It
“I can’t get no one to address my concerns about my lump, so I thought a doctor wouldn’t repair It,” Jada said.
“I promise I and the nurses will address your concerns,” Dr. Smith said.
Jada yelped and tears squeezed between her closed eyes. A white Sharpie oval marked a distention on her pelvis, with a knife half-embedded in the center. A foul smell indicated a perforated intestine.
“Jada, are you pregnant?” Dr. Smith asked.
“Not pregnant,” she said.
Jada refused addictive painkillers, and the IV acetaminophen barely helped. Rolling her onto her side for a nerve block required stabilizing the knife. Jada already immobilized it with bulky bandages, but even when she lay on her back, the knife swayed. A nurse held it still.
Dr. Smith ultrasounded Jada’s spine for the nerve block and, coincidentally, saw the mass. Without changing his expression or tone, he asked, “Jada, how long have you had the lump?”
Answering verbally interrupted Jada’s self-controlled breathing. “At least eight years.”
“You should feel numb within about half an hour. Have you been diagnosed with cancer?”
“No.”
“The lump is very big and serious. I’m more concerned about it than the knife wound, but your knife wound also needs repair. Have you received treatment for the lump?”
“Nobody’s done nothing about it.”
“We will do what we can, and you will need to stay in the hospital for treatment, possibly overnight.”
“Keep examining me.”
“A further exam may cause too much pain, and you are stable.”
“Fine. Examine me.”
Carrying a backpack and document box, Jada entered the Jacksonville Mayo Clinic Department of Emergency Medicine. She immediately went to the women’s restroom, where she stabbed herself. Jada bandaged her wound and walked calmly towards the triage desk. Another woman in the restroom alerted the triage nurse, who met Jada halfway.
The mass shifted under Dr. Smith’s hands, and wincing, Jada held her breath and clenched the blanket.
“You didn’t hurt,” she grunted.
Something jabbed visibly under Jada’s skin.
“It may be an awkward question, and nobody here will judge you. I need to ask. Has anything living or moving gotten stuck in your body?” Dr. Smith asked.
“No,” Jada said.
“You aren’t pregnant. Do you have any idea what might be moving?”
“It grew in me, and It’s mad.”
“What is It mad about?” Dr. Smith asked.
“At me. Stabbed It, and we’re going through withdrawal, and It’s hungry.”
“Can you describe how It moves?” he asked.
“It moves when It wants to. I can’t make It stop.”
“Can you make it move?”
“By hitting it.”
“When it moves, are you pushing like a bowel movement or something like that?”
Jada shook her head.
Dr. Smith ordered a CT scan, then started reading the green journal titled For the ER Surgeon. Jada had duct-taped the journal and her West Virginia ID to her sweatshirt. The ID stated her age (21), ethnicity, and gender. She wrote in gel pen, and the text resembled a bullet journal. White-outs and corrections dotted the pages.
I’ve had It for at least 8 years, and I lost weight, so you’d see It. I’m tired of asking for tests and doctors not running them. I couldn’t get good medical care. I don’t want to be addicted so I’m not a drug seeker. I’m not suicidal or harming myself, and I can’t kill It because I’d die. I sterilized my hands, abdomen, pelvis, clothes, and knife.
Then Jada listed her medications and the last time she drank alcohol, smoked, and used drugs, all within the past week. To prepare for surgery, she fasted from food for twelve hours and water for eight. Also, she had checked her golden labrador service dog, Ping-Pong, into a local kennel, and gave the address, and her parents’ contact information.
Next, Jada summarized her medical history. We didn’t go back to no doctor that didn’t listen, she wrote.
At age eleven, Jada underwent the removal of a benign ovarian teratoma by a reluctant pediatrician Dr. Ripley. The non-cancerous tumor developed from a germ cell and grew on Jada’s right ovary; it caused no ill effects yet and removal could damage her ovary.
Jada and her mother suspected the teratoma recurred at age thirteen. She wrote, When I was about fifteen, Mamma thought maybe he left it in, but we don’t have no proof. But her doctor expected her to outgrow the symptoms. The second doctor diagnosed her with an ovarian teratoma. Because the surgery would damage the ovary, the doctor refused to remove the teratoma.
She bounced from doctor to doctor and specialty to specialty. Jada cooperated with tests and treatments. Also, she and her parents researched specific conditions and requested specific tests, occasionally about teratomas. Doctors often deemed Jada’s self-researched conditions and tests unlikely and unnecessary. They addressed other health concerns with the same symptoms. Over the years, surgeons considered operating and always found reason not to, despite Jada and her parents asked.
But Jada gradually differentiated between the teratoma and her other health concerns. Managing the others rarely helped the teratoma. Treating symptoms reduced her overall discomfort, but sometimes she doubted she had the conditions or that the treatments addressed the root problem. I tried talking to them, so they’d understand, she wrote. I tried not telling them about the teratoma and letting them find it.
When she was fifteen, an exam showed the teratoma had grown, but the doctor declared it too small to worry about. Jada wrote, I felt It squeeze tight during the appointment and spread out afterwards.
One gynecologist scanned the teratoma. Jada estimated at the time, it was approximately apple-sized, but the gynecologist compared it to a plum. It didn’t show yet, so we didn’t know It was so big, Jada wrote. Dissatisfied with the blurriness, Jada’s mother wanted another scan, but the doctor said the first was sufficient. I said that a teratoma grows 1.8 mm a year, so It should be smaller. She told me not to trust online health advice. The gynecologist diagnosed her with endometriosis and treated it medically.
Lifestyle changes, alternative medicine, and psychiatry somewhat improved her physical and mental health, and they prevented complications and side-effects. I don’t want to get sick from something else, Jada wrote (hence never injecting illegal drugs).
Nobody thoroughly followed-up on the teratoma.
Jada argued that by removing It, the doctor could exclude it from potential causes of her health problems. She specifically told doctors It mentally distressed her—beyond stress or discomfort arising from being sick. The teratoma Itself bothered her.
I feel It like It is an instinct and a lump. Its moving isn’t a hallucination, and I’ve had them. It twists and untwists my ovary and presses on internal organs. Behavior reinforcement didn’t work and trying to hold it like potty training or Pilates didn’t work.
When her physical health improved, It became more active, which worsened her health. Physical stress aggravated Its behavior and slowed Its growth. Also, Its growth accelerated when she reached maturity.
One psychiatrist thought Jada expressed herself through the teratoma, while another recommended surgery. I’d still have issues, but I’d have peace of mind about It, Jada wrote. The second psychiatrist continued to care for her.
Doctors increasingly dismissed Jada’s symptoms and concerns; she admitted that her later drug use and mental health contributed to their decisions. Her inability to pay prompted some doctors to refuse treatment. Emergency rooms provided little care, waving her off as an addict, placing her under psychiatric treatment, or examining her, treating her pain, and referring her to a doctor.
Jada lost weight to make it more palpable and give doctors one less reason to ignore her concerns. It stays in my middle like It hangs on to something, so it doesn’t show much. It gets hungry when I’m not.
Planned Parenthood maybe would’ve found It and done something. My pregnancy test was negative, so they didn’t examine me. She took over-the-counter abortion pills, which had no effect, as expected.
Jada resorted to addictive substances. I keep It calm with drugs, but It gets mad when I’m clean. Since the first dose, she acknowledged it was a terrible, stupid decision.
Finally, she attempted killing It, while recognizing the idea’s extreme wrongness. Jada inflicted life-threatening physical stress on herself to no avail. I kept track because maybe I’d get too sick and couldn’t help myself recover. Someone always found out.
Between her self-stress techniques and the drug use, sometimes, the slightest effort overwrought her. I’m pretty broken down, she wrote. I don’t think I can get through a bus ride home.
She considered a service dog early in her drastic measures, and quickly adopted Ping-Pong, a golden Labrador. I really need Ping-Pong. She knows when It is acting up, but she isn't trained for the teratoma. She found It by herself.
When Jada threatened to stab herself in a Level 1 Trauma Center’s emergency room, security restrained her. The doctor briefly examined her, then transferred her to a mental health institution. She explained, It looked like normal fat and I looked mentally ill with a crisis.
Dr. Smith slammed the notebook on the desk and snapped at an intern to find references to the teratoma and also each blood test from her medical history—the document box with dozens of copied medical documents. Then Dr. Smith apologized for snapping.
One biopsy of her teratoma was inconclusive. Some blood tests indicated the teratoma better than others; several results could be attributed to other conditions.
The blood test Dr. Smith ordered easily identified the teratoma. The CT scan showed a perforated intestine beyond the knife’s reach. Altogether, the multiple blurry images showed a fetus-like mass, approximately the size of a pineapple, in Jada’s pelvis and abdomen. Dr. Smith resisted the urge to punch his clipboard.
Jada's notebook and medical documents corresponded to Dr. Smith’s examination and tests and her answers to his questions.
Gently, Dr. Smith told sweating, trembling, goosebumpy Jada there was a mass in her abdomen. “And it shouldn’t be there, and it shouldn’t have been for years,” he said.
“You read my journal?”
“The first few pages and the summarized medical history, and it and the medical records were very useful.”
“Was my mamma right about Dr. Ripley?” she asked.
“I’ll look for signs of previous surgery, but the mass might disguise them.”
“Could he have?”
“I don’t have enough evidence to form an opinion.”
Dr. Smith told her that the mass was probably a fetiform ovarian teratoma, which resembled a fetus. Its movement mystified him, but closer examination or later tests could explain it. Waiting years for surgery had probably unnecessarily increased her risks, and the operation would probably resolve some of her symptoms.
“The mass needs to be examined and treated thoroughly. I can examine the knife wound laparoscopically, repair it, and refer you to a doctor for the mass. Alternatively, I can examine the knife wound and the mass laparoscopically, repair the knife wound, and attempt removing the mass. Do you need some time to think about it?”
“Not switching doctors,” Jada said. “Get rid of It. Get rid of Its ovary. Get rid of whatever It adheres to.”
“I will remove the mass,” Dr. Smith said.
“I need to see It, though.”
“You can. If you are concerned about Dr. Ripley’s treatment, I advise preserving the mass and other tissue as evidence. I can arrange the preservation and storage.”
“Yes,” Jada said, nodding.
Anesthesia stilled It.
Blood partially obscured the underlined word “STOP” written on the blade in black Sharpie. The knife punctured Jada’s abdominal wall and pierced the brown mass, leaving other organs intact. Scars and scrapes, healing or fresh, showed the teeth and bones’ range of motion. The teratoma’s bony protuberance had easily reached the perforated intestine.
It stretched from Jada’s ovary to her back and right side. Held to her abdominal wall by adhesions, It wove between her internal organs. The teratoma adhered to her uterus and a few other nearby spots, but, generally, It grew into her abdominal walls. Among the cysts, a different tissue pulsed; two of many blood vessels led to it. A nerve cluster connected Jada’s ovary and the mass’s brain-like tissue.
Dr. Smith aggressively excised the teratoma, including Its adhesions. He repaired Jada’s perforated intestine and double-checked the ones which the teratoma attacked.
The teratoma’s pulsing ceased by the end of surgery.
Due to sheer disgust, Dr. Smith longed to personally throw It, the ovary, the scraps of internal organs in the incinerator and light it. On principle, however, he wanted the oblivious doctors themselves to require Its surgical removal.
Dr. Smith entered the recovery room for the second time—the first time, anesthesia made Jada loopy—, and like the first time, her vitals monitor beeped steadily, healthily. Jada set her greenish-blue cup of Sprite on the table.
“Is It gone?” Jada winced, easing herself upright, though already propped her up in bed.
“Yes, It was successfully removed,” he said. He thought she babbled the same question the first time.
Her black eyes crinkled as she smiled, her second, almost identical reaction to the outcome. “I knew It was gone. I can’t feel It.”
Dr. Smith explained the surgery.
“I could not determine why It was moving,” he said.
“I want to see It.” Jada held out her hand, with long, green, sparkly nails.
“You can see It. It has an eye, and some people may think that is creepy.”
“Did you?” Jada asked.
“No.” The teratoma revolted Dr. Smith, particularly the eye.
This is where you stabbed it.”
It thunked as she turned the specimen bottle. The moist teratoma had a pupilless eye with a cloudy brown iris and a tuft of black hair.
“Because It scratched your ovary, I couldn’t tell definitively if Dr. Ripley removed the first tumor. If you are concerned, I recommend contacting a forensic medical examiner. I strongly recommend that.”
“Was It alive?” Jada asked.
“In the sense that anything able to make cells is alive, the ovarian teratoma was alive. Your blood flow supplied it with oxygen, and cell death began when the teratoma was removed from your blood supply.”
“I knew the treatments didn’t work. I don’t think mine worked, either. Can a teratoma grow on the other one?”
“Possibly. I checked, but you don’t show any signs of another ovarian teratoma, or a teratoma anywhere in your reproductive organs. If another teratoma grows, a doctor should pay attention to your medical history, and probably catch it early.”
“I didn’t want to stab myself.”
“You were very desperate when you came here. You will need to switch doctors, and I can’t guarantee another doctor in the Mayo Clinic will treat you.”
Jada nodded. “I need drug rehab, too. Will you put me in another psychiatric hold?”
“No, unless you feel you need one. We have a psychiatrist, or we can contact yours. You know your state of mind better than I do and the doctors and nurses here will listen to you."
“No. Are you sure?”
“I was monitoring you for a crisis before the surgery, but I’m not inclined to think you are in a mental health crisis.”
“Why?”
“You took precautions that limited complications. You brought documentation that would have allowed me to treat you whether or not you could speak. You wanted to survive. I have adequate proof the monster in your body was real, not a hallucination. Your psychiatric history concerns me, but I do not have immediate concerns about your mental health.”
“So I can tell you something.”
“You can tell me anything.”
“If you hadn’t gotten It, I would’ve tried to cut It out.”
“The Heweryan Miracle” from The Etminay Persecution by Nucha Toch Rishri
In the city of Heweryan, there is a church ornamented with gargoyles and other works of religious art. The devout congregation and visitors attend daily services. St. Peter’s Church came under violent attack in the 70th year of the Etminay Persecution on Easter Sunday during the sunrise service.
Puro Cester was a devout believer of Bolefinne, and he persecuted Christians throughout his life. In the two or three years before his persecution, Cester prepared one rifle, one handgun, and three explosives. He intended to shoot the clergy and congregants and place one explosive before the exit doors to keep them from escaping and keep law enforcement from entering.
Puro Cester entered St. Peter’s Church and closed the doors, whereupon God animated a gargoyle, and it came into the narthex by breaking a window.
Deacon Noc Ade went into the narthex to discover the source of the commotion. He saw the gargoyle drag an explosive into the coat racks and fly downstairs. Promptly, Deacon Ade told the Reverend Erv Neerd what he saw, and the Reverend Erv Neerd told him to call the police. The congregation and clergy fled through a nave window except for Reverend Neerd.
Reverend Neerd went into the basement and found Cester and the gargoyle in a Sunday School room. Cester had broken a window to escape the gargoyle which he feared. He was pinned to the wall and floor by the gargoyle’s talons and horns, and the gargoyle had injured him. He was disarmed of his rifle, and his detonator had fallen from his pocket but did not cause an explosion. Cester’s face and clothes were wet for the Gargoyle had spat water at him.
Cester spoke blasphemies against Christianity, and threatened to kill Reverend Neerd, but could not reach his weapon. Reverend Neerd forgave Cester and prayed for the safety of all concerned.
Law enforcement broke the gargoyle to arrest Cester and they took the gargoyle as evidence.
Cester’s injuries healed well.
In his trial, Cester pled not guilty but was found guilty and sentenced to imprisonment. He persecuted imprisoned Christians but did not use violence against them, and he refused to be visited by St. Peter Church’s clergy. It is not known if he converted or stopped all his persecutions upon release.
The gargoyle was repaired and mounted to the downspout where it remains to this day. The stained-glass window depicts the miracle. A memorial plaque below the window reads:
God miraculously sent the gargoyle
to protect His people from earthly death.
Easter Sunday, 70th Year Etminay Persecution
Marcus on Calospelegna
“Oh no,” Marcus said, as The-Dread-and-Sore-Amaze unclouded his eyes. “I didn’t try to be here, or should I have tried? What have I done, or what am I supposed to do now? Of course, I can’t tell gods what to do, and they know me, but I’m not prepared for what they want.”
Marcus attempted to hide his nakedness from the elderly woman dressing him in a tunic. Silently, she buckled the sheath around his waist, tied on his sandals, pierced his ear and lower lip with a needle, and inserted rings. The elderly woman wrapped Marcus’ hands around a double-handed knife hilt. Then the elderly woman left.
Two people stood on either side of The-Dread-and-Sore-Amaze, and five more completed the circle around Marcus. A burning cage lit the group.
The-Dread-and-Sore-Amaze put the words in his head, including You are on Calospelegna. Winning the labor might resolve the nations’ conflicts and settle the divine rivalries. Won’t such things improve your life? Remember my words. Speak your mind without fear of divine retribution.
To Marcus’ surprise, the words came out coherently and he mentioned things he was unaware he thought. Among other sentences, he said, “I’ve been assertive today, to the lady who wanted me to reglaze her vase after I fired it. I’ve never killed anybody, and I’ve never fought anybody, but I have been beaten up. I couldn’t survive a fight if I had all my fingers. I try to believe the gods know best, but why choose me?”
You believe equally in every god and goddess, and they have never shown you favor, The-Dread-and-Sore-Amaze said.
“But I was healed in the Djebu River.”
Anybody may be healed there, regardless of divine favor. Sheath your knife.
Marcus did.
Behind Marcus, The-Dread-and-Sore-Amaze parted the two halves of their body. He shut his eyes. Then the Sore-Amaze took Marcus’ arm.
Cringing, Marcus squealed and shrieked, “Please, I am a potter, and I need my fingers. Couldn’t I keep my fingers?”
The Dread bit each finger, excluding the thumb, at the base: one completely off and to puncture the other seven. When its mouth muffled Marcus’ screams, he lost control of his bladder.
A man laughed at him, interrupted by a woman yelling, “He is the most pathetic one yet, but not laughable.”
“It is an involuntary response to fear,” another man said.
But the Dread just left a ring of stinging teeth marks around Marcus’ neck.
While The-Dread-and-Sore-Amaze rejoined bodies, Marcus squeaked at the stumps of his missing left index finger. Rapidly, whiteness covered the healed stump and redness spread up the middle finger’s knuckle.
Unsheathe your knife. Look at your knife. Turn your knife over.
Marcus stared at the spinning, flipping green and brown stone in the knife’s hilt. One side of the blade was black and engraved with symbols. On the white side, clearer than a polished bronze mirror, and smoother than a pool, the blade reflected the red puncture marks circling his pustule-scarred neck. And it was definitely a knife, not a dagger—good for general household purposes and sturdy for traveling.
Take the phoenix torch. With two of its eight legs, The-Dread-and-Sore-Amaze pointed to the burning cage.
The phoenix cage on a torch handle weighed several pounds, but Marcus carried it comfortably, to his surprise. It strapped to his back. Marcus worried about catching fire, but the flames left him unharmed and pleasantly warm.
The-Dread-and-Sore-Amaze said, Look at the warriors. The fighter must kill one or more warriors by dawn. If the fighter fails to kill one or more warriors by dawn, I shall bite off the fighter’s head. I shall deliver his headless body home and his soul shall go to the afterlife. If the fighter fails to kill one warrior per hour, I shall bite off one finger: index fingers, middle fingers, ring fingers, or pinkies. If the fighter does not kill the seven warriors by dawn, I shall transform him into an animal. The transfigured animals participate.
The warriors were struck fatally in war. The fighter faces one warrior from seven nations, and the fighter cannot fight a warrior from his own. One warrior came from Lydan, one from Phahmese, one from Nesatope, one from Jadikira, one from Giruppik, one from Gelumnia, and one from Svalug. One warrior was struck by poison, one by fire, one by trampling horses, one by drowning, one by a spear through his back, one by disease, and one by starvation.
The labor lasts from the eleventh hour past the meridian to the next morning when in the customary time and place, the Sky-God raises the sun fully over the horizon. Therefore, the labor has begun. The rules cannot change during the labor.
You have all that you require. Depart now.
One warrior moved deliberately, while two met, kissed, and went in opposite directions. Two warriors supported a third to some distance away, then the third sat, the first walked straight ahead, and the second went elsewhere. The air cracked earsplittingly, and a horse galloped. The-Dread-and-Sore-Amaze departed last.
