In the Garden of Rusting Gods

by Patrick Freivald

  She frowned, tried again, sucking smoke into her lungs as she did so.

  Choking, chest burning, she rolled away from the cloud of guard bees that spilled from the entrance. They latched on to her bee suit, searching for a gap or thin spot to bury their stingers and die in defense of the hive, but found none. Stumbling to her feet, she walked toward the house, gently puffing smoke at the few guards that clung to her in order to maximize their deterrence, until at last they detached and fled home. Several bounced off her veil in a final warning before disappearing back toward the hive.

  She stripped outside and left the suit on the railing in case of unseen stragglers caught in the folds, and hung the smoker on a plant hanger where it wouldn’t cause a fire. Exhaustion dragged at her heels as she stumbled into the tiny kitchen, chewed numbly on a dinner she barely tasted, and crashed in bed. The clock glared an angry three a.m. Work started at seven.

  She shuffled through the day, stocking clothes and bedding between helping customers. A blonde surveyed king sheets, middle-aged, a wedding ring on her finger. Jamie tried to remember if her hair had been that flaxen, if the calves beneath her knee-length skirt matched those wrapped around the preacher’s thrusting backside. Would Carr’s lover shop at the mall? Would Jamie recognize her if she did? Would Satan find her here, or find the preacher at his dalliances?

  She couldn’t be sure, and the dozen middle-aged blondes she met through the day all could have been smiling with the secret knowledge of their carnal relationship.

  After work, Jamie bustled home with an armload of groceries, gulped down a lukewarm TV dinner, and ducked out onto the stoop.

  Earl Pruitt’s smoker hung where she’d left it, the lone steel screw a shining beacon in the late afternoon sun. A curious worker bee hovered next to her gloves and hive tool, perhaps intrigued by the lingering signature of honey left behind in the ultraviolet spectrum. Her hands shook as she fired up the smoker, pumped the bellows to create a thick white cloud; it took three tries to zip up her suit, another two to secure her veil.

  The hive rumbled as she approached, a sound her human brain interpreted as chaos, in reality the concerted dance of thousands of creatures dedicated to a singular, collective goal: survive the snows until dandelions bloom.

  A whisper of smoke drifted across her vision, sweet ginger mingled with rich myrrh and charred pine. She blasted the entrance, and exploded outward into the fading day.

  Jackson Bard screamed at his cowed wife next to their barbecue, a gold cross tangled in the thick hair springing from his white T-shirt. Light from the necklace sparkled off of a row of purple coneflowers, and the hemispheres atop the ring of purple gave a rich harvest of high-sugar nectar. Ankle-high chicory lined the roadside, low in nectar but loaded with pollen the same bright blue as its flowers that dotted the dirt shoulder next to Dave Cullen, handcuffed on his knees between his Camry and a police car, a half-empty bottle of ten-dollar whiskey spilled out at his feet. The alcohol and smoky resins drew her interest, but only for a brief moment. Late-season Dutch clover spotted the park lawn where Kylee Jones slapped the boy groping at her jeans next to a spilled picnic basket, each flower a bounty of sweet juice and bright white pollen.

  She poured malice toward the boy who wouldn’t take “No” for an answer, and envy erupted at Kylee for being young and attractive and charming and everything that Jamie couldn’t seem to be. The young woman yelped and slapped at her neck.

  Jamie cried out as she pulled away from the stinger embedded in the girl’s skin, her guts tearing free in a streak of gelatinous goo to leave behind the venom sac, dismembered muscles still pumping venom into the wound.

  A rush of pleasure brought her back to the coneflowers. Another three of her sisters died driving Bard from his wife and his meal, sending him stumbling for the safety of the indoors. She laughed, somehow without lungs or voice; the hive didn’t mourn the loss, any more than a person mourns the hair or fingernails they discard on any given day.

  The buckwheat distracted her, and she lost herself for a while in the snowy blossoms and the dark nectar, almost black with a taste like sweetened oatmeal. Regaining herself, she roamed the town from plant to plant, riding the cloud to the giant pink flowers of the rhododendron behind the church rectory, where the view into Pastor Carr’s private sanctum should have found him preparing for the Saturday sermon the next day.

