At the Mouth of the River of Bees: Stories

by Kij Johnson

  “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:

  The story of resolution. The protagonist has a problem and solves it, or doesn’t.

  The story of explanation.

  The trick ending.

  A decision is made. Whether it is acted upon is irrelevant.

  The protagonist solves a puzzle.

  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 w
allet. 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.

  The moan that ice makes underfoot. The taste of salt. The smells of ash and copper. A dog barking at a great distance. A bone cracking in your leg. The gray scouring pain of sleet. She stumbles and falls against a rusted railing. The taste of pears.

  Dido is playing her cards poorly, making her discards at random.

  Her need for Aeneas burns through her hollowed bones. He said something about leaving someday, but she did not believe him. Men say that kind of shit all the time and then change their minds. What does she really know of him, anyway? Stories carved on the walls of temples.

  Dido gives him the keys to her apartment. He can share her kingdom to replace the one he lost: a king for the Queen of Carthage. In her distraction, construction on the city’s white walls slows and then ceases. They remain half-built, cranes akimbo and unused. Her neglected armies grow sullen and fall into disarray.

  The hot-eyed Gaetulian king who is her neighbor wants his land back and, not incidentally, hungers to prove his right to it upon her body. Her faithful widowhood was more effective than a naked sword in guarding her honor and Carthage’s boundaries, but now she has taken Aeneas into her bed, felt his weight on her body, bowed her head to him. She has laid aside that sword.

  But it will all still be fine, so long as he stays.

  Poor Dido. She is dead already. The writer knows it. You know it. I know it.

  The sentence, “She was hollow, as though something had chewed a hole in her body and the hole had grown infected,” unless it’s been used before by someone else in a story she cannot recall.

  And there is the rage sometimes, the rage of a smart woman betrayed by her own longing. It runs under her skin, too hot to be visible. Her breath is smoke; her skin steams. Her tears freeze to slush. Her cheeks bleed.

  The writer stalks the winter streets at dusk and imagines him dead. She imagines their house a smoking, freezing ruin. The fire trucks are gone; all that remains is black wreckage outlined by tape that says do not cross. She imagines her town a glassy plain, every dog in the world dead, the Earth’s atmosphere ripped off by a colliding asteroid, the universe condensed to an icy point.

  [A flute made of a woman’s bones]

  She walks the streets. Her pain cannot permit her to exist in a world where he also exists, and yet she does. Her feet are always cold.

  She can use this.

  Virgil walked the streets of Rome as he composed. It could take all day to polish a couplet.

  Dido knows what happens if Aeneas leaves. Her hot-eyed neighbor, the Gaetulian king, will denounce her inconstancy and send his armies. Her own army’s resistance will be half-hearted. They want a ruler who is strong, and perhaps a king will be better after all, more trustworthy than a woman however clever and just.

  The Gaetulian king will attack, break her gates, and claim her white- walled city. He will find Dido and her personal guard in the great courtyard, on the steps that lead to her palace. She retains this much pride at least, that she will not be hunted through her own rooms. No, that is wrong. It is not pride that holds her here, chin lifted and a naked sword in her hand. Despair and fury burn like lye through her veins.

  The Gaetulian king will slay her guard to the last man.

  He will mount the steps to her. He will strike the sword from her hand. In the presence of his own hard-eyed guard, he will force her to her knees, his hand knotted in her hair. When she refuses to open her mouth to him, he will throw her to the ground and rape her as she lies in the cooling blood of her dead men. This will be almost enough pain to make her forget Aeneas’s betrayal. This will be almost enough pain to make the writer forget.

  The Gaetulian king will hang Dido with chains and march her through the streets, scratch marks on her face, blood running down her leg. He will raze her city. He will disband her armies. Carthage, which was to rule the world, will dwindle to a footnote in someone else’s tale.

  Plus, Aeneas will be gone. Dido has courage for the rest of it, but not for that.

  Some stories are not swallowed but sipped, medicines too vile to be taken all at once.

  “What am I supposed to say here? I’m sorry?”

  “Please. Please just still love me.”

  [pause] “Well. It’s just. You know.”

  Considering the pain it gave the writer when her husband said those words, she imagines it will break Dido’s heart as well. But really, it is pretty banal, written down.

  Demia looked forward, squinting. The dimming sunset [no, it’s dusk] sky outlined the crags ahead of them. The hermitage was there somewhere, safe haven if they could just reach it before dusk dark.

  A howl interrupted her thoughts. Her mare jumped as though she had been struck but did not bolt, Demia’s long hands strong on her reins. [POV?]

  “Lady,” Corlyn said, his voice suddenly tense urgent. “The athanwulfen/athanhunds. They are hunting.” His own horse twisted against its reins under him.

  “Too soon,” Demia murmured, but no: dusk [twilight? nearly dark?] already. “I wish—”

  Her brothers could have defended them all, but they were dead. She and Corlyn had found them on the Richt Desert at the dead oasis, miles to the east—or what was left of them—their bones picked clean and drilled through in many places, hollowed by the narrow barbed tongues of the athanwulfen/athanhunds. Stivvan, Ricard, Jenner, Daved/David/Davell? She clenched her teeth against the loss. There was no time.

  Corlyn lit a torch and was outlined by the flame the leaping flame—

  No Corlyn, no horses, no torch. But at
hanhunds, yes. Demia must lose everything, her own bones hollowed. Otherwise it will not hurt enough.

  No “suddenly”s. Nothing is sudden. When the tornado hits, the house comes apart in a few seconds, but before that there was a barbed curve on the NOAA map, a front coming in from the southwest, clouds and cold and a growing wind.

  In fact, no adverbs in general. Verbs happen, unmediated. Leave, abandon, lose. The next day the videos show you amid the ruins, clutching a cat carrier and a framed photo from someone else’s wedding.

  [ANGER SHAME DERANGEMENT]

  [ALL BETRAYALS ARE THE SAME STORY]

  [at least dido had warning]

  Aeneas does not stay. He says that of course he loves her. He feels terrible about all this. It’s not his fault; it’s the gods that whip him from her side. His words mound up like slush under her feet, slippery and treacherous. He is unworthy—every word proves it—but it’s too late for that to make a difference. He is sorry, so sorry, but he did warn her, after all. It’s not his fault that she didn’t believe him. Etc.

  Dido abases herself, kneels before Aeneas. She has broken a vein in her eye and she sees through a red haze. Her heart skips beats. She fights not to vomit. Her fingertips are bloody from clawing herself.

  He promises to stay, presumably because he wants her to lighten up, but he slips from her arms as she sleeps. There is no time, she will wake soon; so he runs to his ships, cuts his anchor cables, and sails out on the tide. When she sees them at dawn, he is far out to sea. He has lain with her, lied to her, for the last time.

  Diera Vallan’s tears fell unheeded as the V-5f life pod crashed through the meteor field, all that remained of her shattered planet. So many millions, she thought, and the tears fell faster. Her own husband, the Windhover King, was dead, flayed alive by—”