Marcus ran in the direction he faced, sure to find a warrior in the general vicinity. His sandals fit like he had already broken them in. The phoenix torch hardly swung and despite its brightness, his eyes adjusted to the dark.
He reached a cliff. Darkness and fog obscured the ground, but the moon and stars shone brightly in a perfectly cloudless sky. Marcus worried Calospelegna was on Oridocia, above the cloud bank, and below the rarely seen deities’ dwellings. Whoever climbed the holy mountain became sick; Marcus felt healthy.
Marcus climbed down a knotted rope onto a ledge just wide enough for his foot and smeared with bird droppings. He intended to search the caves systematically and act on whatever he found.
Marcus slipped into a shallow cave full of birds. The first one he saw had its back to him, marked with a woman’s face and neck.
“Please, don’t attack us! The-Dread-and-Sore-Amaze transformed us into birds,” another bird cawed.
Marcus shrunk into the open air. He heard a crack and a man’s shout. Somebody grabbed one of Marcus’ arms and he passed out. Twisting awkwardly, the person pulled him aboard clutching him, apparently oblivious to the bird’s tiltings. Marcus was quite aware of it—his stomach and bowels emptied. The bird leveled and glided.
Now Marcus saw that the man’s back ended with birds’ legs and, wings sprouted from his sides. Because he wore armor, Marcus found the first warrior. He whimpered.
“Hold on to me, and I will hold on to you, and we will land momentarily.”
And Marcus realized the warrior saved his life. Therefore, Marcus needed to give him help, a great present, or to save his life, or do a difficult favor, or else divine favor could not salvage his reputation.
The warrior landed in a cave, unstrapped Marcus’ torch, and lowered Marcus onto a nest.
“Are you hurt?” the warrior asked.
Marcus shook his head.
“Do you remember your name?”
Marcus nodded. He realized he heard the man’s native language in his right ear and a translation in his left ear, from which the earring hung. The warrior had a matching pair.
“What is your name?” the warrior asked, smiling.
“Marcus,” he squeaked.
“Flying sometimes makes me sick, too.” The warrior propped the torch outside the cave entrance and crouched by Marcus again. He opened a circular section of armor, which revealed tin tubes.
“…Speared through the back…” Marcus said.
“Yes, and the bird wings and legs allow me to move.”
“And I’m supposed to fight you, but should I now?” Marcus asked.
Marcus remembered The-Dread-and-Sore-Amaze’s words: The warrior shall give the fighter opportunity to fight.
“I intervened because falling off a cliff would be a dumb, embarrassing way to lose. I am not hospitable,” the warrior said.
The warrior can save the fighter from accidental death.
“Why could you not prepare for warfare or defend yourself?” the warrior asked.
“I had the plague and water settled on my brain.” Marcus showed the bald, sunken trepanning scar on his head. “My mother thought training would hurt me. I attended school for a few years, and she let me learn acrobatics, swimming, and running, and I played in caves.”
“And rock climbing was safer because a rock could not punch your scar.”
“I suppose, but it worried her, too.”
“Now we must fight, and I suspect you would not want to kill a man in his own home,” the warrior said.
“I won’t be able to anywhere,” Marcus said.
The warrior and Marcus walked a few hundred yards from the cliffside. Since the warrior was unarmed, Marcus set down the knife. The warrior removed his battered armor, showing raw, minor wounds. A green and brown stone decorated his belt.
Marcus jogged in a circle, forcing the warrior to waddle. Then Marcus was on his back in the dirt with the warrior’s talon on his chest; the warrior bent like a curious pigeon.
“You told the truth about your fighting experience,” the warrior said.
“I don’t know why she picked me,” Marcus said, straining his neck to escape.
“Never mind. An untrained, drunk, old man with an ordinary object can be as dangerous and lethal as a well-trained, experienced warrior like myself.” The warrior sighed. “I don’t want to fight like a monster, but it seems I have no choice.”
Marcus picked up the knife and checked his left middle finger’s red second knuckle.
The warrior’s wings cracked, and his talons brushed Marcus’ hair. Another crack and the warrior was a hundred feet higher. After another swoop, Marcus hung from the warrior’s talons, a few feet off the ground.
“I thought you wanted to survive,” the warrior said, perplexed.
“I didn’t know this would happen!” Marcus screeched.
He dropped a few feet before hitting a boulder. Marcus curled up to shield himself from the warrior’s earth-gouging talons. He raised the knife overhead as a warning and ducked. The warrior’s entrails splattered. Immediately, Marcus’ neck stopped stinging and the puncture holes turned white.
He scrambled out from beneath the warrior’s tailwings.
“Why didn’t you think the knife was a warning? Don’t birds have sharp eyesight?” Marcus asked.
The participant cannot kill himself.
He heard The-Dread-and-Sore-Amaze’s instructions, Marcus thought.
“Your eyes were human,” Marcus said.
The warrior came here of his own free will, equally willing to survive or die without divine intercession. the warrior wants the selected fighter to earn his life. The warrior willingly faces defeat, whether he dies honorably, by murder, or in another situation.
Shaking, Marcus smeared the gore with his hands, then handfuls of grass and dirt. He made his way to the warrior’s cave, where he washed his face and emptied his ear of something unspeakably disgusting. Then Marcus examined his neck with the clean knife. I have my head and will have one finger.
When the fighter wins the labor, if the transformed animals have survived, I shall break the spell and send them home. If the fighter dies during the labor or after being transformed into an animal, I shall deliver his human body home and his soul shall go to the afterlife.
For safety, hoping the rules allowed it, Marcus brought the warrior’s waterskins to the Calospelegnan caves. He remembered, If a rule does not forbid something, it is allowed.
He marked his route with the phoenix torch. He followed instructions his mother gave him as a boy: If the ground shook or rocks fell, or he encountered water, he left. As usual, he occasionally ignored the instruction that he could not climb to a stopping place higher than the height of his raised arms.
He assumed the warriors lived near the surface, but he found signs of animal and human habitation in deep, dark caverns and passages. For what seemed like hours he only heard water dripping, his movements, the phoenix’s fiery sounds and rustling, and his heartbeat. Talking to the phoenix soothed him.
“I can’t remember being very scared of caves,” Marcus said.
The knife chipped a stalactite, accidentally. Marcus pushed the knife into the floor to the hilt, like a shovel into frosty hard-packed clay earth. His two-handed tug sent him and the knife backward. Marcus embedded it in the cave wall and hung from it; the knife felt secure however he moved. He spelunked much faster, digging handholds and footholds.
While he explored, The-Dread-and-Sore-Amaze’s instructions popped into Marcus’ head, and he considered his situation.
I won’t die sitting in a cave overnight. An animal could find the way out or be unable to reach it. They will find me if I am supposed to participate.
Marcus’ red left middle finger turned black and stopped stinging. Redness quickly spread over the webbing between his middle and ring fingers and went slowly up his left ring finger. He wondered if the color changes damaged his fingers, but they moved normally. The coloration tracked time and kills.
Though he dreaded losing a finger, he also worried about killing again. He wondered if it was possible; his ability surprised him.
When his ring finger was nearly red, he rested—losing a finger while actively spelunking sounded foolish. He expected to travel more slowly afterward.
The-Dread-and-the-Sore-Amaze took his left ring finger. Watching his reddening pinkie finger, Marcus remembered, The loss of a finger weakens the fighter and alters his behavior, and self-preservation becomes harder.
Marcus thought, Completing the labors with two thumbs and one finger would have done the same thing! Even thinking the thought was risky under the circumstances until he remembered he could say what he wanted. What could a two-fingered potter do, especially when the fingers were on his non-dominant hand?
The fighter has opportunity to retain all fingers but one.
I’ve wasted too much time…But I don’t want to fight again…
Marcus spelunked to a warm passageway. Voices echoed in the distance, and he smelled old and new smoke. He laboriously read an inscription near a clearly tooled ceiling opening: “The fighter cannot enter the Palace.”
Thinking the warriors might exit the Palace, and looking for an easier route out, Marcus explored the nooks and crannies. He paused. Though he wanted to run from the lion, he sidled down the passageway.
Out of the corner of his eye, Marcus saw the roaring and bleating lion fly on eagle wings. The monster had a goat’s head on its back and a snake’s tail. He bolted, begging the monster to understand his point of view.
A flying griffin, the lion-goat-snake monster, and a bull with eagle wings forced Marcus into a crevice. A lion-bat hybrid crawled overhead.
Stone crunched overhead and a rope ladder fell around his neck. Marcus screamed.
“They understand you have lost your way, and they want you to escape,” an elderly woman said.
Marcus untangled himself from the ladder, strapped the phoenix torch to his back, and climbed up.
“Let me move the stone back for you,” Marcus croaked.
Instead, she stood on the stone, and it blocked the entry. Her earring and lip ring shone.
The elderly woman led Marcus to a cave full of boulders, stalactites, and stalagmites. She perched herself on a boulder.
“Leave the cavern by a different route than the one entered,” she said.
Marcus found a rectangular even crack, and within the rectangle, there was an intentionally carved and coincidentally scarred and bloodstained boulder with a slot.
“Is this the door?” Marcus asked.
“I can’t help you further,” the elderly woman said.
Marcus slid the knife into the slot, although it seemed silly. The wall thunked and rotated and something fastened over the knife’s handle. Rather than have his hands crushed off, or lose the knife, he pressed against the rotating wall. When the door stopped moving, the floor turned upside down, but in a few seconds, without rotating again, he felt like standing upright on his feet.
The steep tunnel opened to a cavern with three other entrances and a sphinx sitting in the middle.
“I always find one when I’m busy!” Marcus checked his left pinkie, red past the second knuckle.
The sphinx stretched and yawned.
“Listen, Marcus of Lucopoli,” the sphinx said.
“Huh?” Marcus tried to slice through a door bolt, but the knife just scraped off.
“Answer my riddle correctly and I shall open the door. Answer my riddle incorrectly and I shall not.” The sphinx recited the riddle that The-Dread-and-Sore-Amaze put in his head, which ended with: “What am I?”
Automatically, Marcus rattled off a common Lucopolitan solution: “The correct answer to the riddle.”
The sphinx hissed and batted Marcus, who stepped away from the doors.
“I answered it!” He spun around. “It works against—” Marcus choked on the last word.
Marcus had never seen a scorpion tail on a sphinx before, nor heard of one, nor imagined a sphinx with vulture wings.
“You’re the Lucopolitan warrior?” Marcus asked.
The creature opened the door and chased Marcus to it. He stepped from a floor onto a wall, but his nose broke his fall.
“Is this a trick?” Marcus asked the shut door. “I have to find my way out and fight you, don’t I?”
All attempts to open the door failed.
A warrior wouldn’t let me leave, but…I need my ring finger…Or I could save my right hand and become an animal.
But being transfigured into an animal bothered him, so Marcus ran down the tunnel.
A window in the door showed a bright feast hall, in which several dozen people of various social statuses sat at a richly laid table. More people rested on floor cushions, and even more on the floor, and all eating bread, meat, wine, and all kinds of good things.
He knocked. The generous host might let him stay until dawn (Marcus theorized about fighting and lacked determination), or maybe offer him a bath.
“You are welcome here,” the host called.
Marcus stepped through the doorway into a frosty, damp, dim feast hall with empty dishes, and full of dead bodies. He stepped back and saw the same thing, and wished for another way out.
The host urged him to enter. Marcus picked his way through the others; only their clothing styles and hair length indicated their sex.
“Sit here by me and rest,” the host said.
“I don’t have much time…”
His and the hosts’ breaths showed, and they shivered.
“Set the torch in the bracket.”
Marcus did. The host wore a cloak fastened with a green and brown pin, and he had an earring and lip ring—Marcus wondered if he looted a warrior. Other fighters probably fought before Marcus’ turn on Calospelegna.
“You must have been in battle. You must be exhausted and should spend the night here. Would you like a bath before you dine?” the host asked.
“Thank you, but…I will take one…when I get home.”
“Agnus! I am Unata, a Prince of Gelumnia, and we have already seen each other once. Please, sit.”
Marcus did. Agnus was the elderly woman; an earring and lip ring hung from her face.
“Let the guest wash his hands, and then serve the food,” Unata said.
Unata’s physical appearance made Marcus weirdly uneasy. To avoid looking at the host, Marcus picked up a black and white bowl. Don’t waste time. It doesn’t matter. He examined it from all angles. “Gelumnia…"
“The-Dread-and-Sore-Amaze preserved the others from starvation.”
Marcus felt like he had not eaten for a day or two.
“Drink from my cup,” Unata said.
Agnus handed a heavy golden cup to Marcus, who held it in both hands, worrying about damaging it, and wondering why he deserved it. The stem and base were gold and the bowl was another material with natural markings and edges filed smooth. Reluctantly, Marcus tilted the cup to drink, and blood stained the inside of the cup. Shrieking and falling off his stool, Marcus, dropped the skull cup. The phoenix torch toppled onto the preserved people. He wiped his hands on his tunic and hastily righted the phoenix torch. The preserved Gelumnians seemed all right.
“I…” he almost said, Fainted, but decided, under the circumstances, the cup was more than a trophy. “…I have never drunk blood before. Please excuse me.”
“Of course, and I usually wouldn’t.” The warrior lowered himself into his chair again. “Agnus, please help him up. I’m afraid I am too weak to help you up.”
“I’d rather stand.” Marcus leaned against a wall.
“It is my own skull and blood. If you had drunk it, you would have felt better.”
Women brought in serving dishes. Dashing to the door, Marcus tripped on a Gelumnian.
“Eat, though you need not accept my hospitality, but you may be too weak to return and fight me,” Unata said.
“Nothing fights starvation except food…and you are too weak to be a warrior,” Marcus said. “…You starved.” He thought, Why do the deities want me to fight a prince?
“Eat your fill.” Unata’s face was filling out and he sat straighter. “Agnus, help him to the table. I hope you like Gelumnian food.”
Agnus obeyed and scurried from the room. Unata began telling his story.
Leaning on the table, Marcus shuddered and squeezed his eyes shut—the first bowl resembled his grandmother’s chicken feet stew (his favorite), except the cook substituted whole human feet. He said, “I’m never eating chicken feet stew again, and if I look at the rest, I won’t eat anything again.” And he cared little about saying so aloud. Marcus experienced short hunger before and rarely found nothing to eat. Unata’s food smelled better than anything he imagined.
Marcus tried to identify what, other than cannibalizing Unata, was wrong with the dishes.
Along with fresh bread, sweets, and all kinds of vegetables and spices, he caught a strong whiff of outhouse, but not cooked liver and kidneys. Every woman Marcus knew (on the rare occasions they afforded it) cooked cut-up meat and offal, but Unata’s serving dishes contained whole cuts, which he thought suited a wealthy man.
Marcus developed scurvy. His belt slipped; adjusting it meant falling. When he clutched his stomach and hunched over, he knocked the phoenix torch onto the table. Unata muffled a painful moan. The knife jabbed Marcus’ thigh, but he was fine.
Marcus mustered the energy to pick up the torch with both hands. Don’t worry about putting out the fire, he thought. Then his knees gave out and he rolled to his back.
His trepanning scar and others reopened, which confused him. Marcus wondered if the starvation warrior and disease warrior attacked together.
“I can’t kill a starving man,” Marcus said, as Unata lifted him to the stool. He isn’t starving, Marcus thought.
But the food smelled so good, that Marcus hauled himself upright. Maybe eating an olive would be fine if it did not touch the liver. He considered the dishes burnt by the phoenix torch more appetizing than before. And the other meat and organs were raw.
Despite knowing cannibalizing was wrong, Marcus longed to eat. He doubted he could stop himself.
“I can’t eat it…And I can’t kill you slowly like this.”
He found the beating heart in a covered bowl. Unata pushed him down, but Marcus brought the dish with him. He stabbed the heart, and Unata crumpled like a blanket.
Marcus felt less hungry, possibly from disgust. Stumbling through the door and another tunnel, he realized he had forgotten the phoenix torch, but he could not tolerate Unata’s feast hall any longer.
The door opened to a torch-lit garden lush with various plants, and a large fountain splashed out of sight. He tightened his belt and sandals and explored as far as the fountain. The irrigated garden also held cushioned benches and extremely life-like statues.
The walk to the fountain exhausted Marcus. The pool was large enough to swim in; aquatic plants decorated the fountain itself.
Beyond the fountain, out of sight, a woman sang a bawdy sailor song to a lyre’s tune.
Marcus thought, The music will send me to sleep, or I might find giant scorpions and spiders. Or the diseased warrior is malarial. Now he thought about it, since he arrived, he had not seen any live animals, including nocturnal or sleeping ones, or insects and fish. He wondered if fighters became monstrous animals, like the ones in the cave.
Too grimy for a bench, Marcus rested in long grass, somewhere between sleeping and waking.
A splash jolted him. Marcus jumped into the draining pool after a person floating face-down in the water. Marcus swam quickly to her, turned her face up, and towed her to the edge. Unusually, she wore a purple veil over her face, in addition to the normal, optional cap. Under a purple robe, her purple dress covered her hands and feet.
Marcus climbed onto the edge and grabbed the woman’s hands to pull her up. Like a crocodile, the woman flipped Marcus into the water.
He surfaced and spit water; she stood on the pool’s edge, drying her face.
“You were drowning?” Marcus asked.
“You coped well with the apparent situation and worked so hard, I did not want to interrupt you.” She spoke his language with a thick accent.
Marcus shivered on the wet gravel.
“What was the—You’re—Alisha, Queen of Lydan.”
“Is it not easy to lose one’s place here?” Her gold jewelry clinked on the stones.
“I want to go home, and I didn’t want to come here.”
“You know how to leave.”
“But I don’t.”
“Your six or seven fingers contradict that,” Alisha said.
Marcus realized The-Dread-and-Sore-Amaze had taken his left pinkie while he slept. His right index finger steadily turned red. Six, he thought.
“Please don’t be upset,” Marcus said.
“My mood does not matter to you, but who have you defeated?” Alisha asked.
“The…flying birdman—”
“Belkish.”
“…him, Belkish, and the Gelumnian Unata.”
“I am not upset regarding the death of Unata. I took your knife while you slept, but you may have it again.”
“What?”
The knife plunked into the water. Marcus concentrated on the knife and avoiding the draining whirlpools but caught occasional glimpses of undressing Alisha. He attributed her odd appearance to shadows and water distortion. The knife glinted on the surface.
“My knife floats?” He ducked underwater again due to Alisha’s apparent nakedness.
Alisha pulled him up by the collar. “Do you not know my ship burned? I drowned. When I washed up on shore, my armor could not be removed,” Alisha said, hauling Marcus out of the pool. “Fight or leave my garden.”
Shiny bronze marked her forearms, legs, and wet hair. Bronze scales covered her torso and hips, and a white linen pattern showed where her tunic ended. Brown, leathery strips ran over her cheeks, chin, feet, and ankles. The marks showed which pieces of armor she attempted to remove. But her body moved as if she was naked.
“Fight or leave my garden!” Alisha yelled.
Marcus shoved her into the water but winded himself on the raised edge. Water gushed from Alisha’s mouth and nose. He stared at her dangling eyeball, but she popped it in, and it swiveled to face him. Marcus lacked the breath to whimper.
Alisha gurgled, “Have you stayed because a six-fingered potter from a poor family will starve and not support his wife and baby?”
“I didn’t want to fight anybody,” Marcus said, backing away. “I shouldn’t have been watching a lady swim, but you could have drowned again…You can’t drown again…And you are a warrior, but a lady, too…in a private garden. It doesn’t matter here?”
Alisha sighed and folded her arms. “If you do not fight or run in ten seconds, I shall remove everything I wear.”
Marcus scrambled up to run and skinned his knee. A few steps later, Alisha threw him and herself into the draining pool.
Alisha, who tended to swear and grunt, often dodged his pummels, slashings, and stabbings. The armor fused to her skin protected her like normal armor, and his knife scored it. Marcus aimed for light brown fleshy areas.
In water shallow enough to stand in, Alisha choked Marcus and restrained his legs. Marcus stabbed through her hand; his knife’s point stopped against his hand. With her other hand, she twisted it away. She grabbed Marcus’ arm, but he sliced her elbow to the bone.
Wading away from the billowing blood, Marcus thought, I can’t kill her! He said, “Let me stop the bleeding…What will the Lydanites do?”
