SmokeLong Quarterly

I’m not surprised when I find my older brother murdered by bees in the corner of his bedroom. His arms and feet are pocked with dark pink pinholes. The cops call them track marks, as if I’d never seen my mother’s arms. “Overdose,” the cop says, but I know the truth.

Brian hadn’t answered his phone in three days, so tonight, I picked my way through each dim room of his apartment, following a trail of dead bees, carefully overstepping piles of damp t-shirts, empty boxes of Imodium, and burnt tinfoil, until I found him. He was dressed in the same sweat-stained yellow t-shirt and ripped black acid wash jeans he had been wearing all week. A needle dangled from his foot. His body was curled into C shape, his skin so pale it glowed in the dark like a waning crescent. The carpet around him was littered with dead bees in the same arc, as if they had all been ritualistically fumigated.

One summer morning twenty years ago, a bee stung my clavicle, and my neck swelled thick with the emptiness in our home. The whole day, I wheezed and gasped for air, never once wanting to wake our mom and disturb the peace in our house. For safety, I stuffed old newspapers into the crevices between the windowsills and the splintered frames, the drafty gaps under doors, and the spaces in the wall where outdoor pipes entered uninsulated. It felt like someone had emptied a can of spray insulation into my throat and it was expanding by the minute. Brian took a break from waiting for Dad to return home and led me into the backyard, sat me down under the burning sun, and told me to be still. From a distance, I watched as he stole the neighbor’s pool skimmer. One by one, he trapped every visible bee in the yard and waterboarded each one to death. With each kill, more spawned. The air whirred with the bees’ buzzing death and my wheezy breath. The sky spun. My neck hair prickled. Bees swarmed Brian, stung his hands, arms, and legs. The more that arrived, the more that died, until the air quieted, and Brian collapsed into a sweaty, swollen, smiling mass in grass that now glowed with specks of gold in the sunlight like the earth had grown nuclear flowers. “If they want to sting you,” he said, out of breath, “they’ll have to sting me.”

Now I feel a sudden urge to explain to the empty space where my brother used to be why our house had so many holes. And I can’t shake the feeling that all those bees in our backyard knew each other. That they were related. That they’d been planning this revenge. That the bee that stung me was testing to see, years later, who would still be there.