At the Mouth of the River of Bees: Stories

by Kij Johnson

  It happened too fast to be afraid. The hunter bolted across the shaking log just as the bear ran onto the far end. The man slipped as he passed Small Cat and he fell to one side. Small Cat had been too surprised to move, but when he slipped she leapt out of his way sideways—onto the log!

  The bear was a heavy black shape hurtling toward her. She could see the little white triangle of fur on its chest. A paw slammed into the log so close that she felt fur touch her whickers. With nowhere else to go, she jumped straight up and for an instant, she stared right into the bear’s red-rimmed eyes.

  The bear reared up at Small Cat’s leap. It lost its balance, fell into the swollen stream and was carried away, roaring and thrashing. The bear had been swept nearly out of sight before it managed to pull itself from the water on the opposite bank. Droplets scattered as it shook itself. It swung its head from side to side looking for them, and finally shambled back into the trees far downstream. A moment later, the male dog limped from the trees and across the fallen log to them.

  The male whined but sat quiet as the bear hunter cleaned out his foot. He had stepped on a stick and torn the pad. When the hunter was done, he leaned against the wall, the dogs and Small Cat tucked close.

  They had found a bear sooner than expected, he told them: a female with her cub just a short walk into the forest. She saw them and attacked immediately. He used his throwing spears but they didn’t stick, and she broke his stabbing spear with a single blow of her big paw. The male dog slammed into her from the side, giving him time to run for the hut, where there was a rack of spears on the wall beside the door.

  “I knew I wouldn’t make it,” the hunter said. His hand still shook a little when he finally took off his pack. “But at least I wasn’t going to die without trying.”

  Small Cat meowed.

  “Exactly,” the hunter said. “You don’t give up, ever.”

  Chapter 16

  The North

  Small Cat left not so many days after the bear attacked. She pushed under the door flap while the hunter and the dogs dozed beside the fire. She stretched all the way from her toes to the tip of her tail, and she stood tall on the step, looking around.

  It was just at sunset, the bright sky dimming to the west. To the east she saw the first bit of the full moon crawling from the trees. Even at dusk the forest looked different now, the bare branches softened with buds. The air smelled fresh with spring growth.

  She paced the clearing looking for a sign of the way to the road. She hadn’t been conscious when the bear hunter had brought her. In any case it was a long time ago.

  Someone snuffled behind her. The female stood blinking outside the hut. “Where are you?” she asked. “Are you gone already?”

  Small Cat walked to her.

  “I knew you would leave,” the dog said. “This is my home but you’re like the puppies will be when they’re born. We’re good hunters so the man will be able to trade the puppies for fabric or even spear heads.” She sounded proud. “They will go other places and have their own lives. You’re like that too. But you were very interesting to know, whatever you are.”

  Small Cat came close enough to touch noses with her.

  “If you’re looking for the road,” the female said, “it’s on the other side, over the stream.” She went back inside and the door flap dropped behind her.

  Small Cat sharpened her claws and trotted across the log, back toward the road.

  At first, traveling got harder as spring grew warmer. Helped along by the bright sun and the spring rains, the snow in the mountains melted quickly. The rivers were high and icy cold with snowmelt. No cat, however tough she was, could hope to wade or swim them, and sometimes there was no bridge. Whenever she couldn’t cross, Small Cat waited a day or two until the water went down or someone passed.

  People seemed to like seeing her. This surprised her. Maybe it was different here. They couldn’t know about cats but maybe demons did not frighten them so far north, especially small ones. She wasn’t afraid of the people either, so she sniffed their fingers and ate their offerings, and rode in their wagons whenever she had the chance.

  The road wandered down through the mountains and hills, into little towns and past farmhouses. Everything seemed full of new life. The trees were loud with baby birds and squirrels. The wind rustled through the new leaves. Yellow and pink flowers spangled the meadows and smelled so sweet and strong that she sometimes stepped right over a mouse and didn’t notice until it jumped away. The fields were full of new plants, and the pastures and farmyards were full of babies: goats and sheep, horses, oxen and geese and chickens. Goslings, it turned out, tasted delicious.