Alisha squeezed the artery. “The Lydanites believe I am still dead.”
Her hand relaxed by the time Marcus dragged her from the pool. He held the already dry knife blade to her mouth, but she had stopped breathing. While Marcus arranged her in a more-or-less straight position and patted her dry, her fish-eaten armored appearance changed to a skin-like one. She removed all her jewelry except for her earring, lip ring, and a green and brown stone on a tight, bronze necklace. He covered her with the purple robe.
Marcus felt vaguely guilty over thinking about his own problems while Alisha died. I will have one finger on my right hand…he thought. The redness advanced up his right index finger.
He dipped his knife experimentally in the water; the water flowed from the smallest details. Cautiously, then harder, he pressed the knife point against his arm. It felt sharp but did not cut him, or leave a red or white mark.
Alisha had piled her gold jewelry (some beaded or set with gems) on the ground, and Marcus considered bringing it with him. He heard stories of Alisha’s wealth, and anybody willing to soak solid purple clothes could afford to. Of course, if Marcus took the clothing and most of the jewelry to Lucopoli, he would be arrested under suspicion of theft. Even the plainest items, the earrings, were risky. Warriors looted each other’s armor and weapons, which hardly fit Marcus’ predicament. Why steal if I will turn into an animal for years? he thought.
Marcus found Alisha’s tent and wrapped up in a sweet-smelling blanket but found sitting on her bed, stool, or even the ground impossible. Alisha left one of her cosmetics jars open on its side. She owned the lyre and a weaving stand. Marcus had never seen a mirror before, let alone a freestanding full-length one. He hardly recognized his pustule-scarred face.
I can’t stay in her home, and I need my fingers.
Marcus took a torch and behind ivy, found a door in the obsidian wall. Then he returned to the pool.
I’ll take the jewelry and ask to keep it. If I can’t, I will give it back. Marcus wrapped the jewelry in purple cloth and tied it to his belt.
Most wounds Unata inflicted on Marcus healed, but Marcus’ weight loss remained, and his scabs healed quite quickly. In the feast hall, he felt sick, which meant the diseased warrior already attacked him. How can he attack me if I feel better? Marcus thought. If he found shelter from the wind, far from the feast hall and garden, he might recover, or avoid another attack. The diseased warrior’s possible attack and the horror of Unata’s feast hall overruled wishing to speak to the phoenix.
As Marcus searched for shelter, a riddle repeated in his head:
I am flat and raised, and rough and smooth. I float, but I am heavier than stone. I am clean but have been in filth. One of my parts is sharp and dull. I turn myself, but you cannot turn me. I can be seen through but cannot be seen into. I represent nine figures and more. What am I?
In a grove, he held the knife to the torchlight. The closest tree whacked him with her branch and the others shooed him, saying:
“If you hide here, he will eat our bark.”
“It doesn’t hurt us much, but it is quite ugly.”
“We don’t like to upset him.”
Out of the trees’ range, Marcus broke up the riddle. He was fairly sure the correct answer was “the knife.” Will the riddle monster eat me if I don’t answer him completely? he thought. But The-Dread-and-Sore-Amaze gave it to me….
Marcus flicked, twisted, and otherwise failed to move the knife’s stone—until he turned his entire body. Reflecting seemed different than seeing into or seeing through. The deities oversaw everything, but his labors preoccupied them—that worried and alarmed him, though he also expected it constantly in his normal life.
With the deities’ symbols, the blade showed seven figures. Although the Three-Eyed Goddess and the Two-Headed Deity of Life and Death were the patrons of the shown cities, the knife’s engravings showed different ones. Marcus recognized a couple of symbols as foreign, but forgot which deities they represented, or if the deities belonged to his religion. If the knife’s design included general, vague symbolism, the green and brown stone represented the Three-Eyed Goddess’ hazel eyes. Black and white referred to the Two-Headed-Deity-of-Life-and-Death. The knife’s black, engraved sides symbolized the Death-Head due to the warrior’s deaths, and the white, mirror-like side the Life-Head, showed that the nations would live. “And more” referred to the deity parting into the Goddess of Life and the God of Death. Alternatively, “and more” meant the mirror reflected anybody’s face.
A rider on a headless horse approached, then Marcus noticed the rider’s hips joined a horse’s body and legs. He also either had donkey ears or a unique helmet plume.
“…Trampled to death…” running Marcus panted.
His knife’s stone pointed to the horse warrior, who raced Marcus at a trot, then a walk, occasionally whacking him with the flat. Rarely, Marcus slashed or stabbed, and less often, wounded him.
With a stitch in his side, Marcus slowed to a walk. He gouged the horse warrior’s sword, but the horse warrior kicked Marcus’ ribs. He tossed the torch and knife in opposite directions. Marcus scrambled for his knife.
Continuous lightning, without thunder or rain, distracted Marcus and the rider. Ball lightning drifted around them, and ozone and sulfur filled the air.
The warrior thrust the spear through Marcus’ tunic, intentionally missing his flesh. Marcus chopped the spear in two and picked up the bottom part.
A ball of lightning rolled down the warrior’s sword. The warrior and Marcus’ hair stood on end, then a lightning bolt struck the ground a few feet away. The warrior shouted and reared.
Marcus dropped the spear half, blanket, and jewelry, bolting and shouting, “I’m sorry for stealing! And I’m sorry for burning the torch! What…Do you want me to do…Do you want it back and how am I supposed to do that?”
The walking horse warrior mocked Marcus, who identified the language as Nesatopic. He knew most of the horse’s vulgar vocabulary and the translation reached his ear.
“It scared you, too!” Marcus snapped as if a comment like that ever helped him.
Marcus sprinted to a rocky outcrop, but the horse warrior reached it first. A face-flattening wind blew.
A bird screeched overhead, then the phoenix torch clanged off the horse warrior’s helmet. The warrior collapsed.
A few seconds later, the blanket gusted after Marcus into the smoky outcrop. He called, “Thank you!” The torch, spear, and jewelry clattered off the rocks, and the wind calmed, but Marcus had already tumbled down a flight of stairs.
Stones in the cave’s wall burned and smoked, which alarmed Marcus. Still, he preferred an underground fire to the horse warrior. Cautiously, Marcus retrieved the phoenix torch; the horse warrior had left.
His knife’s stone oscillated from a dim passage to various parts of the ceiling. I don’t want to meet another warrior, he thought.
He had killed Alisha for fear of drowning or choking, and he attacked the horse warrior simply to escape. The next time, he worried he would intentionally fight the warrior, and expected it soon: nearly the entire index finger on his right, dominant hand was red. Why had The-Dread-and-Sore-Amaze bitten off his left ring finger instead of the left middle finger? Now he constantly, involuntarily made the worst gesture known to the Crescent Sea. Don’t complain about having fingers, he thought.
The dim passageway contained an out-of-reach stone staircase. Marcus lowered it with a knife slot, and it swiveled to a lintel.
He followed the burning stones to a crumbling structure built into the caves. Because it resembled a temple, Marcus found a good shelter if he could not kill more warriors.
It can’t be a temple, he thought. The rules indicated deities rarely interacted with people on Calospelegna, but Marcus believed the deities should have temples, the fighters, warriors, and preserved people lived on the holy mountain, and they needed to worship.
One oversized man supported the tilting, cracked ceiling; his spear or stylus propped up the doorway. Marcus passed a line of bronze, burning, oil-filled lamps: life-sized people with lifelike expressions leading sacrificial animals or bearing bronze spelt or molten bronze. Marcus thought molten bronze was impossible, especially without a heat source. At the altar, the lamps depicted a priest sacrificing a young woman. Human sacrifice was a known religious practice around the Crescent Sea, but people like himself rarely witnessed it. Due to the sacrifice and unfamiliar features, he worried he found a mystery religion forbidden to him. The deities wanted me to come here, he told himself. Marcus thought the patron deity sent The-Dread-and-Sore-Amaze to preserve the priest, sacrifices, and warrior from something, possibly another deity.
“I’m not involving myself. I won’t fight in a temple,” Marcus called.
Against the deities’ wishes, Marcus longed to return to his old life. Those on Calospelegna can leave when the seven warriors are defeated.
Because he killed the chosen warriors of three deities, according to the warriors’ and deities’ wishes, he worried about the other deities’ reactions. Though he remembered, If the fighter survives the labor on Calospelegna, he shall not be subject to divine reaction, he wondered if the deities’ plan included every deity in the pantheon. What about the divine creatures, like The-Dread-and-Sore-Amaze?
Then he realized the deities could not heal his hands or mysteriously alter them like they changed the warriors’ bodies. Marcus had not thought of physical modification until that moment; the refusal disappointed him anyway.
The fighter shall be provided for during the labor. If the deities decide unanimously, the fighter may receive divine assistance. In extraordinary circumstances, the deities may reach a compromise.
Marcus believed that of everywhere in the known world, Oridocia was the most likely place to find divine assistance. Thoroughly, he searched the building for something providential.
Every lamp except the warrior’s lit the building’s interior. The warrior’s lamp held a solid, smooth, yellow substance and a wick. The illegible bronze tablet at the lamp’s pedestal shared letters with Marcus’ language.
The wall over the trapdoor was fresh, dried clay, easy to rehydrate and rewrite, the other temple’s paintings, permanent. While Marcus examined the drying comparison chart of deities’ symbols, a trap door opened. His knife slowed and stopped him. But he almost lost the knife. So, Marcus slid onwards, clutching the knife.
Hissing and shouting snakewomen lined the walls and galleries; Marcus assumed they had been preserved, but he stared at them—until several snakes carried an armless, legless woman towards him. Closer, he identified her as the warrioress: Two snakes came from the warrioress’ right forearm and one each from her right knee, left shoulder, and left foot.
Marcus seriously considered spelunking up the slide, but the warrioress dragged him to the center of the warm cavern. Her legs’ snakes held her upright, as steady and still as legs, and the warrioress’ arms coiled firmly around him like rope, at arm’s length. The warrioress wore the green and brown stone on a leather band around her human upper arm, over a mended and patched tunic-like garment.
Positive Ogdolia would understand his predicament, he noticed the average snakewoman flattened one breast more than the other, was of child-rearing age, and had white human skin and unfamiliar clothes.
No! Please, don’t be Svalug!
He spotted a few more snakelets (one nursing) and a complete absence of men or snakemen.
Svalug women!
Marcus lied, “I can’t have children! Men in my family never have children! Not on my father’s side or mother’s side! We can’t!”
Marcus’ ear interpreted the warrioress’ words as the unsarcastic sentences, “Congratulations on your baby. Go home to your wife and baby.”
Snakeskin scarred her black hair and the rest of her pale body, at least what little Marcus saw. Snakeskin replaced one ear. Her right, human eye was deep brown and her snake-eye yellow. The snakeskin was tan with yellow, black, and reddish-brown markings, and the snakes’ eyes were yellow.
A few months ago, Marcus read on the bulletin board that, the year before, the Svalug tribal queen poisoned herself to avoid capture. He bungled her name.
“Katarami. Kah-TAHR-amee. Katarami,” she said. “Mzia, prepare him.”
Mzia roughly bit Marcus’ left arm, cut open the bite, sucked the venom out, and washed and bandaged it. She held his nose until he drank a body-temperature, bloody, herby potion that burned his mouth, throat, and stomach. Both Mzia and Katarami had an earring and lip ring.
The treatment baffled him, but he worried about voicing objections.
Marcus drew his knife and stabbed Katarami, hoping to escape. The single spurt of blood burned his skin. She crushed his hand until he dropped his knife, then she handed it to Mzia.
“We do not fight yet,” Katarami said. “I am crying from the wound. You do not make me cry.”
The deep stab wound had already stopped bleeding, apparently without treatment.
I need a plan…She’ll kill me.
Katarami explained that the snakewomen’s poison was the antidote to hers and vice-versa, which confused her. Fighters required her and Mzia’s early intervention—Katarami grew more powerful than predicted.
Through the explanation, Katarami stopped crying, and white, leathery skin grew over the stab wound. Marcus expected a snake to burst out at any moment.
She isn’t a snake, he thought. Longing to run, Marcus told himself, I need my right fingers.
“Fight now!” Katarami shouted.
The snakewomen and snakelets quieted. Mzia tossed Marcus’ knife to him, and he fumbled it, as Katarami’s snakes slithered away. She sat cross-legged with other snakewomen.
Katarami’s snakes half-surrounded Marcus; she controlled them like arms and legs, and she required at least one stationary snake to stand upright. He wished he had two whole hands and the phoenix torch to brandish at the snakes on one side while knifing with the other hand. When Marcus attacked one side, Katarami tended to bite or coil around the opposite side. Still, Marcus half-severed her shoulder snake, and he ducked the two or three spurts of blood.
Her snakes constricted him, but eyes shut, and head turned aside, Marcus plunged the knife into her chest. Katarami’s coils relaxed. He wriggled his arms free, then Katarami knocked him down as she fell.
Through a closed mouth, Marcus yelled “Get off!” Katarami bit his back as he fought free.
“Please stop. I don’t want to cut your head off,” Marcus gasped wheezily. He attempted to wipe his face clean on a sweating arm and cautiously squinted.
Katarami’s mouth and the remaining snakes hissed at him. Like lizard eggs half-dug up, a white growth covered her heart and shoulder; Marcus expected a baby snake to burst out any moment. Either run now or cut her neck and run, he thought. But he doubted he could chop off a head.
Marcus grabbed the larger snake from her right forearm and slashed through it. The snakehead’s fangs embedded in his arm, but he kept a slippery grip on the smaller one and pried out the head. He yanked the smaller snake towards him. Clumsily, Marcus slashed her shoulder and throat to the spinal cord and a snake’s head drooped mid-bite.
The watching snakewomen quieted further. They will kill me, Marcus thought.
“Please don’t kill me,” he called.
Katarami’s mouth and snakes hissed in unison, and Mzia hurried to listen. She completely ignored Marcus, which relieved him. Then Mzia left, calling, “Do not tend her wounds. Follow him, if necessary, but do not kill him.”
Marcus untangled himself and crawled out of Katarami’s reach. Something kept her snakes alive and functional, but Katarami’s human body became limp and still. Her snakes fought independently, but he dodged them and stepped on one just enough to immobilize it.
Though he longed to escape, he rolled Katarami over and checked the wounds. Her clotted neck lacked a leathery growth. Marcus slit her neck, heart, and the leathery growths over her snakish stumps. A minute later, they stayed open, and her snakes had weakened.
In severe pain, Marcus hobbled from the cavern. The scorpion-tailed monster galloped down a passageway, so Marcus dodged into a room—full of baskets holding snake eggs. He crouched behind a boulder.
“Hold arrows!” Mzia ordered, and others echoed.
“Marcus of Lucopoli, leave the nursery!” Mzia said.
“I know four…five…two Marcuses, three Marcoses, and two nicknames, so who do you mean?” Marcus asked.
“The Marcus of Lucopoli who is a potter.”
“Marcus of Lucopoli cannot be a potter,” Marcus quavered.
“Look in front of you. Walk. Turn when I say. For every child you step on, I will remove an organ.”
Walking, Marcus said, “I haven’t stepped on children. I didn’t mean to disturb your…eggs…”
Soon, Marcus became too dizzy and weak to drag himself further, and he fainted.
Marcus vaguely remembered what happened next and drifted in and out of consciousness. Mzia bit him, easily made him drink the potion again, and the scorpion-tailed monster stung his upper back and buttocks. People carried him to a well-lit cave and moved around him, sponging, and bandaging the bites.
Agnus and somebody else balanced wheezing Marcus upright. He folded to the stone floor.
“Well, you’ll hold yourself up in a minute.” Agnus creaked to the floor and propped him up. “Open your eyes. Count your fingers aloud, not your thumbs.”
Marcus squinted at the hands Agnus held up and mumbled, including his thumbs, “One…two…three…four…five…No!” According to his black right middle finger and his reddening right ring finger showed approximately an hour passed since he entered the Svalug women’s cavern. His right ring finger was red halfway to the second knuckle.
“Close enough for now.” Agnus laid his hands down. “You’d’ve’d six, but Katarami hasn’t died. You’d’ve died if Mzia and the Winged Manticore hadn’t gotten you, and if Katarami hadn’t sent them to you. So many fighters died after fighting the snakewomen, The-Dread-and-Sore-Amaze turned the Sphinx into a Winged Manticore to cure them.”
“Do I have to kill him?” Marcus asked.
“Who?” Agnus asked.
Marcus pointed to the Winged Manticore. “I don’t want to. And isn’t he Lucopolitan?”
“No! Don’t kill him! He is not a warrior!”
“Good.”
“The Lucopolitan warrior carries Calospelegna on his back, so he won’t help you. Us preserved ones have very specific instructions.”
“From the caverns? But how long has it happened?”
“Longer than you’ve been here. You can’t stay with us anymore,” Agnus said.
“…But I’m too weak to fight now…”
Agnus and another woman silently hustled Marcus to the three-way passageway. Marcus’ knife and phoenix torch seemed heavier than before. Every part of his body hurt, and he struggled to breathe, but his legs steadied during the walk.
Marcus leaned against the wall to chase his breath; it refused to be caught. Considering the night’s events, of course, he felt sick. But his ribs ached and his breathing hurt. His bandages numbed his bites, or so Agnus claimed.
He wished The-Dread-and-Sore-Amaze took his fingers from left to right, rather than the most recently fully reddened one. Then he could just hide until dawn, keeping his right hand intact. Even a trained fighter could not kill the other three in the time remaining: one hour at the earliest and two hours at the latest.
It's too late to save my hands, but the deities want me to fight, Marcus thought.
He determined that every lethal wound he gave a warrior was quite different from the wound from which The-Dread-and-Sore-Amaze preserved him. Also, wounding the preserved part hardly affected the warrior, and, if the wound fell on a preserved part, the warrior survived an imaginably lethal injury—the monstrous elements functioned as armor. Marcus hated planning how to kill, and it disgusted him, but to kill a warrior quickly, he needed to attack the most human spots. Confident in finding a warrior if he went in the direction his knife’s stone pointed, Marcus limped down a passageway.
He came to a carved rolling stone with an incomplete machine. Marcus manipulated his knife in the slot until a metal bar emerged from the stone and completed the handle—the wrong shape for hand-turning. As Marcus pedaled, the stone rolled aside.
Marcus went into a stuffy chamber lit with oil lamps. He walked slowly from necessity, which saved him from drop-offs. Too weak to hold up the phoenix torch except to mark his route, it scraped the floor.
The venom continuously wore off, but Marcus felt feverish and shaky, both reasonable aftereffects of his recent activities.
Marcus found many dead-ends, but one had an inscription with backward letters. Marcus’ knife reflected them, and he read, Find the door. Marcus’ knife quickly cut through the thin wall.
He stepped into a corridor with a grooved wall, and, experimentally, Marcus pressed his foot to it. His foot stuck to the wall. He steadied himself with his knife and then raised his other foot to the wall. Stones ground and the walls shook. Some stones lowered, while others rose.
The groove ended facing a wall with a passage too high to jump. Marcus uncomfortably walked on the ceiling. He pulled himself into it, and, to his relief, he felt like standing the right way up.
An inscription over the door read: The fighter cures the disease.
The door had a deep recess with five fingerholes, clearly hand-shaped. He scraped dried gore from the fingerholds. Holding his knife between his palms, forming one complete hand, slid his knife into the slot. If he made a fist or raised or lowered his hand, sharp spikes and a wobbly stone would ruin them.
When the door opened, a recognizable smell wafted down the tunnel: plague.
I can’t kill it. I can’t reach the River Djebu. Then Marcus wondered if only his knife killed warriors.
Doctors knew that, inexplicably, an immune person in direct contact with the plague spread it to a healthy person. Until Marcus healed, his friends’ parents worried about his buboes bursting and infecting their children. If he stood close enough to smell it, he risked carrying the plague to Ogdolia and his baby. Maybe he could purge his lungs and bathe before going home.
Apparently sleeping, though the plague caused days-long insomnia, plague victims lay on beds and the floor, dribbling pus, cerebrospinal fluid, urine, vomit, and diarrhea.
As Marcus splashed and shuffled through similar rooms, his mouth was so dry, he thought it absorbed the water before it reached his throat. He suddenly needed to urinate in an overflowing bucket. Then he forced himself to continue walking. Sweat soaked Marcus and his teeth chattered. Despite double vision, he recognized the furnishings from his trip to Phahmese.