  He sat at his desk, in full view of the highest bees, writing free-hand on loose leaf paper. Next to his pad sat a tangle as pink as the flowers, the thong’s lace edge giving way to thin fabric meant for seduction, not practicality. He stroked it with a finger now and then, eyes closed, before going back to his work.

  This man had denied her even thoughts of pleasure with his weekly promises of damnation and hellfire, all while he indulged his depravities at a whim, defiling another’s marriage and his own vows for a taste sweeter than honey.

  Her wrath meant nothing to the bees; behind the closed window he may as well have not existed. Snarling in frustration, she let her mind escape to the flowers, let it pull back into the hive with the setting sun, let it settle in turn to the business of evaporation and brood-rearing. As she came to on the ground, human once more, she grinned.

  He’d be outside tomorrow. He had to drive to church.

  Jamie slept in on Saturday, waking without the alarm at nine-fifty-two. She showered and ate lunch, bologna and American cheese on white bread, then read a little. With church at five, the pastor wouldn’t leave his house until four. That gave her a few hours to clean house and do laundry, chores she’d neglected in favor of riding the cloud.

  Sweaty, exhausted, but satisfied, she fired up the smoker and approached the hive at ten minutes to four. A puff, and she joined the swarm, consciousness spreading over the town to find her target.

  Carr’s Forrester wasn’t in the driveway. Up, up she rode, into the whirling storm of drones and virgin queens, casting her gaze downward. He wasn’t at church. Frantic, she scoured the streets, jumping from hedge to shrub to garden plot, until at last she found his dark green Forrester skulking in the shadows of a linden tree on Ringwood Circle.

  She waited in the comfortable hum of the branches until Carr came outside. A peek through the doorway dashed her hopes of catching him in further depravity; a frail old woman held his hand as he left, letting go only when another step would have dragged her outside. Jamie wondered what she’d think of the panties he probably had in his pocket as he jingled his keys on the way to his car.

  Fueled by Jamie’s rage, her sisters rushed him, seeking out unprotected areas on his neck, face, and hands. She gritted her teeth as her guts came out, again and again, each sting a divine rebuke and a holy sacrifice that filled the air with the dense, banana-like scent of alarm pheromone.

  Screaming and slapping at the already-dead bodies, he flung open the door and dove inside. Breathing hard, he stared wide-eyed out the window, apparently not knowing enough to scrape out the stingers before they could inject their full load of venom. She followed as he peeled away, his scowling face red with pain and anger. He sped, racing toward home or church at twenty over the limit, but not near enough to outrun the pheromone cloud that enveloped the town from her backyard.

  A hollow filled her stomach, pulled and stretched like taffy, oozed as the stinger came out. One of her sisters had stayed behind, trapped in the preacher’s clothes, violent and aggressive because of the scents her dying sisters had erupted all over his body. His car swerved as her body crushed between his hand and temple.

  Jamie heard the crunch, and the cry, and the shrieks. From high in the air she saw the red streak stretching twenty feet behind and under Carr’s vehicle, over the sidewalk and onto the lawn. Children gaped, horrified, at the mangled bicycle half-pinned under the Forrester’s front grill.

  She fled, up and away, riding the cloud to the buckwheat field, to the simplicity of sweet nectar and wholesome pol
len, to a world where humans meant nothing and cars didn’t crush little boys.

  But when she woke, she cried, her sobs tearing out of her chest in the middle of the night, drowned by the symphony of crickets.

  She went to the funeral, where a guest preacher presided, gently speaking of the evils of drink and speeding, and the power of compassion and forgiveness, and of a divine plan beyond our comprehension. He couldn’t know that there had been no plan, only the petty envy of a sinful woman.

  They shunned her, though from aggrieved apathy rather than malice. Surrounded by the people she’d called her own, she wallowed in the emptiness of their company. No one asked how she knew the boy, or why his death would bring her to such tears. No one pointed fingers, no one accused her. No one paid her any attention aside from the occasional curious glance.

