At the Mouth of the River of Bees: Stories

by Kij Johnson

  Not that, either.

  The writer still has her health, her wits, the cat. Many people have lost more. There are plagues, earthquakes, fires and starvation. Children run down in the street. A man’s legs crushed between two cars as he tries to jump-start a Ford on a winter’s night. A woman losing her ability to form words as the tumor webs across her brain. A couple waiting for the stillborn birth of their already-dead son. Farming accidents. Alzheimer’s.

  And other divorces. She is not unique. She is not even unusual. Perhaps this has more in common with a wedding ring lost by the pool at a vacation hotel, or blood poisoning from a cat bite.

  237 “the”s. They are words that dry to invisibility, Elmer’s Glue-all to anchor nouns.

  104 “and”s; 30 “but”s. Apparent correlation.

  Too many semicolons.

  Clean out the passive constructions. Dido was there. She did things and some of them were wrong.

  She has a dream in which he’s still there. He has not yet betrayed her and she is still sane. They huddle together in a mountain cave where they have found shelter from the night’s storm. The world outside roars with rain, broken timber, falling stones. The air here is chill but they are safe.

  All things are new, all things are possible. In the darkness, she sees him only with her fingertips: his eyelids, his curling lashes, the complex shapes of his ears. His lips smile against her palm. He opens his mouth. She feels his breath. They lie in a nest they make of their clothing, the things they have cast aside.

  They are not cold. She runs her hand down the long smooth planes of his body. She feels a scar. He says it still hurts when it is touched. She understands this; she has her own.

  In the darkness he strokes her and she feels outlined in light. Her skin is afire. She sobs under his hand, his mouth, the weight of his long, scarred body.

  I want to leave them dreaming there, Dido and the writer both, for lines and lines. It is a lie I am telling them.

  Are grammar and syntax correct? Is there enough setting? Were the senses engaged? Is this the best start to the story? Does it end too soon/too late/too abruptly? Are the characters realistic? Is the story from the right point of view? What is the theme? What is the subtext?

  The story betrays us all.

  I spend the entire night rewriting, changing things around, hoping for a better result. The story doesn’t do what I wish. Dido always dies. The writer always finds herself alone, a flute made of a woman’s bones.

  She does not want to face the raw, whole thing, so she takes it in pieces. She transfers, distances, sublimates. She cannot sit at her keyboard for long. She is haunted. The apartment is cold and smells of chicken. The cat turns over the bones she forgot to put in the trash.

  Rewriting ends when the deadline comes. Even then, she will attach the file to an email and send it, and wish there had been more time.

  The onshore wind blows through Carthage. His ships are far off, flecks smaller than snowflakes on the dark sea. He is still in sight but he cannot return: the winds forbid it. In any case, he was gone already, before ever he cut his cables and sailed at dawn—before the cave and the first time he held her in his arms, even.

  In the great courtyard before the palace, Dido, Queen of Carthage, orders a pyre built. She will burn all the things he left here: the clothes and jewels she gave him, the shield and sword he left beside her bed. She holds the naked sword in her hand.

  She is dead already. She has been dead since he was first brought to her, sea-stained and despairing, and the flame of her hunger gnawed into her bones.

  She curses him. She curses him. She curses him.

  But it is herself she kills.

  Delete.

  Undo.

  It is not just that the writer needs the safe distance of a zombie story, a ghost story. It is that no story can carry so much sorrow and anger without being crushed beneath its weight, without bursting into flames, without drowning.

  What really happened—the careful stacking of pebbles in the path of the landslide that was the last year of their marriage, the woman from the gym, the months of listening to his voice make promises for the bitter false comfort of it—those words cannot contain her feelings.

  Even her imagined Dido cannot contain them, as she bleeds upon the oil-soaked pyre in those seconds before her heart stops struggling to fill the hole left by the sword. A torch stabs into the stacked wood. Flames run along each tier.