A hydrocephalic, pustule-covered Phahmesian man lay on a bed in an otherwise empty room. He wore a linen skirt and a belt with a green and brown stone; he also had an earring and lip ring.
Marcus felt for the disease warrior’s weak, rapid heart. The warrior held Marcus’ hand to his chest and his red down-turned eyes fixed on him. Probably from Marcus’ dizziness, the room spun. He tasted barley gruel and felt as anxious as he had when, aged six, he contracted the plague. Why am I sick again? he thought.
“You are immune. Please, tend the sick with me,” the disease warrior said.
“No, but I want to,” Marcus said. “…I should…”
“But you love your wife, and she—”
“She is in Lucopoli.”
“She came here for treatment, for she is near death.”
The disease warrior pointed to the bed, where infected Ogdolia lay under a sheet. Marcus rushed to her. Ogdolia’s long, black, curly hair had been cut to her scalp and one side of her head shaved clean for trepanning. Pus dripped into the freshly sewn cut.
“Unfortunately, the pus from her head entered her brain, and she will likely die soon,” the disease warrior said.
Marcus believed him; the complication terrified his mother. He whispered comforting things to her, but also thought, But she couldn’t become so ill in a few hours! Hydrocephaly developed after a few days. “Don’t believe him,” he whispered.
“Don’t you know, unfortunately, mothers spread the plague to their unborn and nursing babies?”
“Yes, but it isn’t normal…” Marcus felt Ogdolia’s fever long before he touched her forehead.
“It often happens, but, fortunately, we have a treatment.”
Marcus sniffed the pus on his hand.
“Perhaps extracting the baby will save your child, but, unfortunately, your wife will likely die.”
“How did she come here?” Marcus asked, gently turning over Ogdolia’s hand.
His wife burned her finger while cooking supper; the burn appeared as he examined the spot.
“She came with other plague victims,” the doctor said.
The-Dread-and-Sore-Amaze brought everybody here, Marcus thought. “I’m hallucinating her. And I don’t want to spread the plague.”
The disease warrior felt Marcus’ forehead with a hot hand. “Your fever is too low to cause hallucinations.”
“Don’t involve her and our baby!” Marcus found the warrior’s heart again. “They have nothing to do with my situation! …And I shouldn’t spread the plague.”
“Of course, I will treat her, but, unfortunately, she may—”
Marcus slid the dagger through the man’s heart and blood trickled down Marcus’ arm. The gruel taste disappeared. Scared he doomed Ogdolia and their baby, he looked at the thankfully empty bed. All plaguey bodily fluids disappeared.
Returning to the passageway required all of Marcus’ effort. The stone pointed down the remaining passageway, but he slumped to the floor.
I can’t participate as a sick, lame animal…
Throughout the night, Marcus had worried that the shock of The-Dread-and-Sore-Amaze taking him would hurt Ogdolia or the baby. A potential life without them was awful, and if he lost more fingers, he doubted he could support himself, let alone them. Having the maximum number of fingers prevented future suffering. By fighting, Marcus gave himself the opportunity to save at least one finger, maybe more.
And if he sat longer, he would fall asleep. Marcus forced himself up and followed the passage, which led to Belkish’s cave.
He wandered around Calospelegna. When Marcus encountered the warrior, he said, “I can’t kill you outright, and you have suffered too much to attempt a battle.” His earring and lip ring marked him as a warrior.
Marcus’ symptoms had faded somewhat, but he was too exhausted to reply. Eventually, his knife’s stone pointed to the rock outcrop, where he collapsed. Involuntarily and immediately, Marcus fell asleep.
The warrior prodded Marcus at an awkward angle with his spear. Marcus scrunched up, but then he lunged forward and stabbed the warrior’s thigh. The warrior limped circles around the outcrop.
Marcus checked his right pinkie, red to the fingernail. He worried about tracking time with totally red fingers. Katarami’s death also complicated matters: unless he fought her again, he expected to lose one finger from his dominant hand. Guiltily, he thought she might die.
Scared of the horse warrior, Marcus decided to find the fire warrior.
The fire warrior’s wick was out of reach, but Marcus figured out that his stylus or spear functioned as a lamplighter. Quickly, the beeswax melted into floor groves. The ceiling and the warrior’s slab lowered, and Marcus crouched underneath. The alternative was retreating, and he doubted, if another route existed, he had the strength to find it.
The warrior, glowing red-hot, stopped in a dark and silent room with a slightly tilted floor. Tin dripped onto the slightly tilted floor. Marcus cut a foothold and inserted his knife in a slot—but his right pinkie disappeared. He stood up, then snatched his knife from the approaching tin. The bronze deformed.
The webbing between his white left index finger and olive thumb reddened. Marcus expected to fight two or three more warriors, but all his fingers had either been taken or turned red and kept. Oh no…he thought. Marcus realized how much his red fingers encouraged him.
“They can be taken? But I saved them!”
Marcus carved deep footholds in the wall and three fingerholds for his left hand. Wobbling, with his right hand, he activated his knife key. One stone in each wall slid aside and ice-cold water poured through them. A vent in each wall let in fresh air.
“It has an exit somewhere, and the water probably opens it,” Marcus told himself.
A red mound with a black crust illuminated the steamy room, but as the water rose, the light faded. The steaming phoenix objected to the water; Marcus quavered comforting things. Though the water warmed, Marcus swam to the pouring ice-cold water, worried about the temperature increasing. He coughed from sulfur fumes.
Marcus swam on his back to the grinding stone and into the passage. Regretfully, he held his breath, unstrapped the phoenix, and entered the passage. The phoenix sank underwater and extinguished.
The passage tilted up, then down into a half-filled chamber. The red and black mass followed him, occasionally shedding a floating, gray substance. Marcus wedged himself into a corner. Ice-cold, filthy, smelly water flooded the chamber, but just as water reached the ceiling, it drained.
The water brought him to a drain partly filled with ice-cold water and ice chunks. Though he inhaled some water, he survived. Now the red and black mass resembled a person, and whether it was a Winged Manticore-like situation or the fire warrior, it scared and confused Marcus. The warriors are supposed to be human, he thought.
He swam toward the light but bumped his head on the ice. He cut an air hole in it. While making a large hole to escape through, he lost his knife. When he found it, he lost the air hole and cut a new one. It was the thickest ice he had ever seen.
Meanwhile, the fire warrior oozed into Alisha’s pool, like thick mud, and swam near the surface, melting the ice, slightly warming the water, and breaking free of the pumice. Marcus watched him for a few seconds.
Get out of the water, Marcus thought.
Marcus cut a new air hole and attempted to widen it, clutching his knife in both numb hands. He struggled to stay afloat. The fire warrior brought Marcus’ pathetic stabs. Heat radiated off the fire warrior.
Then the fire warrior took a deep breath and submerged again to knock the remaining pumice from his charred body. On the sixth try, Marcus clambered out of the pool.
“Leave the water before the lightning hits it!” Marcus called. “…It isn’t…normal lightning…”
The fire warrior floated by Alisha’s body, talking to her, and periodically dunking himself and rolling over. His charred burns began healing into severe burns.
Marcus warmed suspiciously quickly. I don’t know how to kill him, Marcus thought. Also, he found himself incapable of moving—until the fire warrior swam towards him with his knife. Marcus backed into a rosebush.
The fire warrior tossed Marcus’ knife into the bush, asking a question in a language very similar to Marcus’.
“Please repeat it. I didn’t hear it,” Marcus said, staring at the fire warrior’s green and brown teeth. Gold tinted his lips and ear.
He recognized some words in the question and his ear filled in the rest: “Why did you cut Alisha in such a manner?”
“I don’t know how to kill people! I didn’t want to, but she was drowning me.”
“I hope I won’t avenge her. If I killed you from revenge, I would not give you opportunity to earn your life, and I would not be killing for our purpose.”
“I can’t fight you,” Marcus said. “But…The last time I stabbed you, it didn’t work, so I want to escape…”
I will overheat…And I can’t survive another battle, he thought, finding the knife.
The fire warrior returned to Alisha. Feeling like a low-life, Marcus jumped onto him and stabbed him twice in the back. The fire warrior sunk and bobbed to the surface.
Once recovered from the cold shock, Marcus hobbled to the garden door.
The sky dimmed and, suddenly, the sun swooped over the horizon. Lightning abruptly halted. A total eclipse darkened the sky. It hurt his eyes and, because watching an eclipse was bad luck, he focused on his two-thirds red thumb. The sun emerged, flashed closer and northward, and then darkness fell again.
I’m supposed to be an animal, Marcus thought.
The Winged Manticore landed beside Marcus, who squeaked and brandished his knife.
“What’s wrong with the sun?” Marcus quavered, as lightning resumed.
“A deity other than the Sky-God moved it. The Sky-God intervened to save the world. The deities are discussing the situation. At the moment, I must examine Anaxeus, a scribe and warrior from Jadikira.”
The Winged Manticore padded to the pool and Marcus followed beyond stinging range.
“Please, let me keep my fingers,” Marcus said.
“I do not decide.”
The Winged Manticore grudgingly entered the water and pushed Anaxeus to the edge, then wrangled him onto the gravel, forbidding help from Marcus. He examined the body briefly, while Marcus paced to keep warm.
“Anaxeus is quite dead,” the Winged Manticore said, approaching him. “You shall keep a finger. You need only worry about one more finger and warrior.”
“I can’t fight more,” Marcus said.
“It is your decision.” The Winged Manticore had a lip ring, and his earring tangled in his mane.
“Do they truly want to be here and fight me?”
“Oh, yes. They have various reasons and motivations, but I cannot discuss specifics with the fighter. I may say that you killed Thones and Katarami in the same hour, and no other fighter has killed two in one hour.”
“Who was Thones?”
“Thones was a soldier and doctor present at the first outbreak of plague, in Bekhet. Katarami led the Svalug tribe. Belkish began a civil war in the Empire of Giruppik. A volcanic eruption destroyed Anaxeus’ home long ago, and the nursery rhyme Insula Peninsula comes from it. I believe you know the other warriors’ stories.”
“What about the horse-man warrior?”
“I cannot discuss him yet.”
“Agnus, the other preserved Lucopolitans, and some warriors have been dead for years, but how can they be alive?” Marcus said.
“The deities resurrected them, and they are very alive. Every warrior shall die and go to the afterlife.”
Like a cat, the Winged Manticore quietly groomed himself dry and clean.
Marcus worried about what would happen when other nations discovered he killed their people. He wondered about Ogdolia’s reaction to the night; she might understand.
Marcus’ right thumb reddened, and his left thumb turned white. He kept his other four fingers.
“But I can’t work anymore,” Marcus said. He barely held the knife.
A couple minutes later, Marcus asked, "Is the correct answer my knife?"
"Yes," the Winged Manticore said.
Finally, The Dread-and-the-Sore-Amaze appeared to Marcus. The deities have reached a compromise due to extraordinary circumstances. Marcus shall become a boar, and the sun shall finish rising in a customary manner. Manticore, send for Agnus.
The Winged Manticore flew away, while Marcus begged for his fingers.
He dropped to his hands and feet, and two of his lower teeth jutted over his lip. His two front cloven hooves missed half of each, but he wobbled like a piglet. His normal squeaks and squeals became pig-like. Agnus approached.
Open your mouth, The-Dread-and-Sore-Amaze said to Marcus.
Agnus set his knife in Marcus’ open mouth and lashed it to his tusks.
Continue with the labor, The-Dread-and-Sore-Amaze said.
Marcus practiced walking and moving faster around Calospelegna. White, red, and black colored his front hooves, which had one clove each.
Marcus correctly assumed the horse warrior would find him, and Marcus dreaded dying. The horse warrior moved at a pace difficult for him to match. The spear hardly wounded Marcus.
He dodged between the horse warrior’s legs and stopped but failed to trip the horse warrior. As the warrior twisted and turned, looking for him, Marcus sliced through a leg; the horse warrior kicked him and lost his balance.
Marcus charged the struggling horse warrior’s back. He stopped just short of goring with his tusks. A boar body was too unwieldy to attack the warrior face-to-face. But the horse warrior turned over and blocked his knife with his spear, so Marcus ran behind his back. Marcus cut through the spear and plunged his knife into the horse warrior’s side at approximately chest height. He easily shook free of the horse warrior, who gurgled, unable to stop two more attacks. Then Marcus backed out of a spear’s reach.
The horse warrior’s clothing resembled a horse blanket, and Marcus had seen a green and brown stone fastening it at the belly. So, Marcus knew he defeated the last warrior.
The-Dread-and-Sore-Amaze descended and restored Marcus’ human form, which felt much better. The red on his thumb stopped spreading, which relieved Marcus—now he stopped worrying about keeping his fingers.
“Who was the horse warrior?” Marcus asked.
He was Klonos of Nesatope, The-Dread-and-Sore-Amaze said.
But he won games and fought many battles, Marcus thought. …He lost an army at the Battle of Natyline.
You completed the labor and defeated the seven warriors.
“But more than eight nations live around the Crescent Sea, and I don’t know how many more live beyond it. We have more than eight gods, too. Why did killing the seven warriors help the situation?” Marcus asked.
The deities chose the nations for specific purposes and with reasons mortals might not understand. Great changes may come to your life. I shall carry you home now.
Yoshi the Electromagnetic Cloud
Little Boy blasted Yoshi’s body to ash and bits of bone, and the shockwave carried her far from Hiroshima. She remembered the pain that lasted a fraction of a second. Then she remembered the explosion—the light blinded her first, and then the sound rattled her eardrums.
Now wind tore her apart, painlessly, but uncomfortably. Yoshi tasted metal and smelled burned flesh, and underneath it, dust and burning rubble. She attempted to rub her eyes and sniffle, but her hands passed through her face. Scared, she looked at her transparent, oddly-colored hands, and no air came through her nose. Yoshi looked around and yelped at the distance between her and the water, and her and dry ground, and went into hysterics.
Eventually, Yoshi heard a man calling for the crying person. Yoshi forced herself through the air to him, relieved to find an adult. But when Yoshi reached the Imperial Japanese Army soldier, he disappeared. She dissolved into tears again.
Yoshi forced herself through the air to Japan much faster than she expected and wondered if she missed Hiroshima. But Yoshi recognized the bay islands, and Hiroshima was larger than the other nearby towns. An unusual, dissipating cloud hung over the city.
Before the air raid, she had picked up a leaflet from the United States, warning of a bombing raid worse than the ones on Germany. Yoshi begged her mother to evacuate, but her mother needed to work and they did not qualify for official evacuation.
Hiroshima consisted of scorched buildings, limbless trees, rubble, and ash. Yoshi instinctively shrunk from the developing firestorm, except the heat felt tolerable. The bombing overcame the firebreaks that she and other children had built, which annoyed her, and the concrete buildings, which alarmed her. She dreaded her mother’s munitions plant blew up.
Her mother told her, during an air raid, to absolutely never, ever, under any circumstances, for any reason whatsoever, even in an emergency, be on the same street as a munitions plant. Yoshi searched for it anyway and then her home, but found neither. Her mother was probably in a demolished hospital.
Yoshi, an only child, was too young to care for herself under the circumstances. On a normal day, she thought she was old enough. Her father died honorably in Saipan. Most of her extended family lived elsewhere in Japan; she forgot their addresses and looking for her mother’s address book was ridiculous. Stories of what Americans did to Japanese people and Japanese-Americans scared her, and so nothing would convince her to live with her Japanese-American family. Her family’s friends might take her in temporarily, or tell her where to find help.
Yoshi grew sadder and angrier through her search for Hiroshima and despaired of adults responding to her calls. She doubted the survivors could help her. They congregated together and walked in lines, with their arms and legs spread apart, and flesh and ragged clothing hanging off their bodies. Some made incomprehensible sounds with wide-open mouths, which Yoshi strained to hear. Occasionally, people near her slumped or fell. Her mother was probably in the same condition.
So, Yoshi approached a group of survivors. A few feet away, the ones closest to her fell over dead, and smoldering wood ignited. That scared Yoshi—there was something deadly on the ground, like a gas leak. Fluttering backward, she bumped into another victim. A mushroom cloud proportional to the person’s size erupted and ash and miniscule fragments of charred bone piled on the ground. Terrified, Yoshi bolted into the air.
Yoshi felt safer over Hiroshima than the Sea of Japan, but she worried about coming too close to the ground. Lingering smoke and dusty particles accumulated in her cloud without feeling dusty or smoke-filled. She adjusted her cloud to hear the wind, the only sound, better. Then she regained her normal vision and, if she wanted, she could see beyond human’s light spectrum, which explained the weird colors.
Along with missing her normal sense of taste and touch, she longed to smell anything except the sickening stench of her own body burning. She was not hungry or thirsty, and her other bodily functions seemed nonexistent. It scared her, and felt weird, but seemed good under the circumstances.
Finally, Yoshi thought the deadly thing on the ground must have been repaired, shut off, or aired out, and she descended to Hiroshima again. Her presence accidentally killed people. Yoshi realized that, inexplicably, she had cremated the victim. It horrified her, but she could not convince herself she was wrong.
She decided to avoid people, especially her mother, and including people in Yoshi’s condition. She saw them in the distance.
Another massive shockwave hit Yoshi, followed by a detonation. She turned in the detonation’s direction, where a mushroom cloud hung. Obviously, with an unfamiliar weapon, the Allies attacked Japan, and Yoshi suspected the United States carried out the bombing raid. She wished the bomb made small explosions inside the city, explaining the cremated victim.
Yoshi saw a transparent radioactive lady in a nurse’s uniform. She watched for quite a while, unsure how to treat a distraught adult.
But the nurse asked, “Little girl, do you need help?”
“Stay away!” Yoshi yelled, panic overruling politeness. “Don’t touch people! Don’t touch me!”
“I won’t. I am Hara-san. Who are you?”
“Yoshi,” Yoshi said, backing away. “I can’t go near anything. Or anybody. Living people die if I touch them.”
“The United States bombed us and asked Japan to surrender.”
“Japan won’t surrender,” Yoshi said, confidently.
“They used one bomb on Hiroshima, and I suppose they did it again to Nagasaki.”
“One bomb?” Yoshi asked.
Hara-san explained what little she knew, then said, “You were right to stay away from people. Come with me if you want.”
“I want my mother,” Yoshi said.
“I wish you could find her. But if we are radioactive, we will make her sick.”
“Couldn’t you please treat her?”
“I wish I could, but I can’t. Come with me if you want.”
“If I bump into somebody, he sticks to me, and I don’t like it. Stay away from people.”
Yoshi sped away from Hara-san.
The Japanese free people and the Korean slave labor had become radioactive clouds, and before conflict arose, they moved away from each other but remained in contact.
Concerned, Hara-san checked on Yoshi, and convinced her to visit other radioactive clouds, who lived over the Sea of Japan. Unable to speak Korean, Yoshi visited the Japanese group. But Yoshi thought she somehow killed the cloud who called for her and the idea scared her too much to associate with other radioactive clouds. Hara-san comforted her.
The radioactive clouds listened to the radio. Because the ability seemed separate from their hearing and radioactive clouds frazzled electrical wires, the radioactive clouds thought they received and transmitted radio signals.
Over the radio, Yoshi heard the disconcerting news of Japan’s surrender. It made sense because it stopped the atomic bombing. She hoped nobody dropped an atomic bomb again. Then she observed the occupation of Japan and the war crimes trials and wished the rebuilt Hiroshima was more like the one she remembered. From anger, she plotted vengeance and punishments.
Whatever sort of being the radioactive clouds were, only they knew they lived. The Japanese radioactive clouds figured out they were not true ghosts, yūrei, and, therefore, they were not vengeful ghosts, onryō. The words monster and mutant seemed wrong. They survived the atomic bombings, but in such a changed state, they did not consider themselves hibakusha, such as the living victims Yoshi encountered in Hiroshima. Yoshi considered herself half-dead. She longed to be completely alive in Japan, either as she had before the bomb or as a hibakusha.
The radioactive clouds rarely interacted with people for their safety and because the situation was unbelievable. Experiencing it forced radioactive clouds to accept it. Yoshi despaired of finding a solution to her existence.
Lonely and bitter Yoshi lashed out at marine life or the occasional seabird or coastal animal until a codfish became a radioactive cloud—it was an innocent victim, like her. Because the codfish bumbled around wreaking havoc, Yoshi absorbed it. She supposed she constantly killed microorganisms and plants, too. Following the codfish incident, when frustrated, she practiced controlling radiation.
