Archive for the ‘Authors’ Category
The Kinetic Energy of Bees
Friday, October 9th, 2009
A cloud of bees surrounded the white-painted dresser in the back of the backyard. Earl flipped a switch. A line of LEDs blinked readiness along the dresser’s top edge.
“The hive’s primed,” he said.
“The transreality gate, you mean,” said Monica.
“Right,” said Earl. “That.”
Monica hopped from one side of the patio to the other, twiddling dials and tweaking sliders.
“This gonna work?” said Earl. “I mean, the mantis engine and the wasp bridge, those sounded like good ideas too.” He was rubbing the place on his forehead where the welts had been.
She slapped a lever down, said, “I checked the math twice.”
“And what if it does work?” said Earl. “What then?”
“I’m ready for that,” said Monica. “Dial it to three, dear.”
Earl clicked the dial around and the wooden box made the sound of summer weekend afternoons.
“Five,” said Monica. “I’ve been watching documentaries and reading the web.”
“Didn’t know Wikipedia had much on the insect dimensions,” said Earl. “And when do you have time to watch TV? It’s dance lessons every night, you’re hardly ever home.”
“Eight,” said Monica. “I didn’t realize you left the garage and your card-playing buddies long enough to notice what I was or wasn’t doing.”
The hive vibrated with contained momentum.
“Whoa,” said Earl, “this is serious.”
“Eleven!” said Monica.
The hum of the buzz became a pipe organ roar and the air shimmered over the hive.
A hexagonal window opened above the hive, and a bee-woman dropped through in a cloud of pollen.
“The insect dimensions!” said Earl, “I thought you were cra– I mean, I didn’t think they were real.”
The bee-woman twitched her antennae, and looked back and forth between Earl and Monica. He couldn’t read the expression in her faceted eyes.
Monica stepped forward, and did a kind of shimmy-waggle dance. Earl thought it looked like belly dancing, but something was wrong–it was like Monica had a stiff back, but she hadn’t mentioned anything and there wasn’t any rain in the forecast.
The bee-woman shimmied and waggled back. The motions of her three-segmented body made Monica’s movements make sense.
The two of them danced several minutes conversation before the bee-woman climbed up the hive, into the hexagon, and away to who knows where.
“Don’t wait up, dear,” said Monica, and followed.
Wait, what?
Thursday, October 8th, 2009
He was telling her all about it.
“So I was all like, what, you want me to show you the fire? You want to see the fire? ‘Cause I can bring the fire if I got to!”
“What? What do you mean, ‘fire’?”
“And he was all like ‘You ain’t got no fire,’ and I was like ‘Don’t make me show you the fire, ’cause I will fry your head with that shit,’ and he was like ‘Fire, my ass, you just better give me that money,’ so I had to burn him.”
“Burn him with what?”
“With my fire! You know, my fire.”
“From where?”
“From my mouth! Shit, didn’t you hear what I said? And he just started running back to his spaceship with his head on fire!”
“Back up, back up. What space ship?”
“You got to have heard that space ship when it landed on Eighty-Fourth street basketball court.”
“I didn’t hear no spaceship on no basketball court. What’s all this bullshit about breathing fire out of your mouth and space ships?”
“But you know what happened then? You would never guess. He had a unicorn! On the space ship! And it just charged me.”
“I don’t even know what you’re talking about anymore. What kinda junk you been smoking this time?”
“No, no lie! Unicorn! Spaceship! And I tried to breathe fire on it, and you know what? They fireproof. No lie, those unicorns, they fireproof.”
“Yeah, well, whatever.”
“Hey, don’t walk away while I’m talking! I ain’t even got to the good part yet! You know what that unicorn did to me?”
“I hope he killed your ass, because otherwise I’d have to be listening to you talk bullshit just about now.”
“He stabbed me! In the chest! With his damn horn!”
“Which is why you’re still alive like that?”
“No, then he like, injected me with a space drug that makes you their slave, you see what I’m saying? And now I’m like, their slave.”
“So why don’t you go do their laundry ‘stead of bothering me?”
“No no, ’cause you know what I got to do?”
“What?”
“You really want to know?”
“Just tell me what you got to do.”
Then he breathed fire on her, and she ran away in flames. Good thing she was secretly a robot, or that shit would have hurt.