  Her skin breathes a mist. She is for a moment outlined in light. Then the fire bursts upward and she becomes a burning pillar, a tower, a beacon, and she is dead; and he looks back and does not see the thing that he has destroyed, only the flames upon the half-built walls of Carthage, and he wonders what message they send and to whom.

  Not Medea’s frenzy, not Ariadne’s broken thread. Anna under the train’s wheels. Butterfly holding the blade to her breast. None of the betrayed women, that commonest story of all.

  Not even Troy itself and all its deaths: the bitter siege and ten years from home, Penelope’s tears and the Trojan women’s torn breasts and Iphigenia’s sacrifice, the ruined towers, the blood dried to dust on the golden stones; the anguish of Paris; Aeneas’s own pain—even these cannot contain her rage, her loss.

  Words fail.

  She found herself in a room with ivory-painted wainscoting and a floor tiled with black and white marble. There were no furnishings, only a single glass table at the hall’s center. There were no doors. The narrow windows were too high to reach, though she tired herself through the long afternoon, jumping for them.

  When it grew dark at last, she huddled against the wall on the cold marble and slept, and tried to remember the flowers that had been in the garden.

  Dido dies on the sword. She hits CTRL-S. I type “End.” We will do this again.

  Wolf Trapping

  He was saving the laptop’s battery and the generator was down, so Richard was transcribing his field notes into a notebook by lamplight when the wolf’s scream of pain cut through the walls of the cabin. He dropped his pen on the open page. He’d known a poacher would be coming after the wolves, when he saw the rabbit snare a few weeks back. He picked up his emergency pack and the Winchester thirty-thirty, and slung them over the parka he already wore against the cabin’s cold. He stuffed the handcuffs into one pocket.

  The early winter evening caught instantly at his lungs when he ran out the door; it had been a cold day, the coldest yet. The wolf was still howling: south he thought, though it was hard to tell much in this dead air. He couldn’t tell whose voice it was. He dragged on his gloves and outer mittens, kicked his bear-paw snowshoes into the snow, and stamped his boots onto their frames.

  The howling raised in pitch—not far away at all—and now there were growls. Richard ran south along the nameless creek that led from Horsehead Mountain, ahead.

  The wolf’s sounds cut off abruptly. He was crossing a small clearing among the trees, where salmonberry bushes made a bramble; he stopped to get his bearings but heard nothing over his own panting and the light wind hissing through the bare alder branches.

  Running sounds, and a wolf broke from a deer trail in the trees ahead, a mass of fur and teeth and eyes. Richard tripped, crossed his shoes, and fell floundering helplessly backward. The wolf stumbled to a halt ten feet from him.

  It was the gray female, Genna, one of the lower-ranked wolves of the Horsehead pack, gamma or delta depending on the day. She held her left forepaw slightly raised. Blood spattered the pale fur of her breast and dripped slowly onto the snow, where it melted a red uneven hole. He looked at her eyes, for the white ring of panic around them or visible distress, but she only watched him warily, unafraid in spite of the injury. Even in the dimming daylight, her eyes were golden, with a pale and wild gaze.

  From the ground, she was bigger than he had imagined. He rolled to his side, eased himself into a crouch. The snowshoes made a sound like sticks rubbing but she did not move. He realized he was speaking to her as thoug
h she might be soothed by a man’s voice: “Let me look at the foot,” he murmured. “Pretty girl, pretty girl.” Her eyes tracked him as he leaned toward her.

  She bolted, and the suddenness of it rocked him back so that he fell again. He rolled upright in time to watch her vanish into the trees, limping but moving fast, the padding of her feet swallowed immediately by the air. He stared after her a minute. He’d never been so close to a free wolf.

  Close ahead, Richard heard the heavy whack of a trap’s metal jaws snapping shut. He ran again, crashing through the salmonberry bushes and then the brush under the alders, jamming his fingers into the lever action of the rifle as he backtracked Genna along the deer trail: easy to follow when drops of blood marked the way. The cold of the rifle bit through his glove.