Hara-san tried to calm Yoshi, but they disagreed with each other and argued.
They removed themselves from their conversation before Yoshi became violently upset. She was so temperamental; the other radioactive clouds feared her. She also scared herself; she might kill them. She ran away from radioactive clouds if enraged and, eventually, Yoshi stopped visiting radioactive clouds entirely. Occasionally, somebody came to her.
Radiation was odorless, invisible, tasteless, and scentless, but Yoshi and the other radioactive clouds sensed the various kinds.
Yoshi discovered that if she hovered near Hiroshima or Nagasaki, the radiation increased her strength and volume. Feeding on nuclear radiation was a personal choice among the radioactive clouds. Having a head start, Yoshi swelled. She realized the more she grew, the greater the risks she posed to people.
Observations of fasting radioactive clouds indicated she could live off background radiation quite well. Yoshi practiced emitting or restraining all types of radiation—gamma rays, X-rays, ultraviolet light, visible light, infrared radiation, and microwave radiation—, and, therefore, she needed to feed. Also, the radiation remained on Earth, but Yoshi held it within her cloud and lived far from people. Because discharging radiation simply put it into the atmosphere again, she reabsorbed it immediately.
Once able to contain her radiation so that living things survived her presence, Yoshi began eavesdropping on university courses. She learned physics and English. Gradually, with interruptions, she added various nuclear studies and the language used by each nuclear power spoke.
Correctly, physicists predicted that the nuclear radiation drifting around the world and decaying would become less harmful. Initially, physicists believed the radioactive clouds were part of the drift, possibly held together by wind currents. But radiation dotted remote spots or blobbed together in small clusters.
Physicists called the phenomena “radiological lakes.” Everybody thought the radiological lakes were a normal side-effect of the atomic bombing.
Physicists thought the atomic bombs might set the atmosphere on fire, and they calculated the chances were extremely low. The radioactive clouds surprised physicists. To many people, the effects of nuclear weapons seemed like rogue waves or out-of-season tornadoes.
The radiological lakes were too high in the atmosphere to harm people on the ground or at sea. Airplanes skirted them. Radio waves disrupted communications, but people coped. Meteorologists tracked radioactive clouds’ paths, while astronomers accounted for them while planning space flights. The radioactive clouds bypassed publicized aircraft or spacecraft. In several instances, a classified craft approached a radioactive cloud and, in seconds, it dodged the craft or withdrew from the flight path.
The nuclear programs frustrated Yoshi. The news reported steps taken to prevent nuclear war, but Yoshi had an obvious solution: stop making bombs and destroy the instructions.
When the United States, Soviet Union, and other countries tested nuclear weapons, Yoshi sensed the radiation gush from the weapons, rather like smelling water. Yoshi traveled at light speed to every test site. The fallout concerned her as much as the radiation, and collecting radiation from the open air was easier than from a contaminated area, where a descent might add to the problems. So, Yoshi swept through the area and the fallout gathered inside her cloud.
Physicists’ plans and experiments accounted for the radiological lake’s (Yoshi’s) presence, but she drove them to inaccuracies regarding non-alive radiation. After noticing the problem, Yoshi shortened the time spent at test sites.
Power stations, radioactive materials processing facilities, and waste sites popped up with little risk to people. Using her radiological senses, Yoshi agreed with physicists that the background radiation was low. Due to potential accidents and the unfamiliarity of nuclear technology, she thought placing it near a city was inherently unsafe.
Because she did not know the effect she had on plutonium, uranium, and other radioactive materials, Yoshi decided against depleting radiation from the warheads, processing facility materials, power station fuel, waste sites, and the like. But she wondered if to stop nuclear disasters, the risks she posed to people were acceptable. She lacked the confidence and scientific data to interfere or experiment.
Yoshi coincidentally arrived at the Bikini Atoll before a test, and instead of feeding, waited for the test. Whatever happened could not be worse than a nuclear detonation. She extended a sliver of her cloud. Gingerly, Yoshi soaked up the radiation from the unexploded warhead. It felt like eating a whole ginkgo nut if lava filled the center. And nothing radiologically terrible or wonderful happened. The warhead caused a pinprick spike in her overall radiation and settled into her cloud.
The physicists declared the warhead a dud that inexplicably heated the weapon. They thought the radiological lake’s temperature remained below the case’s melting point. Transferring radiation from an object to Yoshi or from Yoshi to an object produced heat, which Yoshi thought was obvious. Worried about test delays, the physicists said it was a one-time incident.
Though Yoshi wanted to absorb more warheads, she wondered about the long-term effects and if they stuffed her permanently.
The Soviet Union built the Mayak Production Association in the 1940s and it produced weapons-grade plutonium. The processing method involved ammonium nitrate and acetates. Previously, the Soviets flowed water contaminated with radiation directly into Lake Kyzyltash. They dumped radioactive waste into the Techa River, Lake Kyzyltash, and Lake Karachay. Before the Soviets collected the cooled waste from Lake Karachay, the lake’s radioactivity lethally dosed people who entered it. Belatedly, deep beneath the Mayak Production Association, the Soviets built concrete and steel storage tanks, each inside a faulty, badly monitored cooler, for ammonium nitrate and hot radioactive waste.
Yoshi wondered how the population of over 240,000 lived. The people, even factory workers, seemed oblivious to the radioactive isotopes inside their bodies and spread finely across the community. She sensed it; doctors studied radiation health problems.
The Mayak plant was among the radioactive clouds’ best feeding grounds; Yoshi always checked that she was alone before feeding there. Elsewhere, from other accidents, she taught herself to identify radiation and fallout spikes. She attributed the Mayak burst to another radioactive cloud feeding—until it persisted.
Upon observing Mayak, Yoshi regretted waiting. The tanks had exploded. Flickering radiation and fallout continuously poured across Russia. She absorbed the exploded tank’s radiation and collected fallout closest to the Mayak Production Association, the rest blended into the pollution.
She expected everybody to die, even if the Soviets evacuated them. Many people survived the high contamination levels. The Soviets evacuated approximately 10,000 people over two years and hardly cleaned up the site. They suppressed media reports about the accident.
Yoshi decided to investigate unusual radiation immediately, giving herself plenty of time to absorb it.
In England, the Windscale Piles produced, among other radioactive materials, weapons-grade plutonium, which required uranium. Rapidly after the Mayak Disaster, Yoshi sensed the Windscale Fire.
Yoshi arranged herself over the fallout. Operators thought the accident, rather than Yoshi, increased radiation. They remained on site to extinguish the fire or minimize further problems.
Quickly, Yoshi found over one hundred displaced, flaming uranium cartridges. She plunged a filament through the concrete containment and wiggled it through the cartridges, which depleted their radiation. Because the fire threatened the other radioactive elements, she drained them as well. The radiation level rose and then plummeted steadily while she worked. Then she retracted the filament, collected stray fallout, and went into the upper atmosphere over the Irish Sea.
On the radio, Yoshi learned that not only did she set the building on fire, but she fatally poisoned the operators and sickened nearby people. Because she temporarily increased the hazards, Yoshi decided to respond to nuclear accidents when either the operators finished their work or the situation became unmanageable.
The government accurately predicted little fallout or radiation from the Windscale Piles fire, but the nuclear accident scared people. The government censored the media. To Yoshi’s relief, the Windscale Piles would be decommissioned, but the lack of evacuations concerned her. She thought Soviet and British authorities underestimated nuclear radiation’s dangers.
Yoshi preferred the current Japanese government to the one she grew up with.
Hara-san encouraged Yoshi’s hypothesis that the radioactive clouds might survive outer space. Yoshi’s scientific arguments confused Hara-san after a certain point, but she liked the idea.
Radiation filled space. Gaseous planets and nebulous clouds existed, but they had high gravity and Yoshi low. The space race sent capsules of living things into outer space and retrieved them alive; Yoshi lacked a capsule, and, according to mainstream biology, could not be alive. Movie monsters contradicted mainstream biology and irritated and insulted her.
Yoshi eased a filament into outer space and felt her first pleasant sensation since 1945. To relax, Yoshi waded through half-atmosphere, half-outer space and let the upper half’s radiation drift around. Earth was a radiological desert compared to space.
Her fallout particles clung to her cloud. She left them behind at the same rate as on Earth, but she collected them much more easily; they tended to hang in one place or travel in a calculable direction and speed. Yoshi discovered if she discharged radiation in a specific direction, her filament moved. The principle worked on larger parts of her cloud.
To shrink her cloud, Yoshi emitted more radiation than she absorbed. She hoped the radiation would not damage celestial bodies out of sight. Sometimes she thought that being Yoshi, her radiation would hit the only extraterrestrial life in the universe.
Over the years, Yoshi wanted to take revenge on the United States, but attacking the rented United States bases in Japan risked harming the Japanese people. She wanted to keep radiation from American civilians, especially children. Finally, Yoshi had a feasible plan. Every attempt of Hara-san’s to ask about Yoshi’s increased grumpiness, isolation, and practice failed.
Manhattan Project historical sites in Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, and Hanford burned down, and the Truman Library and Museum, Truman’s home, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, and offices or laboratories of living Manhattan Project scientists also caught fire. The spreading fires injured various people and others nearby suffered mild to moderate radiation sickness.
There was no good explanation for how the fires started. They caused structural damage and their spread and locations seemed to allow people to escape.
Authorities struggled to lower intense media interest in the fires but suppressed the radiation sickness reports. Some witnesses reported an odd, glowing cloud overhead; most people attributed the witnesses’ claims to fires, stress, or lying.
On July 23, 1960, in Hawaii, servicemembers fell ill with radiation burns and radiation sickness or even were reduced to charred bone and ashes. Many survivors died in hospital or developed cancer.
Survivors reported hearing a child’s crying and wailing, possibly in a foreign language. Some attributed the sound to an open window or to their friends dying, but a medic said a patient insisted he look for a child. The medic glanced around at adults. People across the bases reported a burning, meat-like stench.
Investigators mapped the same event in every Pearl Harbor base, approximately moving west to east, and generally lasting an hour. It affected buildings prohibited to civilians. Inside the buildings, the problems emerged from the top of the building to the bottom and from one end of the hallway to another.
The event shorted out all communications and electrical systems across the base. Some military families complained of radiation sicknesses, but the doctors determined it was mass hysteria.
The investigators thought if the descended radiological lake caused the event, locals would have suffered, too. They searched in vain for a radioactive device, fallout, or high background radiation.
Less than an hour after the last Pearl Harbor attack, nuclear missile silos experienced similar events in a similar pattern. Every missile silo hatch had been melted; the hatch was the entry point. Especially in the most affected areas, heat damaged the concrete, and the air vents had been melted or overheated and warped.
Most missile silo airmen died within a month, and many were too ill with radiation poisoning to report their experiences promptly or coherently. A few airmen said that the dust cloud or a child cried and wailed. Many said that dust fell to the ground, rose into the air, and blew through the ceiling or air vents.
In each silo east of F. E. Warren Air Force Base, investigators found, burnt into a concrete wall, a stick figure wearing monpe trousers, a kimono-style top, and sandals. Of the surviving witnesses, none recognized it.
Entering an American base scared Yoshi, but she knew she could defend herself from any kind of assault.
The atomic bombing of Hiroshima happened too quickly for Yoshi to remember the injuries as they were inflicted. Now she wished she remained ignorant, but continued her attack.
Throughout Yoshi’s rampage, she drew the emitted radiation to her again and gathered fallout. She listened to radio and television broadcasts and military transmissions. Yoshi outpaced the military aircraft following her. She temporarily ignored most aircraft, which flew away from her, and the submarines.
The media remained silent about her military attacks but reported the fires. Yoshi cared little whether the atomic scientists lived or died; she wanted them to experience a radiological attack on something they valued. She assumed they loved their jobs. And the scientifically ignorant authorities might imprison the scientists for concocting another hazardous nuclear experiment.
Physicists and meteorologists encouraged people to remain indoors due to increased radiation. As Yoshi moved east, some regions started evacuations—but she passed before evacuations succeeded—or suggested sheltering in a bomb shelter. She heard one nuclear siren in North Dakota and none anywhere else. Quite a few stations delayed reporting Yoshi's movements, just in case people panicked.
The military called DEFCON 1 a training exercise, which seemed unusual to Yoshi. She had almost completely disabled the United States’ nuclear defenses. In Georgia, Yoshi worried the United States would accuse Japan and retaliate, despite Japan’s clear nonparticipation and the fact that military technology was incapable of her actions.
Yoshi detoured to Washington, D.C. and after checking several other buildings, found the White House. On an exterior wall, Yoshi made her stick figure mark and wrote a note: I died in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Japan or another country did not send me to attack the United States.
Then Yoshi went to Arlington and easily found the Pentagon, from which non-essential personnel were evacuating. Yoshi hovered high above it and then lowered part of her cloud.
The remaining servicemembers wore NBC suits, but they offered little protection from Yoshi’s presence, let alone when, on the top floor, she raised her filament’s temperature high enough to vaporize people. Everything else in the immediate vicinity melted or reached its flashpoint. Radioactive fallout billowed. Yoshi decided another vaporization would spread the fallout too far to collect.
As she worked her filament through the rings and down the levels, she noticed a Coast Guardsman trying to attract her attention and distance himself simultaneously. His face had melted off before he became a radioactive cloud.
“What?” Yoshi snapped.
“Do you deplete Soviet missiles?” he asked.
“Why?”
“The Soviets probably know we don’t have missiles, so they will launch at us.”
“Will you or the Soviet Union attack Japan?”
“Who cares about Japan? If the Soviets—”
Yoshi snarled and reached for him, but he backed away.
“The radiation will affect Japan. Please, deplete the Soviet warheads. I don’t know how or I would.”
Yoshi warned him about absorbing radiation clouds and giving people radiation poisoning.
Then Yoshi depleted the Soviet warheads, limiting collateral damage when possible.
A Soviet observed a stick figure mark and message write itself on the Kremlin’s wall: I died in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Japan, the United States, or another country did not send me to attack the Soviet Union or the United States.
Feeling unwieldy, Yoshi tracked nuclear aircraft into remote areas and ate the missiles. Alternatively, she waited for the aircraft to land and trawled a filament over them.
Yoshi rarely submerged herself underwater because she killed millions of marine creatures every time. Emitting visible light illuminated just a few feet in any direction and from above, she could not study the terrain. Therefore, hunting submarines was much harder than airplanes. She hovered above the ocean until she sensed a submarine’s nuclear torpedoes and missiles, and then her trawling filament melted through the submarines and absorbed the warheads.
The revenge satisfied her and while still lonely and bitter, she had vented most of her frustrations. Even her remaining problems seemed tolerable. However, she worried about losing control of the radiation and destroying the Earth. Yoshi’s cloud felt stuffed and bumpy due to carrying over 19,000 missiles.
She rushed beyond Earth’s orbit and stretched out. The radiation seeped from her cloud.
Then Hara-san peered at Yoshi as if standing on tip-toe on the thermosphere.
“Have they shamed me?” Yoshi asked.
“Yes, and the others won’t visit you,” Hara-san said. “I will, though, and I want to. You are my friend. But the other clouds won’t welcome your return to Earth.”
Yoshi ran away crying, feeling ashamed, and thinking Hara-san hated her. She felt guilty about killing people. However, Yoshi thought her rampage was right, and she was not particularly ashamed of herself.
Physicists and meteorologists called Yoshi’s rampage a “radiological storm.” Conspiracy theorists and some physicists thought the radiological lake moved too intentionally and restrictively to be a natural storm.
Yoshi’s planned route kept the Sun in view behind her. A one-way journey to a celestial body’s orbit required several minutes to several hours, and finding the celestial body’s current orbital location took longer. She tolerated the unnerving distance between planets if she traveled at light speed.
Yoshi visited acceptably hot Mercury, where the Sun shone too brightly to look at directly for long. Closer to the Sun, she felt uncomfortably hot, and looking at it hurt. She believed the Sun’s gravitational field might pull her into it or a solar flare could absorb her radiation and kill her. In the opposite direction, beyond the asteroid belt, Yoshi worried about losing sight of the Sun, and so she always escaped storms. She warmed herself up with radiation. Yoshi swam in the gas planets and, at long last, found two things she could smell: Jupiter and Uranus. To her annoyance, they stunk of ammonia, rotten eggs, something offensively sweet, and bitter almonds. On tolerably cold Pluto, the Sun shone as brightly as a full moon on Earth.
The elements and chemicals reacted with Yoshi’s fallout, and they accumulated in her cloud. The only side-effect was that she felt them in her cloud. Soon, she accustomed herself to them.
But beginning beyond the asteroid belt, Yoshi felt odd, and on Pluto, weak. The weakness and wrong feeling combined with the isolation and darkness alarmed her. Yoshi jetted herself to Mars, rested for several days, and recovered. Radiation sustained her life, which baffled her.
For a home, Yoshi found a pretty, cozy spot near the Aristarchus Crater, with a good view of Earth. She bleached drawings into the grey rock and lasered rough spots smooth. After practicing elsewhere, Yoshi lasered structures akin to furniture and climbing gym equipment, around which she shaped her cloud.
Yoshi’s attack spawned four radioactive clouds, who fed on radioactive waste and nuclear tests and lived above Nevada. Despite officially not existing, they worked for the Department of Defense and drilled in outer space.
Yoshi missed Earth and though she liked living on the Moon, outer space was too empty and lonely to endure alone forever. She shrunk herself to a manageable size, then she listened to the radio and television signals, resumed university courses, and observed nuclear matters. Hara-san visited her and told the other 1945 radioactive clouds that Yoshi was alive.
Even though Yoshi could absorb the world’s nuclear weapons and discharge the radiation in space before losing control, she decided against it. Yoshi regretted her rampage caused international panic and killed innocent people. She hated that she had created more radioactive clouds.
Still, she wanted complete nuclear disarmament. Hopefully, governments would disarm themselves, but her missile silo attacks raised Cold War tensions and she doubted she could absorb a nuclear war. The proliferation of nuclear weapons slowed to a liferation because the Soviet Union and United States replaced their weapons before increasing their arsenal. Their activities delayed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, and she approved of the treaty. Every time she ate a warhead, the country made another one. Before it frustrated her into a rage, she abandoned the idea.
The Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty relieved Yoshi’s radiation fears; she switched to feeding off radioactive waste, cooling pools, mining towns (background radiation only; nothing inside the mines themselves), and accidents. She learned to deplete them without causing fires or making people moderately ill.
Businesses stopped selling radioactive toys and housewares. As more fission power plants popped up and radiological medical equipment was invented, engineers developed coping mechanisms for a descending radioactive cloud.
Militaries were developing anti-radiation technology and defenses against it.
Suddenly, colored light flickered over the East Urals Radioactive Trace, formed by the wind blowing across the Mayak Production Association. Some people said a cloud glowed and showed blue sky in the gaps, or flashed red or orange as it had during the Mayak Disaster; very few noticed a human form and hardly anybody reported it. As birds and insects fell dead from the sky, metallic dust rose into the cloud, and so did hair and bugs, small animals, and fish, which landed gently a short time later.
Many people felt overheated on a cool day. Cases of mild radiation poisoning increased briefly, but some people’s radiation-related health issues improved. Hip or knee replacements, bone pins, and the like shifted and one man’s prosthetic leg stuck to the refrigerator for several minutes.
Across the region, electrical wires frizzled; replacing appliances and electrical wiring required months. Pacemakers malfunctioned. Cars refused to start. Jewelry coiled up, magnetized together.
Scorch marks appeared on structures and the ground and grass ignited. The Mayak Production Association’s fuel was depleted and the building caught fire, but the contaminated smoke and particles whooshed into a cloud.
The cloud vanished. The ash showed very little radiation and much of the previous fallout disappeared. The best explanation was an outbreak of small tornadoes that blew the fallout away, making the fallout somebody else’s problem.
Japan rented military bases to the United States, which bothered Yoshi. To force the American military to leave Japan, she stalked the bases with slightly less aggressiveness than she had at Pearl Harbor. She worried about affecting or scaring the Japanese people.
The United States reinforced its military installations, set up sensors, drilled evacuations, and stationed an American radioactive cloud above Japan. But Yoshi absorbed him, then the other American clouds.
