They appeared overnight at the end of the summer and I awoke to the hum and the steely banging of their bodies against the screen of my bedroom window, hovering in drunken loops around a smooth tennis ball-sized nest the color of peanuts. It was dawn and I lay in bed, rigid, not daring to move, because they would see me through the window, grope their way in through the blind cracks of the walls, and find me by scent. I imagined them on my skin, dozens of them at a time forcing their shivering bodies between my lips and into my ears and under my eyelids, scoring my insides with their needled bodies. I hid in the grotto of my sheets until 10 a.m. when my mother came to get me for breakfast, and when I pointed the nest out to her, she kissed my forehead and told me she’d made eggs. She pulled my covers off and I covered my mouth with my hands and fled my room, slamming the door behind me with my mother still inside.
I spent the day in the cellar, watching television in the dark—if it was one thing I knew, it was that bees couldn’t burrow. My father came home tired and told me he would take care of it over the weekend, which was three days away, and with dread I envisaged the coming days in grim, ripe detail: the formless swelling of the nest as it blocked the sunlight from entering my window, bees covering every corner of our house like a living shroud. I had never been stung before—did it turn red, like a mosquito bite, or was it green, like poison? Would the skin rot? Would my muscles seize up, like the time I touched the piece of broken wire coming from my parents’ WaterPik with a wet hand? And more scenarios: What if our neighbors’ houses were infested? All of Connecticut? Could the Army, with its machine guns and stealth bombers, really stop a millions-strong horde of invading bees, whose homes were the houses of America and whose swarms would be as elusive and ubiquitous as fog?
In their complacency—their appeasement—my parents were unwilling to face the impending war. So I scoured the house for protection, finding a black turtleneck and a pair of my mother’s black stockings, and I slipped them on, padded them with t-shirts and dishrags, and smeared my face with Vasoline. When my mother came downstairs to put me to bed, she saw me and laughed so hard that she let out a little squeak of a fart and then laughed more, which only frustrated me with solemn anger: why couldn’t she understand the danger we were in? She was so oblivious, in slippers and curlers, running off to get the camera.
* * *
The prospect of returning to my bedroom that night haunted me all throughout the day: I imagined a basketball-sized nest, a dissonant choir of wings. Even when my mother finally herded me in and I found that I couldn’t see or hear it in the dark, I could still feel it there, clinging and growing like a tumor on my own body, swollen with malevolence. I didn’t let my mother turn the lamp on as she tucked me in; she smoothed my bowl-cut hair, intoning gently: “Don’t worry, bunny. They’re afraid of us as we are of them.” Without a reply from me, she closed the door, and when the stripe of hallway light under the door had been out for five minutes, I slipped out of my room and into the cellar, where I retrieved my father’s hardshell suitcase from the storage closet. It was black and sleek and hollow-bellied, like a kettle. It was secure. I opened it, climbed inside, and with my knees folded to my chest, I fit just right; sandwiched between the lids, I bobbed for hours in and out of sleep.
In the morning, with my knees and neck throbbing with stiffness, I heard my mother calling my name from above, and with my reply—“I’m here”—came her footsteps beating down the stairs. As she descended she saw me step out of the empty suitcase, and only once I was being held in her arms did it occur to me that I might have committed an offense.
As per my mother’s telephoned request that night my father bought a can of Bee Freeze at the hardware store and told me briskly to fetch the mosquito net: we were going to teach those buggers a lesson, he said. I felt an ember of relief warming my chest, a sense of imperious cheer; when I returned with the net, my father was wheeling the Wet-Dry Vac out the front door. I followed him out; he signaled my mother to close the door and turn off the porch light, and motioned for me to stand next to him. He draped us both in the mosquito net, then took the can of Bee Freeze from his back pocket and poked the straw through a small tear in the mesh. We waddled over to the side of the house, dragging the Wet-Dry Vac along by its hose, and ducked down about ten feet from my window.
“Wanna pull the trigger?” he asked me, handing me the can. I took it and shook it up, and there was a pause: I squinted in the low light through the net to see the nest: a soft dark globe. It was covered in huddled drupelets—the bees, clinging to the hive that could not yet accommodate them all. Soft, furry, like the button of a sunflower. My father nudged me, and I took aim and sprayed and gray foam splattered the nest and the wall behind it. It fizzed and dissolved where it was struck, and a dark sludge of bees and nest fragments dripped off of it in clumps, like seaweed. A few survivors circled the nest, but none bothered us. My father told me to go ahead and use up the whole can, and when the foam stopped, there was no more nest.
“Nothing to it,” my father said, and he crawled out from under the mosquito net, plugged the Wet-Dry Vac into an external outlet, and it droned to life. The sound it made as it drank up the dead bees was a low muffled slurp. I ventured a closer look: it seemed like there were only a few dozen of them, after all. Not even a hundred; nothing to it.
That night when I went to bed, I found a dead bee with its leg trapped in the screen of my window, and when I blew on it, it came off as light as a kernel of popcorn, and the thought I had before falling asleep, passing into an unrestful interval, was that no home was ever quite safe enough.