  Journeying was a pleasure now but she knew she was almost ready to stop. She could have made a home anywhere, she realized—strange cats or no cats, farmer or hunter, beside a shrine or behind an inn. It wasn’t about the stories or the garden. It was about her.

  But she wasn’t quite ready. She had wanted to find The Cat From The North’s home, and when that didn’t happen she had gone on, curious to find how far the road went. And she didn’t know yet.

  Then there was a day when it was beautiful and bright, the first really warm day. She came around a curve in the road and looked down into a broad valley with a river flowing to a distant bay that glittered in the sun. It was the ocean, and Small Cat knew she had come to the end of her travels. This was North.

  Chapter 17

  Home

  There was a village where the river and the ocean met. The path that led there passed through fields green with new shoots and full of people planting things or digging with hoes. The path became a lane and others joined it.

  Small Cat trotted between the double row of houses and shops. Every window and door and screen was open to let the winter out and the spring in. Bedding and robes fluttered as they aired. Young grass and white flowers glowed in the sun, and the three trees in the center of the village were bright with new leaves.

  Everyone seemed to be outside doing something. A group of women sang a love song as they pounded rice in a wood mortar to make flour. A man with no hair wove sturdy sandals of straw to wear in the fields; he told a story about catching a wolf cub by falling on it when he had been a child. The girl sitting on the ground beside him listened as she finished a straw cape for her wooden doll and then ran off calling for her mother. The geese who had been squabbling over a weed scrambled out of her way.

  A man on a ladder tied new clumps of thatch onto a roof where the winter had worn through. Below him, a woman laid a bearskin across a rack. She tied her sleeves back to bare her arms, and hit the skin with a stick. Clouds of dirt puffed out with each blow. In between blows, she shouted instructions up to the man on the roof, and Small Cat recognized that this was a story, too: the story of what the man should do next.

  A small Buddhist temple peeked from a grove of trees, with stone dogs guarding a gate into the grounds. A boy swept the ground in front of a Shinto shrine there. Small Cat smelled dried fish and mushrooms that had been left as offerings. It might be worth her while later to find out more.

  Two young dogs wrestled in the dirt by a pen until they noticed her. They jumped to their feet and raced about, barking, “Cat! Cat!” She wasn’t afraid of dogs anymore, not happy dogs like these, with their heads high and their ears pricked; but still, she hopped onto a railing where they couldn’t accidentally bowl her over. They milled about wagging their tails.

  A woman stretching fabric on a frame started to say something to the dogs. When she saw Small Cat, her mouth made an O of surprise. “A cat!” She whirled and ran toward the temple. “A cat! Look, come see!”

  The woman knew what a cat was, and so had the dogs! Ignoring the dogs, ignoring all the people who were suddenly looking at her, Small Cat pelted after the woman.

  The woman burst through a circle of children gathered around a seated man. He was dressed in red and yellow, his shaved head shiny in the sun: a monk but not her monk, she knew right away; thi
s one was rounder though his face was still open and kind. He stood up as the woman pointed at Small Cat. “Look, look! Another cat!”

  The monk and the children all started talking at once. And in the middle of all the noise, Small Cat heard a meow.

  Another cat?

  A ginger-and-white striped tomcat stood on a stack of boxes nearby, looking down at her. His golden eyes were bright and huge with excitement, and his whiskers vibrated. He jumped down and ran to her.

  “Who are you?” he said. His tail waved. “Where did you come from?”

  When she had decided to make this her home, she hadn’t thought she might be sharing it. He wasn’t much bigger than she was or any older, and right now he was more like a kitten than anything, hopping from paw to paw. She took a step toward him.