The urban legend of Shadow Girl (also known as the Shadow Woman, the Ash Girl, or the Ash Woman) originated near the United States Forces Japan bases. The first reported sighting occurred on April 9, 1979, in Tokyo. Earlier unexplained disappearances, all involving piles of ash or radiation spikes, have been attributed to her.
The Shadow Girl smelled like burning meat and other unpleasant odors, such as sewer gas, cyanide, and ammonia.
Her physical appearance varied. She was either a young teenage girl dressed in monpe trousers, a kimono-style top, and sandals or a pretty, young woman dressed in a kimono and with a hime haircut. In some accounts, she was a shadow on the wall and when she reached out of the wall, her arm appeared to be made of dust and ash. Other witnesses said her entire body was made of dust and ash and she cast a glowing, radioactive green or blue shadow or that while killing, her hand glowed.
The Shadow Girl waited in alleys or behind buildings for a United States servicemember in uniform to pass. Once servicemembers were advised to wear civilian clothes off base, she chose a white person, normally a man. The Shadow Girl lured the victim closer by crying. She asked, “Are you an American?” If the person answered, “No,” she vanished, but if he answered yes, her touch cremated him or gave him severe radiation burns.
If other people accompanied the man, the Shadow Girl attacked anybody who responded to her question. She rarely chased people who ran away from her. Some survivors reported mild radiation poisoning.
Yoshi narrowly escaped a folklorist (Dr. Hughes) equipped with a Geiger counter. Killing him would just attract more researchers, and she had let other people live. By the time he published his findings, she had stopped her attacks.
Though Yoshi disliked the Shadow Girl urban legend, it did not upset her.
The U. S. Embassy considered the Shadow Girl a complete fabrication. No law enforcement investigator, either Japanese or American, found radiation or radioactive fallout in Japanese alleys, and they discredited other claims. The Japanese government refused to renew the United States’ military base rent contract. Coincidentally, the radiation attacks stopped.
Conspiracy theorists loved the situation.
Yoshi watched a movie: The Radioactive Thing from the Hypocenter. It insulted her—the filmmakers definitely based the monster on her. She wanted to write a rude note for them but thought it might scare them.
Biologists discovered that radioactive clouds confused migrating animals and birds, but peculiarly, the radioactive clouds avoided migration routes. When flashing, radioactive clouds attracted animals that saw light beyond human sight. Some seemed to flash when the animals naturally moved towards them.
Also, radiological clouds, sometimes called electromagnetic clouds, complicated the new idea of nuclear winter. The clouds trapped fallout and radiation apparently permanently. At their average accretion rate, they would block the sunlight within hundreds of years; the largest (Radiological or Electromagnetic Cloud #5) in less than one hundred years. In a nuclear war, the clouds would collect massive amounts of fallout and radiation, and the skies would never fully clear, and bands of decaying but lethal radiation would float across the world unpredictably, instead of following wind patterns.
Countries occasionally mishandled radioactive waste, certain that before it caused serious harm, a radioactive cloud would absorb it. Yoshi noticed in her nuclear inspections, that minor problems went unfixed, despite her warnings, until she wrote a strongly-worded note on the head of state’s wall. If it failed, she left another note on a wall of the United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs or the International Atomic Energy Agency. As a last resort, or earlier if the problem threatened people’s lives, she depleted the facility’s nuclear materials—fully aware she reaffirmed people’s reliance on radioactive clouds. Some people considered her a symbol of safe nuclear energy or anti-nuclear energy.
Mysteries and misconceptions about the radioactive clouds abounded, some only clarified if researchers spoke with the radiological lakes at length, and scholars tended to overlook their colleagues who communicated with natural phenomena.
Yoshi studied more than enough for a PhD in physics and experimented in outer space. Her studies, experiments, and personal experiences convinced her some ideas were incorrect. Unable to explain why or offer another idea, she thought her opinion did not count and argued with physicists in her head anyway.
Among people who thought hibakusha were still radioactive, a minority believed that hibakusha could turn into radiological lake or had radioactive superpowers. However, since the 1940s, Hara-san correctly thought some people considered hibakusha monsters—she simply had not told Yoshi, who would interpret it as the people calling her a monster or evil. When Yoshi finally heard the theory, she ridiculed the premises and overlooked the conclusion that hibakusha were monsters. Then Hara-san told her. The complete wrongness of the idea upset Yoshi.
A growing number of people thought the radiological lakes were intelligent and maybe extraterrestrials. A respected pseudoscientist, Dr. Tremblay, hypothesized that one extraterrestrial attacked the United States and the Soviet Union in 1960 and returned to its planet. He thought the extraterrestrial was a radiological cloud. Next, either a different extraterrestrial from the planet or the same extraterrestrial returned in the 1970s-1980s to attack the United States military bases. Therefore, the people of Earth were in great danger of another attack by hostile extraterrestrials, who intended to defeat the world’s militaries and impose their own rule for nefarious purposes, like slave labor or stealing the Earth’s resources. Some pseudoscientists argued the extraterrestrial merely armed its spaceships with radiological weapons, which explained the atmospheric lights. Dr. Tremblay said the lights could be a spaceship—the extraterrestrial must live somewhere, like every other living thing—, but he preferred to explain it with electromagnetic radiation and glowing radioactive elements.
In Yoshi’s opinion, Dr. Tremblay essentially called her an evil monster with horrible intentions. But she helped people. She accidentally harmed the people with pacemakers and metallic implants, and, therefore, would not attempt mass magnetization again.
From Hara-san’s perspective, people amassed more data about Yoshi than the other radioactive clouds combined, because of her alarming activities. Her actions prompted Hara-san and some other radioactive clouds to respond to would-be-contactees.
“If you were more active and helped people, people would notice you,” Yoshi snapped, and ran away.
By then, most radioactive clouds faded, hardly distinguishable from background radiation. Among the feeders, Yoshi was the most vigorous. Feeding sites ran low and the radioactive clouds complained about losing Mayak as a feeding source.
During the Three Mile Island accident and Chernobyl’s meltdown, Yoshi absorbed the radiation and fallout. The power plants remained open. She deposited radiation blobs over the Poles and on the Moon, where a few radioactive clouds had moved.
Immediately upon South Africa announcing its complete nuclear disarmament, Yoshi absorbed the warheads, processing facilities, waste sites, and everything else she could find. The same happened in former Soviet Union countries and whenever a country shrunk its arsenal.
Yoshi fought against the Argentinian, Brazilian, and North Korean nuclear weapons programs. Argentina officially stopped adding nuclear weapons when the dictatorship ended, then Yoshi absorbed their capabilities, and they abandoned the program. The tiny Brazilian program persisted with anti-radiation devices. On her second trip to North Korea, Yoshi noticed everybody had been replaced, from janitors to physicists to governmental officials. She easily tracked the previous workers down: they showed a dangerous level of radiation and compared to other countries, North Koreans owned few electronics, which emitted just enough radio waves to disguise contamination. The old workers were in concentration camps. She verified their names and discovered that the North Korean government imprisoned their families, too. So, Yoshi let the program continue—she worried about sending more people to the prisons—and monitored the radiation levels more closely than in other countries.
Israel had a policy of deliberate ambiguity about its nuclear weapons. Even though Yoshi snuck into Israel’s nuclear affairs, people noticed radioactive clouds near Israel, and she interfered with the country’s policy.
Yoshi hunted down nuclear materials thieves and poisoned them, depleted the weapons, and told the authorities where to find them.
Terrorists threatened and plotted to use dirty bombs. The conventional explosives’ detonation would spread the radioactive material; there was no nuclear explosion. When Yoshi caught dirty bomb makers, she poisoned them, leaving them identifiable. She wrote a note on the authorities’ walls and guarded the bodies. She waited outside the compound. The first Italian soldier to spot Yoshi caused a convoy pile-up. However, Yoshi had scared the local terrorists too much to take advantage of a crash.
Yoshi depleted salted bombs, nuclear weapons containing radioactive isotopes for extra fallout. She appeared to the engineers, too. Because authorities approved their activities, she burned those involved to death and destroyed the facilities.
The nuclear bomb plans Yoshi found online scared her and irritated her. She despaired of deleting them.
Japanese radio usually played somewhere in Yoshi’s cloud and she half-paid attention to it. When she heard about the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, she preemptively depleted the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.
Then Yoshi lurked in the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station until the Russian soldiers mutinied. She also made the Ukrainians a bit edgy, despite a note reading, I am not attacking Ukrainians, and another warning the Russians against arresting the nuclear technicians.
Yoshi regretted her attacks, but she was happy that the United States left Japan. She wished she found another way.
Military anti-radiation shielding sapped energy from the electromagnetic clouds (the modern term for radiological lakes) so that the shielding partly powered itself. Scientists adapted the technology to collect background radiation for electrical power; an ethics board determined it was like harvesting methane and carbon monoxide. To slow climate change, scientists proposed shrinking electromagnetic clouds by collecting radiation, though the fallout particles posed problems.
Some scientists, including Dr. Nakano, thought the electromagnetic clouds had at least animal-like intelligence. Dr. Nakano objected to keeping them inside a power plant without their consent or domestication, and the longer he studied electromagnetic clouds, the more intelligent they seemed.
Dr. Nakano and others deduced that electromagnetic clouds interfered with military nuclear weapons and communicated with heads of nuclear powers. Electromagnetic cloud #5 provided the most data. He and others thought the electromagnetic clouds could be weaponized, or their actions may increase tensions, or a government could carry out a nuclear attack, blame it on electromagnetic clouds, and succeed because the general public understood little physics. Unlike many other experts, Dr. Nakano wondered if the electromagnetic clouds wanted to provoke nuclear war or accidents—they lived on radiation. Once he knew Hara-san and Yoshi better, he changed his mind.
Countries wanted to prevent each other from weaponizing electromagnetic clouds and stop the electromagnetic clouds’ attraction to their defenses. But radioactive clouds tended to be neutral. Dr. Nakano insulted Yoshi when he asked if she was pro-North Korea; she flew to Mars in a huff and Dr. Nakano apologized via Hara-san and a rover.
So, the United States government contracted Dr. Nakano to trap at least one electromagnetic cloud in an old missile silo converted into a power plant, named the Fermi Electromagnetic Radiation Power Station. Dr. Nakano focused on Electromagnetic Cloud #5, the largest. The government and press said it wrought the most havoc and that controlling it protected people. Yoshi and the other radioactive clouds became suspicious.
Omitting information to gain Yoshi’s trust, Dr. Nakano persisted. Providing electricity for impoverished countries seemed like a good cause, and so did preserving the ice sheets. Yoshi wanted to shrink enough to live on Earth constantly; she wrung radiation from her cloud almost as quickly as she absorbed it from the Sun.
Yoshi entered the Fermi Electromagnetic Radiation Power Station on November 30, 2033, and due to her electromagnetic interference, photographers stayed home, reporters took notes on paper while wearing NBC suits, and live-streaming was impossible closer than one mile. The roads shut down as a precaution and satellites changed paths.
A team closed the silo doors behind Yoshi. She eased through the corridors and new tunnels.
Once the radiation levels above ground lowered and stabilized, Dr. Nakano allowed the press access to the power facility. He banned them from visiting Yoshi at her own insistence.
The construction crew had removed the interior doors, wiring, and furnishings and filled the ventilation system with concrete. Water covered the silo like a dam, except for the silo’s doors. Walkways connected buildings. Cargo airplanes transported energy cells to and from the Fermi Power Station, and employees lived on-site or in an easy drive. The plant powered itself.
Dr. Nakano’s team entertained Yoshi with TV and radio signals and an Internet connection, and established a telephone link between her and weak, fading Hara-san. He dropped vivid, mildly radioactive cadmium pigments through the door. Yoshi added them to the radioactive matter with which she colored her cloud. Also, he tracked down Yoshi’s family, who refused to believe him; it upset Yoshi’s hopes.
The committee treated Yoshi like an animal or inanimate force, and so, by treating Yoshi like a person, Dr. Nakano risked his career. He omitted his suspicions that Yoshi had vaporized people. If they thought she was a murderer or a rogue cloud, they would cap the door, provoking a rampaging escape.
Yoshi missed traveling wherever she liked and watching the scenery. She deciphered code words indicating she was a captive; power station radio communications changed suspiciously frequently. Also, she required more sunlight than was provided by resting for an hour under the open door.
Yoshi explained to Dr. Nakano the difference between sickening and shrinking. Though he supported her against the power plant’s committee, he told Yoshi there was no solution. She melted the door open. Somehow, Dr. Nakano convinced the committee to tidy up the doorway and leave it open.
Yoshi forced herself to stay inside the silo. Then she peeked at the scenery. She threatened to give herself sunlight holes, so Dr. Nakano scheduled safety precautions that allowed Yoshi to trail a filament in the open air once daily.
The radiation collectors gathered whatever naturally flowed from Yoshi, but sometimes she emitted radiation intentionally to speed up the process. It began to hurt. She stopped intentional releases; Dr. Nakano supported her decision before the pushy, goal-orientated committee.
Yoshi realized, at her current shrinking rate, that even with Dr. Nakano’s promise of more efficient technology (that required decades or centuries to fulfill), she would emit a useful amount of radiation for thousands of years. She doubted a governmental program could last for thousands of years. If she weakened too far, they might close her inside, like boarding up an old mine.
She needed more sunlight than Dr. Nakano arranged. Yoshi pushed against the ceilings, choosing the thinner, radiation-collecting areas. The ground over the tunnel shifted as the lead above the concrete melted and dirt fell into the molten lead.
Dr. Nakano reminded the operation’s committee that gaseous lead gave people heavy metal poisoning and contaminated the ground. The committee refused to build sunlight holes for several reasons: the operation’s goal was shrinking radiological lakes and Yoshi fed on sunlight; employees would quit or strike if Yoshi exposed herself; they thought a legitimately sick radiological lake could not burn through the silo; and they doubted Yoshi adequately contained the fallout and radiation.
Over several days, heat soaked through the soil and turned the lead into a gas. The pool’s water steamed, then simmered, then boiled, while Yoshi melted through the pool’s bottom.
Dr. Nakano stopped arguing with the committee and Yoshi; he hated the business side of the power plant and sympathized with Yoshi. Technicians sandbagged the areas, minimizing water loss. He encouraged Yoshi to continue—nobody could stop her or punish her.
Hours later, the weakened pool’s bottom cracked open. The water soaked her, but it boiled off.
Dr. Nakano fell out of favor. He told her his replacement, Dr. Donovan, would arrive in two weeks. When Dr. Nakano led the operation, Yoshi felt uneasy about her situation, and she thought the replacement would change matters for the worse.
Yoshi escaped, deciding that even if people contacted her, she would only help if they started a major nuclear disaster or war again. Worried about the other radioactive clouds’ wellbeing, Yoshi breached the other three electromagnetic power plants around the world. Two clouds left, one of which visited regularly, and one remained.
Yoshi rushed into outer space and recovered for a day. Upon returning to Earth, she passed to Hara-san radioisotopes that emitted gamma radiation. Hara-san was too weak to find them herself.
Dr. Nakano developed a cheaper backyard or rooftop radiation collector and a charity spread them through impoverished regions. Yoshi regularly flew over them.
Countries built fusion reactor power plants, safer than fission ones.
As the radioactive clouds’ feeding grounds decayed, the clouds extended filaments into outer space. The practice complicated space flights. To assist the course plotters, Yoshi surrounded the metal with her cloud, then took it into outer space, where she raised her temperature to the trash’s boiling point. Once it vaporized, the particles remained in her cloud.
The French government decided to completely disarm their nuclear weapons and Yoshi finished their years-long project in a couple hours.
Along with destroying shared nuclear weapons, Yoshi absorbed warheads in the worst condition, plus five each in the United States and Russia, to equalize their and China’s arsenals. The definition of “worst condition” became relative. However, she never interfered with North Korea.
North Korea and several non-nuclear countries decided against signing the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, but Israel signed for the first time. The United States intended to—until China refused to sign.
To defend itself against China, Taiwan developed nuclear weapons from its nuclear power program; the United States also assisted them. Anti-radiation machines and disguising their weapons as North Korean kept Yoshi at bay. She missed the crisis’ signs while vacationing on Venus and she did not eavesdrop on the government.
Though Yoshi still felt bitter regarding her existence, she dreaded how other people would suffer during a global nuclear war.
She hovered over the East China Sea and the Yellow Sea throughout the Taiwan Missile Crisis. It was the most serious nuclear close-call in world history, and Yoshi thought her immediate intervention would escalate it. To her relief, politicians defused the situation.
Several countries built hypersonic missiles, designed to launch from space at several times the speed of sound. For a short time, governments thought she incinerated a particularly large piece of space junk. But she melted the painful anti-radiation machines around launch sites and factories and stalked the grounds, and the governments calculated trajectories and reviewed satellite photographs.
On the nuclear powers’ walls, Yoshi explained why she let North Korea’s hypersonic weapons orbit the Earth. She worried that the governments would blame North Korea, even though no country had developed weapons close to Yoshi’s abilities.
Yoshi wondered if her non-interference with North Korea provoked nuclear conflicts. She worried it would lead to war.
Yoshi and Hara-san considered themselves the only 1945 radioactive clouds left. Some had disappeared, maybe into outer space and might return, and others seemed to slightly elevate background radiation and drift aimlessly.
Yoshi squeezed radiation from a warhead to Hara-san’s general vicinity. Hara-san did not want to interfere with politics, which was why she had not taken a warhead herself years ago. By the time Hara-san finally agreed to a warhead, the anti-radiation machines could have killed her. Slowly, Hara-san regained her strength.
In South Africa, President Cilliers had quickly rebuilt the country his coup destabilized. He showed off South Africa’s abilities and wanted them to include nuclear weapons. Repeatedly, governments searched for a nuclear program, and altogether, their investigations indicated South Africa had the capability.
Yoshi wrote messages to each nuclear power to warn them that China covertly assisted South Africa’s nuclear program. She wrote exactly what the investigators needed to know. Her information was completely accurate and truthful; politics and supervision hid the information well from other governments, but Yoshi found it.
She destroyed the first nuclear-related shipment from China to South Africa. China denied all involvement. After sinking the second shipment, Yoshi informed other countries of China’s involvement. The news leaked. On the third shipment, Yoshi alerted the other nuclear powers to its location, but nobody stopped it. She attacked the fourth. China blamed Russia or the United States for destroying the shipment conventionally—which contradicted satellite images. Thinking foreign countries needed to see the situation themselves, Yoshi let the next shipments land in South Africa.
Pakistan and India’s land conflict had resumed. Russia supported India and China Pakistan; China deployed troops in Pakistan. Russia and China tugged neutral Iran towards one side or another amid rumors of Iranian nuclear weapons, which Yoshi tried to debunk. The United States supported Iran’s political decisions and an investigation indicated it lacked a nuclear program. After China, Pakistan, and their allies, invaded Iran, Iran joined the Russian side. As promised, Russia declared war on China.
Yoshi burnt through anti-radiation shields. Then she melted nuclear production facilities’ machinery, shorted out military communications and destabilized the silos’ supports, and intercepted raw plutonium and uranium. In civilian areas, Yoshi used a filament, but in military areas, she lurked and slapped her mark into the servicemembers’ backs.
The rest of the time, Yoshi patrolled the Earth. Half the world’s military transmissions cluttered the atmosphere and she deciphered the gibberish nuclear codes. She trawled filaments to crash or sink nuclear aircraft and submarines if she encountered them.
Coordinating with Russia and its allies, the United States invaded South Africa, and, promptly, China declared war on the United States.
Argentina and Brazil signed a treaty to defend each other, and the United Kingdom and the United States considered a similar treaty. The United Kingdom and Israel remained neutral; the other countries joined the war.
The United Nations fractured. Argentina, Brazil, Israel, and the United Kingdom were the united nuclear nations and the number of united non-nuclear nations dropped steadily as they joined the war or other countries forced them into it.
Argentina and Brazil joined China’s side officially.
News stations debated who would launch the first nuclear missiles; Yoshi convinced herself with evidence and bias that the United States would. She considered writing, Do not launch a preemptive strike in the various countries’ state offices, but she and Hara-san thought it would raise suspicions.
But China launched nuclear missiles first, on June 10, 2058, in a coordinated strike with North Korea. Most missiles targeted Russia and the United States. As Yoshi snagged warheads, Russia and the United States retaliated, and the other nuclear powers followed; Argentina and Brazil consulted each other first. Yoshi caught a Pakistani missile in Israel. Then Israel’s President nearly deployed nuclear weapons in self-defense.