  He found the trapper crouching in the trail, in a dirty red parka and camouflage pants, at the center of a circle of snow torn up by frantic bloody claw marks. It was dark under the trees but Richard recognized the trap in the other’s hands, a Newhouse Number 114, an ugly toothed half-circle of steel longer than his hand. If it had caught Genna’s foot wrong, it would have crushed her bones, crippled or killed her. He lifted the rifle over his head and fired, and snow cascaded down from the branches onto them both.

  The trapper stood unsteadily, sinking shin-deep into the snow. Richard chambered another round. Dark eyes looked past the dirty fur that fringed the parka hood, and with a shock Richard realized that the trapper was a woman, and under-equipped, too: no snowshoes, no rifle, no pack.

  “She went your way,” the woman said in a hoarse voice. “Is she okay?”

  “She’s fine,” he said harshly. “Considering.”

  She appeared not to hear his anger. “She looked all right to me. Broken skin but no bone damage. She’s never, none of them have ever let me get so close before.” She paused, seemed to look at Richard for the first time. “You’re the one who watches the pack. The naturalist.”

  “Do you know what kind of trouble you’re in? Trapping,” he added when she stared blankly at him, and pointed the rifle’s muzzle at the Newhouse.

  “Wait. You think—”

  “I saw the wolf, and here you are.”

  “I freed her,” the woman said. “I heard her howl and came running. I pulled the trap open for her—she let me get that close. The trap has been here for months. Look at it.” She held it out.

  “Throw it here.”

  It landed in the snow between them, and when he picked it up he saw she was right. New scratches of bright metal shone through a fog of rust, tracing the arc of the trap’s motion. Flakes of dislodged rust still clung to its jaws.

  She said, “It must have been set and then lost. It happens, you know it does.”

  Richard eyed her for a moment. She was clearly exhausted. Her knees were wet from kneeling in the snow: her pants were not waterproof. He slid his Winchester into the scabbard lashed to his backpack and rolled his shoulders, releasing the tension. “What are you doing out here? Tourists all left a month ago.”

  “I’m staying for the winter.” The woman hunched her shoulders and coughed, and her breath clouded between them.

  Richard looked up. The trees were nearly black now, the scraps of visible sky a fading red. He hefted the Newhouse. “Where’s your place?”

  “Here. Wherever the wolves are.”

  “I mean your real place. Your cabin.”

  She gestured. “No cabin. No tent, no hotel room with a hot tub. Just what’s on me.”

  The wind was picking up and one of the cords that tightened his parka hood snapped in his face. “Fuck. My cabin’s about a mile from here. Come back with me and we’ll figure this out.”

  She led the way, retracing his trail without trouble through the ribbon forests of fir and spruce and the clearings between them. The snow was knee-high in places, all new and still soft, but there had been hard frost for enough nights that any water hidden beneath it was frozen solid. It was full dark, Richard leading the way now with his headlamp, when they walked across the last narrow meadow toward the boulders and ice on the southern shore of Lake Juhl.

  The cabin hunched against a large rock outcropping fifty feet from shore, a small box made of insulation, plywood sheets, and caulking that showed as white strips against the wood. Cords of wood formed a windbreak to the north and west. The single small window glowed dimly.

  The cabin door was shielded by an alcove. Richard gestured her through, removed his snowshoes, and followed her.

  “Did you put this together?” she asked as he entered. The cabin was small, barely enough floor space for them both to stand, and imperfectly lit by his lamp and the stove. Most everything was packed already in plastic crates in the alcove, but the shelves that lined the walls were still piled with food packets, tin pans and eating utensils, the pieces of a shortwave transmitter, replacement tools and equipment, his laptop and its spare batteries, and books, hundreds of books. A narrow iron bed heaped with his sleeping bags pressed against one wall.

  Richard said, “It was here when I came last year, mostly like this. But abandoned. It was all mice and squirrels.” A small table was built into one corner, cluttered with a handful of black notebooks and pens, a few books and printouts from other researchers. He pushed everything aside and dropped the Newhouse on the table. The tea in his cup had already grown a hard shell of ice. He stoked the stove.