  “I am so glad to see another cat!” he said. He purred so hard that his breath wheezed in his throat. “The monk brought me here last year to catch mice, all the way from the capital in a basket! It was very exciting. There are so many things to do here! I have a really nice secret place to sleep but I’ll show it to you.” He touched her nose with his own.

  “There’s no fudoki,” he said, a little defensively. “There’s just me.”

  “And me now,” said The Cat Who Walked A Thousand Miles, and she rubbed her cheek against his. “And I have such a tale to tell!”

  Spar

  In the tiny lifeboat, she and the alien fuck endlessly, relentlessly.

  They each have Ins and Outs. Her Ins are the usual, eyes ears nostrils mouth cunt ass. Her Outs are also the common ones: fingers and hands and feet and tongue. Arms. Legs. Things that can be thrust into other things.

  The alien is not humanoid. It is not bipedal. It has cilia. It has no bones, or perhaps it does and she cannot feel them. Its muscles, or what might be muscles, are rings and not strands. Its skin is the color of dusk and covered with a clear thin slime that tastes of snot. It makes no sounds. She thinks it smells like wet leaves in winter, but after a time she cannot remember that smell, or leaves, or winter.

  Its Ins and Outs change. There are dark slashes and permanent knobs that sometimes distend, but it is always growing new Outs, hollowing new Ins. It cleaves easily in both senses.

  It penetrates her a thousand ways. She penetrates it, as well.

  The lifeboat is not for humans. The air is too warm, the light too dim. It is too small. There are no screens, no books, no warning labels, no voices, no bed or chair or table or control board or toilet or telltale lights or clocks. The ship’s hum is steady. Nothing changes.

  There is no room. They cannot help but touch. They breathe each other’s breath—if it breathes; she cannot tell. There is always an Out in an In, something wrapped around another thing, flesh coiling and uncoiling inside, outside. Making spaces. Making space.

  She is always wet. She cannot tell whether this is the slime from its skin, the oil and sweat from hers, her exhaled breath, the lifeboat’s air. Or come.

  Her body seeps. When she can, she pulls her mind away. But there is nothing else, and when her mind is disengaged she thinks too much. Which is: at all. Fucking the alien is less horrible.

  She does not remember the first time. It is safest to think it forced her.

  The wreck was random: a mid-space collision between their ship and the alien’s, simultaneously a statistical impossibility and a fact. She and Gary just had time to start the emergency beacon and claw into their suits before their ship was cut in half. Their lifeboat spun out of reach. Her magnetic boots clung to part of the wreck. His did not. The two of them fell apart.

  A piece of debris slashed through the leg of Gary’s suit to the bone, through the bone. She screamed. He did not. Blood and fat and muscle swelled from his suit into vacuum. Out.

  The alien’s vessel also broke into pieces, its lifeboat kicking free and the waldos reaching out, pulling her through the airlock. In.

  Why did it save her? The mariner’s code? She does not think it knows she is alive. If it did it would try to establish communication. It is quite possible that she is not a rescued castaway. She is salvage, or flotsam.

  She sucks her nourishment from one of the two hard intrusions into the featureless lifeboat, a rigid tube. She uses the other, a second tube, for whatever comes from her, her shit and piss and vomit. Not her come, which slicks her thighs to her knees.

  She gags a lot. It has no sense of the depth of her throat. Ins and Outs.

  There is a time when she screams so hard that her throat bleeds.

  She tries to teach it words. “Breast,” she says. “Finger. Cunt.” Her vocabulary options are limited here.

  “Listen to me,” she says. “Listen. To. Me.” Does it even have ears?

  The fucking never gets better or worse. It learns no lessons about pleasing her. She does not learn anything about pleasing it either: would not if she could. And why? How do you please grass and why should you? She suddenly remembers grass, the bright smell of it and its perfect green, its cool clean soft feel beneath her bare hands.

  She finds herself aroused by the thought of grass against her hands, because it is the only thing that she has thought of for a long time that is not the alien or Gary or the Ins and Outs. But perhaps its soft blades against her fingers would feel like the alien’s cilia. Her ability to compare anything with anything else is slipping from her, because there is nothing to compare.