Of the thousands of missiles crisscrossing the world and landing on every continent except Antarctica (the United States placed nuclear defenses in Guam), Yoshi missed three. A fourth detonated as she absorbed it. Before the new radioactive cloud knew what happened, Yoshi bumped into it. She hurried away, crying in distress. Two additional missiles reached their targets, but Yoshi caught more. The seventh missile detonated within her cloud and the blast uncontrollably inflated her and raised her temperature. The eighth missile landed in a location already struck once.
The smaller countries used up their nuclear weapons or became disabled. The United Kingdom conventionally declared war, on the United States’ side, and threatened nuclear retaliation if a missile hit a target. A South African missile landed and the United Kingdom launched a single missile. Yoshi intercepted it.
Yoshi intercepted a few missiles so close to populated areas and the ground, surface water boiled and steamed and she ignited wildfires. She brought several endangered species to extinction, changed the conservation level of more species, and killed a breaching great blue whale. In the atmosphere, along with incinerating quite a bit of space junk and an internet satellite, she crippled astronauts, whose safe return to Earth was already unlikely.
Absorbing radiation and scooping up the fallout in her wake swelled into a mobile fallout cloud. Thousands of people reported the radioactive lake’s usual shadows and multicolored glows, and hundreds a humanoid form.
When the United States fired one missile toward China, Yoshi thought the war ended, but a couple of minutes later, Russia launched the very last missile.
In less than two hours, the nuclear war ended. For another hour, Yoshi depleted the world’s remaining missiles. Over 22,000 missiles, either whole or their radiation and fallout stuffed her cloud.
Even after Yoshi jetted great streams into deep space, controlling her form required too much concentration in an open atmosphere, let alone while avoiding radioactive clouds. She squeezed a painful amount of radiation from her cloud. It puddled around her and she flew several light-years away from it, then repeated the process.
Pitying North Korean people, she absorbed the entire country’s fallout and radiation. She barely dodged a radioactive cloud.
Then Yoshi absorbed the fission reactors in affected countries. She thought they might meltdown and that she might not reach them in time.
Beyond the Moon, Yoshi relaxed her radiation field and aimed radiation into deep space. She expected to live for hundreds of thousands of years, and generally be too radioactive and sun-blocking to return to Earth.
Yoshi returned to Earth. Hara-san tended to the new radioactive clouds, some of whom absorbed some radiation and fallout. She moved the radioactive clouds away from affected areas, and Yoshi cleaned up.
Her cloud scattered radiation and fallout. Yoshi felt uncomfortably hot in places and struggled to move the hot patches to a cooler area. Chilling herself on Pluto only worked if she remained there.
Worldwide for days, auroras colored the sky. Some thought it was a sign, or fallout, or Electromagnetic Cloud #5 releasing radiation.
Yoshi needed to stop absorbing radiation intentionally—the radiation oozed out however she tried to contain it—but, first, she dragged the radiation surrounding Earth past the Moon. She rested between Earth and Mars.
Hara-san yelled from hundreds of miles away, “Yoshi, how do you feel?”
“Full,” Yoshi yelled. “Is there a problem?”
“I believe some have gone to attack their enemies.”
“But it never got past the theoretical stage!”
“I suppose they volunteered or thought of it by themselves or the program restarted.”
“I’ll stop them,” Yoshi said. “It means the nuclear war hasn’t stopped yet.”
Ultimately, Yoshi absorbed every fighting radioactive ghost. It intimidated the others, some of whom already feared her.
Yoshi dribbled and shook off radiation on her route to Mercury. She tried to aim the jets towards the Sun since the radiation traveled at a constant velocity and she thought the Sun would absorb it.
But Yoshi’s fallout felt compressed. Emitting radiation hurt again.
According to Hara-san, countries continued their nuclear weapons programs.
Yoshi swept through the exposed parts of plutonium and uranium mines, leaving behind enough radioactive elements for peaceful purposes and forcing miners to dig deeper. She destroyed every nuclear weapons facility and silo.
Her cloud melted down. She rushed into outer space, a radioactive cloud trailing behind her. Her attempts to discharge the risky radioactive elements failed, and then a warhead detonated. Yoshi’s cloud was too unwieldy to catch the fallout and radiation, which she also considered the terrible opposite of a solution.
Hara-san followed Yoshi because she had sensed the radiation. Yoshi sped away from her, worried about killing her. Both traveled at light speed.
“Can you discharge the radiation?” Hara-san called.
“No,” Yoshi said. “I’m going to explode.”
“Let me suck radiation.”
“You will have the same problem.”
Still, Hara-san gathered up some and dodged the shockwaves from detonating warheads.
Yoshi felt a chain reaction. She swerved around Mercury, but quite a bit of radiation struck it.
“Turn around before we reach the Sun,” Hara-san said.
“I don’t want radiation to destroy the Earth, and I don’t know what it will do to other places,” Yoshi said.
“Direct it at the sun and you will feel better,” Hara-san said.
“No, I won’t, and I can’t direct it anymore,” Yoshi said.
“So, wait in deep space.”
“No. I won’t recover and I’m too dangerous. Leave me alone. I don’t want to die arguing with you.”
“I will come with you as far as I can.”
A few minutes later, Hara-san stopped and watched. Yoshi forced herself onwards until the heat overwhelmed her. Her radiation and fallout traveled at her living velocity into the Sun.
The Queen Bee, Part 7 of 7
As long as Joan's bee farm existed, in the presence of people, the bees quieted. Initially, bees avoided Melissa; they seemed less cautious around Norman and Emma.
Melissa and Emma searched Joan’s bee genealogy for colonies related closest to Paige’s, the colony that attacked Ross. In the autumn, Melissa and Emma harvested the produce, then burned sulfur inside the hives to suffocate the bees. Melissa exterminated her bees the same way since they were also closely related to Paige’s.
Averaged together, the bees passively allowed them, but seemed slightly confused. Joan explicitly told the bees why the colonies died. She had not told bees about euthanized colonies before—it might have scared them. But now she warned her bees about the consequences of attacking humans. The current generation of bees behaved itself quite well and subsequent generations grew more docile and sociable.
Though Joan’s hip healed well, she never regained her old spryness, and Norman’s health deteriorated slowly. Melissa moved to England to care for her parents and work on Joan’s bee farm. Melanie declared she wanted nothing further to do with bees, and she hated even visiting Joan’s farm. But she made at least one long visit weekly and Joan, Norman, and Melissa babysat Paige on workdays. Although Paige’s brain damage from her allergic reaction stressed Melanie and preoccupied her, Melanie felt mentally freer now she no longer needed to keep bees or was obligated to. Melissa said she ought to have moved to England years ago, but Melanie did not tell anybody her opinion and feelings about the matter. Melanie dreaded her complaints worsening the family’s relationship.
Joan decided against replacing the exterminated colonies, meaning as the current colonies reproduced, she killed them. She informed the bees of her intention to stabilize the population. She and Melissa managed the downsized business themselves; Emma was the last employee at Joan’s bee farm, which relieved Melanie. Sensibly, Joan’s will stipulated Melissa (the executor) euthanize all her bees, and the clause reassured Melanie to the extent she felt slightly guilty.
Since Joan thought the bees might worry about Emma’s sudden disappearance, before Emma left for London, Emma told the bees she found work in a big human colony beyond the bees’ flying range. Emma, Norman, and Melanie kept in touch over social media, partly because they remained friends and partly because, if the worst happened when Norman and Joan died, Melissa required backup against hordes of mournful, infuriated bees. Even though Melanie might joyfully exterminate colonies, Melissa considered her undependable. Emma always had just enough money for transportation to the village and back; her parents welcomed a visit any time or Melissa invited her to stay at the cottage.
Paige fully recovered from the brain damage sustained during anaphylactic shock and she remained suspicious of restaurants and other people’s food. Her condition gave the restaurant such a horrible reputation that Ross struggled to keep it open. During lockdown, he filed for bankruptcy and moved away, spending the rest of his career managing other people’s restaurants.
Though Paige wanted to help on Joan’s farm again, Melanie forbade it, along with explanations. Paige called the arrangement unjustifiably arbitrary, but as she grew, she noticed Joan, Norman, and Melissa knew why. However, Melanie allowed a solitary beehive in her house’s garden and let Joan teach Paige apiculture. Melanie monitored the perfectly ordinary beehive closely.
In Melanie’s opinion, she herself dismissed Joan’s ideas much more easily than Melissa. She explained her opinion, but Melissa thought Melanie behaved overly secretively and absolutely rude. Because the half-sisters were unable to live on separate continents, their relationship deteriorated. Melanie aggressively distracted or stopped conversations about Melissa’s research or job. Melissa occasionally became distracted by a tangent onto bees and she had a degree to back up her ideas. They avoided each other, sometimes staying home from family occasions or attending, but ignoring each other. Melanie insisted they sit in the same church pew or people would wonder why, but, still, family friends noticed the two half-sisters disliked each other.
Melissa started an extermination business and bee removal service, often regaling her clients with historical bug facts. She continued her archaeoentomological research as much as possible, which was quite difficult. Melissa knew her parents would die, but because restarting her career ought only to occur after that, she disliked planning her future.
When professionally or as a hobby Melissa studied historical insects and other arthropods, she watched for extraordinarily intelligent bees. She doubted she would acquire a grant to research Joan’s bees, and neither tried nor intended to, but they had inspired her to become an archaeoentomologist. Also, she hypothesized experiments sped up the bees’ microevolution. But for fun, Melissa analyzed Joan’s old notes and books and contributed to the collection. Over the years, she digitized and backed up the collection.
Even though Joan highly limited human-bee communications, the bees’ vibroacoustics became more coherent—Joan and Melissa added a new section to Joan’s Bee Phrasebook. Joan’s hearing aid unreliably detected the sounds, so Melissa recorded them. Also, she invented a little bee call several times louder than the bees, but which the bees comprehended. Joan and Melissa promised to hide the bees’ development from Melanie until Melissa euthanized all of Joan’s extraordinary bees.
It became apparent that colonies worked together, with groups leaving to harvest a specific area or presenting a collective problem to Joan. Multiple hives never coordinated themselves around Melissa or Norman, only Joan.
Occasionally, bees expressed emotions, particularly grief over the death of Meadowsweet Hive’s queen. But the colony behaved itself. A viral outbreak prompted Joan to euthanize Primrose and Dogwood Hive. Other colonies on the acre seemed scared of infection and, in some way, bothered that the hives remained empty.
Long Covid declined Norman’s health quickly and he died of a heart attack, which made Joan a widow twice. She and Melissa informed the bees and distributed funeral biscuits. The upset bees seemed quite non-violent. Nobody attacked the nurses and doctor or blamed humans. Melanie suspected Joan’s anti-revenge warning subdued them, but Joan thought the colonies passed on caution themselves, remembering Ross’s ordeal.
A few years later, Joan developed breast cancer. Throughout her diagnosis and treatment, Melissa told the bees, emphasizing that the bees could not help her in any manner whatsoever, and the information clearly upset them. However, they had peaceful, sorrowful reactions.
Paige worked with Melissa on the bee farm; Melanie allowed it simply because Paige wanted to help her grandmother. So, Melanie told Paige about the bees attacking Ross. It shocked her and she wished Melanie told her sooner.
Joan died in winter.
Feeling unable to tell humans the truth, Emma told her friends that her Auntie Joan died and she needed to attend the funeral. Her parents wrongly presumed Emma and Joan had been attached to each other. When Emma applied to Joan’s bee farm, her mother warned her the Spencers and Emma held extremely different worldviews, but the differences and consequences shocked Emma significantly less than she expected.
The honeybees remained awake in winter, cozily clustered together inside their hives and vibrating their wings for warmth. On Joan’s farm, the winter temperatures regularly remained above freezing and sometimes the bees tolerated the outdoors for short periods. Usually, bees exposed to the outdoor temperature dozed off within a few minutes.
Melissa planned on exterminating the bees at night, taking advantage of the lowest temperatures. If the bees escaped and returned to the hive, they would freeze to death by the end of the week—she intended to leave the lids off the hives.
After preparing their gear and spreading hydrocortisone over their hands, faces, and necks and taking anti-histamines, Melanie, Melissa, Paige, and Emma dressed in extra winter layers and covered their faces with scarves, facemasks, earmuffs, and safety goggles. They duct-taped over the zippers and gaps, and, finally, pulled on wellies, headlamps, first aid fanny packs, and rubber dishwashing gloves. The fanny packs included trauma shears to cut through their layers.
Melanie, Melissa, Paige, and Emma gave the bees no warning about the extermination, but brought funeral biscuits with them and told each beehive, “Joan died.” The bees’ reaction consisted of distressed buzzing and vibroacousticing over each other. To everybody’s surprise and relief, they pointlessly donned the extra layers and bee suits. Every bee remained in the hive as Melanie, Melissa, Paige, and Emma burned sulfur.
Melissa remained in the village for another year as she and Melanie sold the farm and sorted through Joan and Norman’s estate. Sneakily, she evacuated Joan’s old books and notes from the apiary; Melanie wanted to destroy them, but Melissa refused to reveal their location.
Afterward, Melissa restarted her research career.
The relationship between Melissa and Melanie improved gradually, but steadily, over their remaining lives.
Though she worked in another career field, Paige kept bees in her garden. Her bees showed no signs of above-average intelligence and wildlife feared them like regular honeybees.
Joan’s lack of experience with pests had discouraged her from publishing her books. Eventually, when Paige felt competent with brained pests and diseases spread from buying other breeders’ honeybees (Joan eradicated her bees’ diseases), she and Melissa waded through Joan’s notes and books. They revised Joan’s books, edited them, added their own sections, and self-published them. Of their own accord, Paige and Melissa removed every hint of Joan’s bees’ unusual cleverness. They wrote that Joan considered bees highly intelligent and emotional creatures. Melanie disapproved of the projects, but Paige was an unstoppable adult and she resigned herself to Melissa guarding Joan’s knowledge.
Melanie dreaded she or Melissa would develop dementia or Alzheimer’s disease and blab about the bees, but Melissa reassured her if so, nobody would believe it, and what with the bees’ death, nobody could prove it. Melissa lied that the family lacked enough evidence for a cryptozoologist or other fringe theorist. In her professional opinion, the average researcher required vastly less data than Melissa and Joan provided. Because Melanie had absolutely no interest in respected archaeology, let alone views outside the mainstream ones, she was oblivious.
Melissa left Joan’s original collection to Paige, whose will required nobody discard them. But later generations did not believe that Joan’s bees were as extraordinary as the notes said.
This is the final part of The Queen Bee. Thanks for reading!
The Queen Bee, Part 6 of 7
Joan’s broken hip hospitalized her for a few weeks, then a transfer to a rehabilitation facility for a few weeks. Through the wooziness and pain, she forced herself to think about her bees and the beekeepers. Now, beekeeping strained her, but she intended to keep as many bees as possible for as long as possible.
Joan wrote instructions, some devised during Ross’s ordeal to prevent another and some considered in hospital. She wrote several copies by hand in prim cursive with her purse’s fountain pen and paper borrowed from the nurse’s station.
Joan changed neither Melanie nor Emma’s hours, but they needed a supervisor; normally, Joan supervised. Her policy that apiculturist supervisors were legal adults ruled out Emma. When Emma turned eighteen, she planned to live in an interesting place or find an exciting job and decided against attending university. Joan already wrote her a glowing letter of recommendation and Emma applied to various dull, unskilled jobs in London. Therefore, Joan’s new plans excluded her, but Joan welcomed Emma’s employment and might promote her or schedule her full-time.
In the time between Clarence’s death and Joan and Norman’s marriage, Joan gave Melanie a choice: extra housework (allowing Joan more beekeeping hours), beekeeping (supporting the family via the farm), or a steady job (partially supporting herself and therefore lowering the budget). Melanie chose a job to utterly avoid the bees, but until she married Norman, Joan often forced her to tend them. The year Joan turned 65, Melanie, out of self-imposed obligation, began working at the apiary, and, therefore, she had significantly more apiculture experience than Melissa. By her own free will and against Joan’s wishes, Melanie was unpaid; she thought Joan could not afford another employee. Also, Melanie worked full-time and Paige needed more motherly attention than before, while the supervisor worked full-time and paid close attention to the bees.
Further, Melanie knew better than to make the vast majority of her mistakes. More than she wished, Joan worried about intentional anti-bee activity. Melanie’s mistakes outnumbered Emma’s, a fact to which Joan thought Emma was oblivious. Joan kept a closer eye on Melanie and fixed them quietly in private. Bees stung Melanie and now Joan wondered if they considered her hostile and Joan’s absence gave opportunity to attack Melanie en mass. An irate colony Melanie tended to quickly calmed down once Emma took over and the colony behaved itself better in Joan’s presence. Joan thought affectionate attention paid to the bees improved their lives and production.
During the extermination of Paige’s bees, Melanie’s revelry unnerved and betrayed Joan. She thought Melanie had more cause and opportunity to accidentally-on-purpose destroy a colony or provoke them into an extermination-worthy situation. Melanie might include reliable colonies in the annual weakest hives list and destroy contradictory produce, and it was impossible for Joan to check the hives personally.
To manage the business, Joan preferred Melissa, and if Melissa refused, she would hire somebody else, despite potential Melanie issues. For Melissa, Joan expected coping well with Melanie would be the worst part beewise and otherwise, changing Melissa’s entire life and abandoning her research were. Melissa stopped keeping them professionally once she left for university, and several years passed without hobby bees. Already, Melanie demonstrated her ability to overbear Emma; Melissa developed resilience. Joan thought Melissa would willingly become a supervisor, even though she preferred other jobs. Melissa and Emma would probably work well together, and Joan thought a peaceful job improved her employees’ lives, and peaceful coworkers, like happy, healthy bees, increased production and quality.
From the airport, Melissa texted Emma an official Telling the Bees statement: Auntie Joan is ill. She will feel better soon. Melanie, Melissa, Norman, and Emma will take care of the colony. Auntie Joan says if the colony tries to kill humans, Auntie Joan shall tell Melanie, Melissa, and Emma to kill the colony.
Emma considered waiting to work or telling the bees until Melissa arrived, but Joan had not canceled work through her convalescence. From Emma’s perspective, her job was more important than ever because Joan was unavailable, Paige and Joan’s conditions preoccupied Melanie, a single day of apiculture would exhaust Norman for a week, and Emma knew nothing about Melissa’s role. Though Emma liked her job, she preferred several other activities, but helping the Spencers seemed like the right thing. It annoyed her a bit.
While contemplating how to tell the bees and keep them calm, Emma imagined millions of bees activating the hospital motion detectors and buzzing through the hospital, confusedly stinging panicking people to death, until they found Joan. Obviously, Joan’s reputation among her bees guaranteed her safety, but what about the patients and staff?
Also, Emma dreaded Melanie’s reaction to a mass sighting. She worried if Melanie killed all of Joan’s bees, she and Joan would estrange themselves. In an emergency, Emma hoped Joan and Melanie promptly figured out a response. Melissa might have a good solution and probably knew how to handle Melanie in a bee-related situation.
Emma stopped by the cottage briefly to ask if Norman needed help. He said Melanie would drop him off at the hospital to visit Joan before she picked up Melissa from the airport. Norman suggested Emma wait with him until he left—otherwise when Melanie saw her car, she would tell off Emma.
“I’m not here to work,” Emma said.
“Joan said not to tell Melanie you were telling the bees,” Norman said.
“I’ll help you and Auntie Joan. The washing up needs doing or something.”
“Thanks, or you can come back lat—Ah, well. Here comes Melanie.”
Emma skidded to the kitchen sink.
Norman and Melanie spoke in the hall for a few minutes. Emma clattered the dishes, trying not to eavesdrop, and thought to distract herself. She figured out how to survive Melanie in Joan’s absence. Over the past couple of weeks, Emma became convinced Melanie felt hostile towards the bees, though hopefully only to the murderous colonies. Emma thought she and Melanie made approximately the same number of mistakes, and recently, Emma wondered why Melanie had not outgrown them. Emma noticed Melanie made weird, careless mistakes, like knocking over a full bee waterer and not refilling it, or opening a hive in the rain. Long before the others, Melanie complained about the labor. She procrastinated protective measures, especially in foul weather. Taking instructions from Melanie seemed like a bad idea. So, Emma intended to beekeep the way Joan taught her, whatever Melanie or Melissa said, unless Joan explicitly told her otherwise.