  No one except Mrs. Pruitt, who had as little place at the funeral as Jamie. Mrs. Pruitt stared at her through the service, and the internment, her rheumy eyes pinpoints of dark knowledge stabbing into Jamie’s soul. She said nothing, though, only hobbled to her car to let a young man Jamie didn’t know drive her home.

  After, Jamie wept on her stoop, the world a blur of tears. Tires crunched on the gravel, drawing her gaze. An ancient minivan pulled into the driveway, “Pruitt’s Bee Services” emblazoned on the side in fading yellow paint. The young man hopped out of the driver’s seat, came around, and opened the passenger’s side to let Mrs. Pruitt down, both still somber in their funeral attire.

  She held his arm all the way up the walk, but when they reached the steps she stood tall and held out a gnarled hand.

  “Give her back, dear. She doesn’t belong to you.”

  Jamie scowled. “I bought it.”

  “She isn’t meant for you, and I didn’t come to argue. So stop dillydallying and give me the smoker.”

  The young man put sun-weathered fists on his hips, not quite relaxed, not quite threatening. He might have weighed two hundred pounds, too much of it lean muscle, and his scowl could break rocks.

  Jamie reached under the step, pulled out the smoker, and froze, unable to let go. The farm boy snatched it from her grip and passed it to the old woman. Mrs. Pruitt sighed, eyelids fluttering, as she clutched it to her chest, lips upturned in a rapturous smile.

  “You know what it can do?” Jamie asked.

  Without opening her eyes, her lips turned down into a vicious snarl. “If you can’t let it go it consumes you, and you die.”

  “Jesus,” Jaime said.

  “You have no idea, back before mites, before all the poisons. Today is a pale shadow of the past. We’d drift away for hours, Earl and I, sometimes for days, let the world crumble around us. That first winter was so, so hard. The second almost killed us.” Her eyes snapped open, bored into Jamie, pupils reflecting nothing, not even the sunlight. “It took a long time to come back, to get used to human living again. Earl never did quite get the gist of it, God rest him. She’s not something to give up lightly.”

  Jamie swallowed. “I get it. Even with … with everything that happened, everything that’s wrong, I still want to do it again.”

  Mrs. Pruitt patted her hand, dry and firm, an unwelcome intrusion to her space and her body. “And you would, too, if I’d let you keep it. A moth to flame. No matter how much you tell yourself that young boy died because you played with something you shouldn’t, that you wouldn’t do it again, you would. Nobody’s that strong, dear. You’d do it, knowing more terrible things would happen, and you’d feel bad and you’d do it again. And again.” The old woman rolled the smoker around in her hands, face softening into almost fondness. “My husband’s jealous mistress. She’s been a thorn in my side a long time, and caused me more grief than is right. I tried to pull him away, one last time, and she killed him. Took his love and his faith and buried it under dry sod. But the farm isn’t the same without her.”

  “Then why did you sell it—her?”

  Pruitt grunted. “I didn’t.”

  “You did. It was in—”

  She stopped Jamie with an upraised hand, far too fast for her age. Her eyes crinkled as she smiled, but no light touched them. “Dearie, have you ever plugged up a hive to move it?”

  Jamie swallowed. “Once, when I brought my first nuc home.”

  “And what did the bees do when you trapped them?”

  “They tried to get out. Boiled out of a hole until I found and taped it up. Clawed at the screen. Stung the s— stuffing out of me when I got them home, too. I’ve never seen them so mad.”

  “That’s right.” Pruitt passed the smoker to her companion. “Like some people, honeybees don’t like to be contained, and like some people, they seek to hurt those that contained them. I’ve kept her cooped up since Earl passed, and planned to do so until I join him. I guess she has other ideas.”

  “You can’t destroy her.”

  Pruitt clucked her tongue. “Of course not.”

  “Then what? I mean, you’re what, ninety-three?”

  “Ninety-six.” A hint of a smirk touched her lips. “Had a few years on Earl, even back then. I don’t have much time, God willing, but I’ll keep her from causing too much trouble from here out. It’s best you don’t know the details.”

  “But I need—”

  “No. You want. And whatever it is you want, get it. Sell your home. Move to the city. Find yourself a man or a woman or a passion. But don’t come back to the farm. It won’t end well if you do.”