  She feels it inside everywhere, tendrils moving in her nostrils, thrusting against her eardrums, coiled beside the corners of her eyes. And she sheathes herself in it.

  When an Out crawls inside her and touches her in certain places, she tips her head back and moans and pretends it is more than accident. It is Gary, he loves me, it loves me, it is a He. It is not.

  Communication is key, she thinks.

  She cannot communicate, but she tries to make sense of its actions.

  What is she to it? Is she a sex toy, a houseplant? A shipwrecked Norwegian sharing a spar with a monolingual Portuguese? A companion? A habit, like nail biting or compulsive masturbation? Perhaps the sex is communication and she just doesn’t understand the language yet.

  Or perhaps there is no It. It is not that they cannot communicate, that she is incapable; it is that the alien has no consciousness to communicate with. It is a sex toy, a houseplant, a habit.

  On the starship with the name she cannot recall, Gary would read aloud to her. Science fiction, Melville, poetry. Her mind cannot access the plots, the words. All she can remember is a few lines from a sonnet, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments”—something something something—“an ever-fixèd mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken; it is the star to every wand’ring bark. …”

  She recites the words, an anodyne that numbs her for a time until they lose their meaning. She has worn them treadless, and they no longer gain any traction in her mind. Eventually she cannot even remember the sounds of them.

  If she ever remembers another line, she promises herself she will not wear it out. She will hoard it. She may have promised this before, and forgotten.

  She cannot remember Gary’s voice. Fuck Gary, anyway. He is dead and she is here with an alien pressed against her cervix.

  It is covered with slime. She thinks that, as with toads, the slime may be a mild psychotropic drug. How would she know if she were hallucinating? In this world, what would that look like? Like sunflowers on a desk, like Gary leaning across a picnic basket to place fresh bread in her mouth. The bread is the first thing she has tasted that feels clean in her mouth, and it’s not even real.

  Gary feeding her bread and laughing. After a time, the taste of bread becomes “the taste of bread” and then the words become mere sounds and stop meaning anything.

  On the off-chance that this will change things, she drives her tongue though its cilia, pulls them into her mouth and sucks them clean. She has no idea whether it makes a difference. She has lived forever in the endless reeking fucking now.

&nbs
p; Was there someone else on the alien’s ship? Was there a Gary, lost now to space? Is it grieving? Does it fuck her to forget, or because it has forgotten? Or to punish itself for surviving? Or the other, for not?

  Or is this her?

  When she does not have enough Ins for its Outs, it makes new ones. She bleeds for a time and then heals. She pretends that this is a rape. Rape at least she could understand. Rape is an interaction. It requires intention. It would imply that it hates or fears or wants. Rape would mean she is more than a wine glass it fills.

  This goes both ways. She forces it. Her hands are blades that tear new Ins. Her anger pounds at it until she feels its depths grow soft under her fist, as though bones or muscle or cartilage have disassembled and turned to something else.

  And when she forces her hands into the alien? If intent counts, then what she does, at least, is a rape—or would be if the alien felt anything, responded in any fashion. Mostly it’s like punching a wall.

  She puts her fingers in herself, because she at least knows what her intentions are.

  Sometimes she watches it fuck her, the strange coiling of its Outs like a shockwave thrusting into her body, and this excites her and horrifies her; but at least it is not Gary. Gary, who left her here with this, who left her here, who left.

  One time she feels something break loose inside the alien, but it is immediately drawn out of reach. When she reaches farther in to grasp the broken piece, a sphincter snaps shut on her wrist. Her arm is forced out. There is a bruise like a bracelet around her wrist for what might be a week or two.

  She cannot stop touching the bruise. The alien has had the ability to stop her fist inside it, at any time. Which means it has made a choice not to stop her, even when she batters things inside it until they grow soft.