The Hive - Part Three

The Hive - Part Three

    I used to be a honey bee - in my old life; I’m covered in setae. I wake up screaming sometimes, not because of the orange-black bands of fur that engulf my body, or the silver wings that protrude from my thorax, but because I’m not allowed to forget how I died. My life suffers from closure. I fly into a spiders’ web; I watch this eight legged tyrant shuffle towards me on its sticky trapeze and gorge itself… I’m allowed to wake once dressed in its sleeping bag.
    ‘Mum, mum!’ I would scream and she would run in with the bat she kept under her bed, “just in case” she told me later, in case it wasn’t the spider. Even now I keep a bat under my bed - just in case it is.
    At breakfast I must have honey on my toast. I refuse to accept any other spread except that which I once collected, I deserve it. I spent so long sipping the flowers and caring for my queen and in this life I take full advantage of commerce.
    In my hive I wasn’t noticed (at first); none of us are. We collect and shift our load amongst the waxy catacombs and hope that we’ve done enough - the workers that is. I started off by cleaning up everyone else’s shit. Once I hit maturity and I developed as all us females do I was able to help with interior design; but the hive doesn’t  like change and I don’t like babies; my proposed  goldenrod yellow to fulvous yellow transformation was rejected; my abdomen was kicked to the sky and I became a gatherer.
    Eventually the buzz got around and I got a name for myself, Brave they used to call me and after the War, it stuck. I would always forage from the daffodils outside the Great Metal Cage: our queen called it “The Gate of Hell.” I never wanted to prove a point; I just wanted to see more things. I loved the daffodils. I would mount myself into their golden trumpets and drink and drink until I believed I was unable to fly, bumbling around in my own gluttony as the sun passed over my pollen fur. On the fifteenth day of my existence I returned to my hive. Nothing was right. The buzz was furious. I could see small black balls dropping from the hive, some decapitated, some wingless. I remember I charged at the six giants pillaging my home. “Brave” they buzzed, the pollen glued to my fuzz-coat glistened in the sunlight; blinding the first giant with wings as the nomads continued their war path to our queen. I landed on its head staring into the devil itself.
    It’s spring and I’m still wearing my woollen fleece to work; I love the way it surrounds me; its own hot, micro-climate. My friends think I’m bonkers, that I’m secretly from the tropics - I am - in another life. In this one I take complaints from customers about their recently fitted garden awnings, ‘It doesn’t go back in love.’ ‘Listen love I thought your company were going to sort this out,’ ‘Look darling, I don’t want to hear anymore about it… gorgeous, treacle, poppet, bitch, love’. Love love, darling, gorgeous, love, I hear that too many times.
    After the Great War, after I realised that God did exist, (He smoked our hive you know, He came down, dressed in white, face veiled, and stopped the intruders, and when He left, He left his love, I felt such deep peace) after we drove out the devil, I realised something: that I had nothing else. I could only accomplish less. Others carried on with their duties, but I couldn’t. I had no sting left - I was getting old. I couldn’t let them hum, ‘There goes old brave could I?’ So I left the hive one morning and ventured toward The Gate of Hell. I used to fly over it, I knew that to fly through the eyes that criss-crossed like swords was suicide. So I did. I flew into its sticky trampoline and rejoiced. ‘Eat the light, you eight legged freak, eat it.’
    Every time I see a bee I have to wink at it, they know me. They know I was once Brave, that I once thought and felt as one. Perhaps once I’ve finished my rounds here I’ll go back to the right way. It’s because I was a coward that I am being punished, the giant flowers no longer profound; because I didn’t finish my life like I was supposed to, the gift of flight was taken from me and now… I have to walk everywhere. Last week I saw a suicide, another of my sisters who did the same as me in a different way. She saw the light and thought wrong. I picked her up and took her home. Under my bed there is a cardboard grave with four walls and a roof. I opened the tomb and put her with her kind. God works in such obvious ways.  


George Ide Solicitors 2011