  Jamie sighed, stood, and tried not to stare in longing at the metal in the young man’s hands.

  “So that’s it, then.”

  “That’s it.”

  Mrs. Pruitt allowed Jamie to help her down the walk and into the van while the young man started the motor. A honeybee lay upside-down on her dashboard, unmoving, desiccated by the midday sun. She swept it out onto the road with her hand, said goodbye, and faced forward. Jamie closed the door and stepped back.

  They drove out of sight. Moments later the dead bee quivered, stood, and took to the air, racing after her queen.

  A CREATIVE URGE

  Tears streamed down Cassie’s face as she smeared paint across the canvas with her bare hands. Bilious green covered the pond in the foreground, smothered the silhouette of children on swing sets and the craggy, vine-covered trees clawing at the sky behind them, obliterating a month’s work under its unrelenting stain. She dipped her hand into another can, and it came up dark red like old blood. That red mingled with green in vicious slashes to form a muddy brown, the same muddy brown that covered the torn and broken canvasses littering her studio floor.

  The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.

  Mikhail Bakunin’s words gave her no succor as she tore the last of her portfolio from the easel and broke it across her knee, smearing herself with more paint, mangled colors that already covered her T-shirt, shorts, bare feet, and every inch of her skin. Chest heaving, sweaty paint dripping in her eyes from tangles of paint-soaked hair, she finally collapsed to a sitting position on the floor.

  For a moment, all she could do was breathe, lightheaded, even hunger a memory of something some other her might feel.

  Before the accident, her last four paintings—all fields of flowers—had sold for a combined total of twenty-eight thousand dollars, almost matching the salary she earned as a science teacher at a prestigious but chronically underfunded charter school. After the accident, her next three—still nature scenes, but dark and haunted—had sold for eighty thousand dollars. An up-and-coming hot property on the New York scene, she’d quit her job and rented a larger space, large enough to paint what she wished, when she wished. Somewhere she didn’t have to share with roommates, and with a lover only if she wanted to.

  She didn’t want to.

  It didn’t make the slightest bit of sense that somebody could be there one moment and not be there the next, love and light and w
armth replaced by a broken doll of cold meat and cracked bone. They’d caught the man that had killed Tess, convicted him of manslaughter on a suspended license after three DWIs, sentenced him to ten years in prison—ten years to pay for a lifetime—and it had done nothing to bring her back.

  Life held no closure, only endings.

  The ability to pinpoint the moment her mind had slipped didn’t make Cassie feel any better. After the call, she’d insisted on seeing the body, barging past her unwilling and hostile mother-in-law to kiss those cold, bloody lips one last time, to slip the ring from her wife’s finger and put it on her own, until death did them part. She’d grieved, and how she’d grieved, but hadn’t broken. No, that came later.

  During the trial she’d insisted on looking at the crime scene photographs, digital images of red blood on green grass where Steve Barrington’s SUV had hit Tess at seventy miles an hour, throwing her mangled body from the sidewalk into the park. Cassie knew every curve of that body, had more than once peeled the sunshine yellow jogging suit from it, but in that misshapen mass she recognized none of her love.

  And yet, a knife of familiarity stabbed behind her eye at the twisted lines and unnerving curves that had once been her Tessie’s limbs. A body couldn’t lie like that, not in a Euclidean world, not in a universe where colors were merely spectral frequencies interpreted by primates who’d outgrown the jungle, where shapes defined a three-dimensional space of real things. A body couldn’t take that shape, and a mind couldn’t see it, not without a slip, a fracture, a bending of what is to accommodate what had to become. Such a shape could not exist, not in human form, not in any form.

  But it did, right there in full color, on glossy print too flat to encompass that terrible form. Cassie knew that shape with the deepest part of her being, and despite the months since, it would not let her go. The shape ate her dreams, turned every waking moment into a nightmare of need—to see it again, to never see it again, to think about it always and never. That moment, that glimpse of the picture before the detective had hidden it away, had stolen her capacity for joy and love, kidnapped her muse, and replaced both with a need she didn’t understand.