  “It’s not very warm.” The woman sat on the bed, the only possibility other than the table’s single chair.

  Richard shrugged. “There’s a generator but I didn’t want to refill the tank this close to the end of the season. I fly out in a couple of days, anyway.”

  She had removed her leather mittens and gloves and pushed back her hood. She would have been a thin woman in any case—she had the strong lean bones he associated with people of Finnish blood—but now she was half-starved and her emaciated wrists were like birds’ legs. Her fingertips were discolored. There were frozen frostbite sores on her dirty cheeks, white patches that sloughed off when she wearily rubbed her face.

  “Jesus Christ, what happened?” Richard said, appalled. “You should have said something.” He put an ice-skinned pan of water onto the stove and slid the aluminum first-aid box from under the table.

  “I’m fine.”

  He pulled out gauze pads and antibiotic cream, and crouched beside her. “I’ll clean what I can, but the frost burns on your cheeks are going to hurt when you start to warm up. And your fingertips—”

  “I’m fine,” she said, and struck the gauze from his hand. Her eyes when they met his were cold and full of anger, but instantly she tipped her face away and they were hidden by a straight fall of greasy hair.

  Richard laid the gauze and cream on the bed beside her and stood. “You can do it, then. What’s your name?” He thought he sounded unnaturally calm.

  “Adela Bjorhus. Addie.”

  He looked down at her for a moment. “Coming close to an injured wolf. She might have hurt you.”

  “She wouldn’t have.”

  “She’s a wolf. She’s dangerous.” Richard suddenly remembered Genna a short leap from him, himself crawling toward her—“pretty girl, pretty girl”—as though she had been harmless, a frightened child. He turned back to the stove. The ice in the pan was melting, leaving little floes that grew smaller as he watched.

  Something in his pocket shifted. He pulled free the handcuffs, key swinging, and dropped them onto the desk beside the trap and the books. She looked at them.

  “Handcuffs,” he said. “Stating the obvious. Six weeks ago I saw a snare, so I had Jeff bring them when he delivered supplies last time. I thought there might be a poacher. If he came after the wolves, I was going to stop him.”

  “That was my snare, for rabbits.” The anger seemed to be gone.

  “You’ve been here for six weeks? Why haven’t I seen you?”

  “You weren’t looking.” She reached across to the table and picked up one of his notebooks. “Who a
re you, anyway?”

  “Richard. Richard Montaigne.”

  She raised her face. Exhaustion had circled her eyes with dark rings that spread onto her cheekbones. “I’ve read your books about the North Range pack. What are you doing this far south?”

  “Research. Second-tier pack hierarchy, specifically. You’ve read my stuff? It’s heavy going for a nonspecialist.”

  “I’ve read everything about wolves.” She leaned back stiffly, propping her feet on the bed’s frame. There was a crack in the leather between the upper and the sole of one shoe. “It’s solid research, but it’s not like being with them.”

  “Nothing is like that.” He shook milk powder and sugar and the freeze-dried contents of a couple of pouches into the pan. He watched it for a time before he asked, “Why are you out here?”

  “I’m doing it the way the wolves do, except that I need a hatchet and snares. I don’t have teeth like theirs.”

  “You can’t survive here without the right equipment. Plus, it’s almost winter.” Richard poured the soup into a bowl and handed it to her. She huddled over it greedily, gulping almost without breathing. “When was the last time you ate?”

  She frowned. “Yesterday, I think,” she said when her mouth was clear. “A hare.”

  “Raw?”

  “I didn’t bring matches.” She pulled her lips back from her teeth in something that was not a smile. “I’ll get used to it.”

  “No one gets used to that,” Richard said grimly. “You can’t really be planning on staying.”

  Addie was silent.

  “You’ll die.”

  She lifted one shoulder, and Richard’s throat tightened. “Don’t you care? What’s so bad that coming out here to freeze to death is easier?”