines, maybe some oaks too, why not?—and the boulders to develop his character. Or Dido’s, to develop hers.

There will need to be a cave, as well.

Does Carthage even have forests? Did Virgil know for sure or was it just convenient for his story? Virgil was a professional liar. This would not be the only place where he pruned the truth until it was as artificial as an espaliered pear tree against a wall, forced to an expedient shape and bearing the demanded fruit.