Melanie brought instructions from Joan and insisted upon reading them aloud to Emma. Melanie interrupted herself frequently to harangue, incoherently or confusingly, and so Emma listened politely, intending to re-read the instructions herself later.
Though Melanie wanted Emma to work under strict, immediate supervision, especially until she proved herself capable of following them, Norman supported Emma’s opinion that she could already adapt her behavior and work independently.
“But you are silly about the bees,” Melanie said.
“I am not!” Emma said. “I’m following Auntie Joan’s instructions.”
“She is worse than silly, and I don’t know what we will do if her new ideas make it worse. God knows how Melissa will encourage the bees. Let’s go over the instructions carefully, step-by-step, and you will prove to me you understand them.”
“Melanie, simply ask Emma if she has any questions, and take me to visit Joan. Let her call Joan if she needs help,” Norman said.
Reluctantly, Melanie asked, “Do you have questions?”
“No,” Emma said, rather than, Can you go away, please, so I can read the real instructions?
“You must need help with something.”
“So, I’ll ask Joan for help.”
“No, you won’t. You can’t. She is too unwell for work.”
“Melanie, trust Emma’s reading comprehension and take me to visit your mother,” Norman said, sternly.
To Emma’s surprise, Melanie objected.
Among other instructions, telling the bees required specific wording, in routine activities, certain words needed to be spelled out, such as extermination, and bee-related knowledge must be either read silently among the bees or discussed indoors with the door and windows closed. Coincidentally, the instructions explained Melissa’s clunky Telling the Bees statement.
To tell the bees, Emma wore a bee suit. All night, the bees hid in their hives and remained indoors when Emma approached. They also seemed scared and so unaggressive she doubted they would sting a wasp stealing honey. Gently, Emma knocked on each hive and a few bees crawled out to listen. She read Melissa’s statement aloud, and then the bees reentered the hive and repeated it to the queen. They understood humans well without pausing to translate. What Joan called “repeating” seemed to be a mix of body language, vibrations, and acoustics.
As Emma moved from the first acre to the second, she heard a loud buzzing in every direction. Hundreds of thousands of worker bees had waited for her to leave, and now they flew from the hive. Briefly, she worried they intended to attack her or somebody, but some settled on their own acre; a great diversity of plants grew in the farm’s fields. Other bees left, flying up to five miles away to visit customers’ gardens, local outdoor trails, hedgerows, and the like. That day, the bees foraged quietly, and relatively few left the farm.
The other colonies perked up and, while Emma informed them, bees across the remaining acres prepared themselves to forage. She felt comfortable in the fields again.
Telling the bees required hours. Emma returned to the apiary. Joan scheduled her part-time until harvest, then full-time.
Emma wanted to work full-time immediately and she felt qualified. Her business skills lay in processing honey and beeswax, packaging orders, and hand-writing receipts and shipping labels. Also, when Joan still sold other bee products, she taught Emma a little baking, soapmaking, and candlemaking. She deemed the results good enough for normal people’s everyday purposes; according to Norman, it was high praise.
Emma had no idea what an accounting ledger was until Joan explained hers. Later, Emma mentioned her mother taught her to cash the paychecks, but Emma forgot how to write a check. Whenever they bought something in-store, Joan told Emma to write the business’s check. She taught Emma to make change in her head, though more slowly than Joan.
Emma flipped through the ledger to last year’s breaking even. Once Joan quit various enterprises, she stopped paying herself, but, unknown to Emma, she and Norman saved for a sensible retirement. Most of the farm’s earnings went towards the employees’ salaries, slightly above the area’s average farming wages. So, the accounting ledger’s lack of profit seemed worse to Emma than to Joan.
Monthly, Joan wrote the schedule on a magnetic calendar blackboard. Emma wrote a note explaining her lateness, listed convenient times for her to catch up, and only wrote down the hours left in her shift. She wanted overtime, but thought mentioning it under the circumstances was rude or tactless—her mother said elderly people lived off fixed incomes.
Emma completed Joan’s usual morning to-do list and went about the routine work for a couple of hours after her scheduled shift ended. According to Joan, bees thrived in as stable, reliable environments as weather cycles permitted.
Melanie found Emma’s car, and ignoring Norman’s warning, Melanie pelted across acres. Norman scootered to Emma’s rescue, but Melissa dashed ahead, rumpled, jet-lagged, and at the end of an hours-long bee argument. Through the one-sided argument, the bees retreated into their hives and the colonies quieted themselves. They cowered from Melanie’s rath.
In the rant, Melanie accused Emma of coming to work, working unsupervised outside her normal area and hours, waiting for new training (Joan’s instructions had not specified it), and (Melanie jumped to the conclusion) disregarding or disobeying instructions. But Melanie’s words were so confusing, that Emma struggled to identify the problem. She insulted Emma and yelled at her. To add to Emma’s indignity, Joan always sent upset beekeepers away from the hives. It might disturb the bees, and her employees’ mental health concerned her. Because Emma felt fine until Melanie arrived and she recognized distressed behavior, Emma knew Melanie had broken the instructions.
Melanie thought Emma cultivated the bees’ aggression and intelligence by informing them of recent distressing events. Somehow, Emma kept herself from verifying Melanie’s guess—and Melanie, as mothers tend to, figured out Emma lied, which Emma recognized as a teenager.
Also, according to Melanie, Joan issued instructions to exterminate the bees closest related to Paige’s hive. Emma intuitively understood the wisdom, but she wanted Joan herself to assign it.
Finally, from Melanie’s perspective, Emma apparently continued working during the rant; Melanie thought Emma totally disregarded her like a snotty teenager. Actually, Melanie said off-hand that the bees probably absconded and needed immediate retrieval. Emma opened the Bluebell Hive to see whether every bee old enough to fly abandoned it—but she saw adult bees in their thousands buzzing anxiously in the hive. Melanie slammed the lid shut. Emma burst into tears and tried to fling open the lid, but Melanie leaned on it.
“You squashed a bee!” Emma yelled, yanking the lid open.
“I most certainly did not!” Melanie yelled.
As Emma held the lid open with both hands and her head, and the bees scuttled into the recesses to avoid Melanie, Norman said, “Melanie, calm down, and stop yelling at everybody. Emma, the bees are fine or they would have stung Melanie. We shouldn’t upset the bees, and Melanie, before you say one word about indicating the bees are dangerous, think again. Let’s go to the cottage. Melissa, take Melanie ahead.”
Emma walked slowly with Norman and between sobs explained her side. Her crushed finger hurt much less than her feelings, and Emma neither knew what Melanie thought she did wrong nor thought she had done anything wrong. Joan’s new set of instructions emphasized the bees were innocent until they misbehaved.
They heard Melanie and Melissa fight in the distance as Emma and Norman turned towards the shed and apiary to tidy up.
Melanie’s attitudes and opinions regarding Joan’s bees soured the relationship with her parents and half-sister. Incidentally, in her personal opinion, archaeoentomologists wasted their lives in a pointless field. Years ago, Melanie and Melissa concluded Joan and Norman were healthy enough for Melissa to live abroad; Melissa promised to return when they suffered serious problems. The arrangement suited everybody. However, Melanie felt bitter that Melissa became an archaeoentomologist and moved away, leaving the care of seniors to Melanie and forcing an obligation upon her to work on the loathed bee farm.
“Melanie said she needed to exterminate unusual or dangerous hives and I shouldn’t work until then,” Emma said.
“Melanie! Melissa! Come here immediately!” Norman called.
The half-sisters returned and Emma edged away to examine a meadow thistle.
“Emma, did you observe any unusual bee-hive-yor,” Norman asked.
Nobody even dignified that with a groan or an eye-roll, let alone a proper response. But Emma snuffled her observations.
“How do you know which hives are which, Melanie?” Norman asked. “When did you research it?”
“Listen to the bees,” Melanie snapped. “Do they sound like themselves?”
Everybody paused and listened.
“Yesterday, they sounded similar,” Norman said.
“Oh, there is another aggressive colony nobody told me about?” Melanie groaned. “Over the whole farm. We can’t control them. We—muffeh.”
Melissa clamped a hand over Melanie’s mouth.
“Mum said unusual, dangerous behavior, and this is not dangerous,” Melissa said.
Melanie attempted to say, “How do you know?”
“Emma, Melissa is your new supervisor. Listen to her and it will be all right,” Norman said.
“Mum always harvests the produce before e-x-t-e-r-m-i-n-a-t-i-o-n, so we have to wait until f-r-o-s-t,” Melissa said.
Melanie answered except nobody understood her: “Needing to spell words around the bees shows how dangerous they are.”
“Did you hear Melissa, Melanie?” Norman asked.
Melanie nodded.
“Take your hand off your sister’s mouth,” Norman said. “Honestly, I thought you had given it up years ago.”
In Melissa’s opinion, the situation called for emergency measures, but she looked dutifully chagrined and said, “Sorry.”
“What did Melissa say with Joan’s approval, Melanie?” Norman asked, and Melanie grumpily mumbled it.
In the cottage, Norman, Melanie, Melissa, and Emma reviewed Joan’s new arrangements. An argument resumed and affronted Melanie quit beekeeping, saying if the others wanted to harbor and breed more dangerous bees, she wanted nothing to do with it, and she forbade Paige from approaching Joan’s bees.
Emma inspected her yellow rose tea cup until Melanie slammed the door behind her. “I didn’t mean to bother her.”
“You didn’t, really,” Norman said. “She is a bit stressed and scared.”
Melissa said, “I wrote my PhD thesis about bug horror media and real bugs! Why would I experiment on a horror movie or allow one to escalate?” She sighed. “Thanks for coming to work today, Emma.”
“I want to work full-time, but I didn’t write the time on the blackboard,” Emma said.
“Write it on the board for overtime and you can have Melanie’s hours if you want, full-time,” Melissa said.
Part 7 coming on Monday, January 1, 2024.
The Queen Bee, Part 5 of 7
Other than bees, there were never insect or arthropod sounds on Joan’s organic bee farm. The absence of bugs was so difficult to explain to the organic control body that Joan could not label her products organic. In a natural environment, the silence felt ominous and backward. Many beekeepers quit because of it, but nobody except Emma admitted to the creeps, and some beekeepers struggled to identify the cause. For the observant ones, saying the reason aloud sounded pathetic or stupid. However, Emma asked where the fauna went, hoping to sound more curious than mildly alarmed. Then she adjusted to the surroundings.
Joan said the bugs moved away over decades, so gradually, she wondered when it began. Once she noticed, Joan thought it was a consequence of modern agriculture. Her ecologically friendly endeavors failed to attract wildlife. Whenever Norman and Joan attempted vermiculture for their flower beds, the worms slithered away, and macroscopic life emigrated from their compost heap. Insectivorous birds and animals foraged elsewhere. The other birds and animals rarely visited and always completely avoided the beehives. Melissa took soil and water samples from across the farm and examined them for microscopic life. The life she found lacked brains; the microscopic life consisted solely of bacteria, viruses, fungi, plants, and algae. Melanie claimed Melissa’s data demonstrated anything with half a brain cell considered the bees dangerous.
While Joan, Melanie, and Ross proceeded with their part of the extermination plan, Emma and Norman went outside to drown Paige’s beehive.
The bees usually hummed loudly, but that day, they were quieter than in the middle of winter. Later, Emma compared walking past the beehives to walking through London during lockdown.
“Joan doesn’t seem very upset,” Emma said.
“She hides her moods,” Norman said.
“What will we tell Paige?”
“Melanie will think of a good excuse.”
Emma felt guilty about drowning the bees; Paige loved them. But everybody agreed the bees posed a danger to any beekeeper, regardless of age.
Joan and Emma exterminated diseased or weak colonies, but Paige’s healthy bees crammed the hive and worked productively. If Emma had time and a safe opportunity, Joan suggested harvesting the colony’s produce. It would keep until Paige felt well enough to use it. Generally, before extermination, Joan and Emma harvested everything from the hive. Sometimes bees considered them thieves or maybe they objected from self-defense, but some seemed to understand the situation. The bees knew when they were ill and how much Joan or her beekeepers harvested yearly.
Joan estimated Paige’s box currently contained 10,000 bees, each necessary to survive until the next summer—if the queen bee expected to return herself. Also, in the queen’s absence, the nurse bees would raise a new one, who required thousands of bees to found a successful colony. But, if the queen bee thought Ross might escape, she might have emptied the hive of all bees except eggs, larvae, nurse bees (who tended the larvae), and bees aged 10-20 days old (who built the honeycomb).
Joan still wondered how exactly the bees passed on knowledge, but they certainly did. A new queen in Paige’s hive might possibly cause trouble for Ross. She believed the eggs, larvae, and pupae were inherently less cruel than the queen and adult bees, being too little to receive instructions. Within weeks, the larvae would be adult bees. Extermination was the most sensible option if adult bees passed the grudge against Ross to the young. Further, colonies descended from Paige’s probably possessed an aggressive streak.
Emma brought a smoker and Norman armed himself with a spray bottle and several water balloons filled with soapy water. Under normal circumstances, stinging failed to intimidate her. She hoped the bees understood for the colony to survive, they needed to live. The fact that Emma planned to kill them anyway was beside the point. A stinging honeybee eviscerated and killed itself.
Thousands of bees zipped out of the top bar hive, ready to sting and buzzing their angry buzz. Emma smoked the bees to mask the bees’ alarm pheromones and trick them into gorging themselves on honey before the hive burned down.
The bees bearded her uncapping knife. It resembled a cake server sharp enough to cut through a honeycomb. Running out of space, the bees settled on her hands and arms.
“I know I’m a bit early this year, but Paige needs the honeycomb and honey,” Emma said to the bees. “It will make her feel better.”
“Royal jelly, as well,” Norman said. “She needs to eat the royal jelly or she won’t grow proper.”
“Auntie Joan will feed you honey all winter.”
“Right. I forgot a jar honey.”
“Let me get it.”
The bees stood on Emma the entire time Norman collected a bottle of emergency honey from the apiary shed. She held still.
Norman set bee feeder full of raw honey the ground. Several bees gravelly inspected it. Then the bees flew into the air and hovered menacingly in front of Emma.
Emma concentrated on transferring honeycombs from the top bars to the bucket. The bees knew Joan and her beekeepers harvested an amount acceptable to both parties, but once Emma exceeded it, the bees swarmed over her hand and knife and the frame.
“Shall I fire?” Norman brandished the spray bottle and a pink water balloon.
“They haven’t hurt me yet,” Emma said, slowly cutting, giving the bees plenty of time to move. “Paige needs the honeycomb.”
Bees stung Emma. To her relief, her bee suit and extra layers protected her, and she let them without comment, hoping they would give up.
Sweat soaked Emma and Norman and veils prevented drinking water. Her mother warned her that elderly people suffered heat exhaustion quickly. Also, Emma wanted to get away from the increasingly agitated bees.
When Joan exterminated bees, she normally used sulfur or dry ice. She thought fools burned sulfur during a wildfire watch and she did not keep dry ice on hand. Therefore, she told Emma to flood the hive—which had a screen bottom.
“We have enough for Paige. You can keep the rest.” Emma closed the hive.
To her surprise, the bees buzzed through the hive’s entrance. Emma nailed scrap wood over the entrance, then nailed the top down. She grasped the hive as if preparing to lift it.
Norman maneuvered his mobility scooter to a leg and sawed through it.
“Don’t know why bees need topple-proof legs,” he joked.
“Bees standing all on one side pull it over,” Emma said.
“Is it too heavy for you?”
“No.”
The pressure on Emma’s hands felt worse than the strain on her arms. Joan gradually changed to top-bar hives because the honeycombs hung side-by-side in one layer, but to access one of the boxy hive’s layers, she lifted tens of pounds. Emma hoisted the boxy hives with more muscles than people expected. With a grunt and her whole body, Emma heaved the bee hive onto its side and then onto its back. Emma poured old paint buckets of soapy water through the screen until the soapy water sticky with honey and full of dust and droppings flowed out.
“All done,” Emma said. “Do you think they suffered much?”
“They can’t hold their breath." Looking towards the cottage, Norman said, “Somebody should have been out by now. No emergency call, at least.”
“I’ll put the produce in the apiary and process it later,” Emma said. “Go into the house and cool down.”
“Joan issued strict instructions to watch you,” Norman said.
Emma and Norman made their way to the apiary, but Emma felt compelled to say, “They probably already killed the dangerous bees, so I don’t need supervision.”
“Arguing shall leave us in the sun longer,” Norman said.
In the house, Norman and Emma struggled out of their extra layers and bee suits. Norman asked her to check on the others, feeling too overheated and exhausted to hustle.
A trail of squashed bees and pesticide rescue led from the lavatory to Joan and Norman’s bedroom.
The tape around the shut lavatory door hung loose. Emma knocked. “Mr. Spencer wants me to check on you.”
“I’m cleaning the loo,” Ross called over the ventilation fan and another fan in the window. “I have a few stings, but I’m alright for now. Ask Melanie about Auntie Joan.”
Emma knocked on the door and Joan feebly said, “Come in.”
“Oh, no!” Emma said. “Did you hurt yourself?”
Joan lay on the bedroom carpet, ashy and sweaty. She felt faint in the lavatory but made it to her bedroom before falling. She thought broke her hip. Melanie cut off Joan’s extra layers and bee suit and gave her several ice packs, and a big glass of ice water. She insisted on disposing of the bee carnage before calling an ambulance. Ross called 999 anyway and to escape Melanie’s wrath, he helped.
Already, Melanie had opened every window in the house and lit scented candles. She ran the last load of bathroom furnishings from Joan and Norman’s bedroom to her old bedroom.
“I might have broken me hip,” Joan said, as Melanie left to collect the suspicious clothing. “I have something to tell you. Sit down near me so I can whisper.”
Emma sat and Joan whispered, “Tell the bees about me and tell them not to kill people or hurt people. Don’t worry Melanie with it.”
“Sure,” Emma said.
In a normal voice, Joan said, “I don’t want to bother anybody, but where is Norman?”
“I’ll get him.”
Norman trundled upstairs in his chair lift and transferred to his wheelchair. He tended to Joan while Melanie, Ross, and Emma continued tidying up. Dead bees stung them occasionally. It affronted Ross; Melanie just said, “Precisely why I told you not to touch them.” Just as the ambulance arrived, Emma ripped the tape from the bathroom door as the ambulance arrived, Norman plucked a dead bee from Melanie’s ponytail, and Ross scuttled into the cupboard under the stairs.
Dozens of bees had stung Melanie and Joan. The EMTs believed Melanie’s story. She and Joan worked with cranky bees on a hot day. She asked Melanie for help; Emma worked on another acre, hence their opposite conditions. Joan became faint from the heat and bee stings, so she decided to cool down in the cottage. She passed out while undressing and broke her hip.
The ambulance, EMTs, Joan, and Norman left.
Melanie and Emma checked on Ross, who was developing a severe reaction to the bee stings. His weight protected him from the venom’s effects somewhat. Despite the clothing, Ross suffered hundreds of stings over his body, though most stingers barely penetrated his skin. Also, Melanie kept him too busy to remove the stingers; she thought he suffered less than Joan.
Melanie and Emma helped him onto a couch downstairs. Melanie scraped out the bee stings and gave Ross Joan’s home cures for hives, sting swelling, itching, and pain. He felt a little better in the fresher air.
Melanie put her hands on her hips. “Alright, now, neither of you tell anybody anything about killer honeybees.”
Emma almost dared ask, Or what? but at the last moment, made herself say, “Sure.”
“Paige’s bees were diseased and needed to be exterminated,” Melanie said.
“Varroa mites?” Emma asked.
“No, believe it or not, they have brains. It was an unidentifiable, contagious disease.”
“What about the legs Mr. Spencer sawed off the hives?” Emma asked.
“She can’t have more bees. I’m taking apart the hive today and Norman can burn it when the wildfire watch ends. She will be in a rehabilitation center until then, probably. If she isn’t, she won’t be well enough to rummage around in the shed. Ross, what is your excuse for being stung?”
“What?” Ross asked. “I didn’t—”
“How will you explain the bee stings?”
In a panic, Ross blurted, “I went to Auntie Joan’s farm to order honey and got attacked somehow. I don’t know what I did to the bees. Emma, what did I do to the bees?”
“What is his excuse, Emma?” He looked at her in wide-eyed panic.
“Mr. Andrews wanted to see the inside of a hive and dropped the worker bee brood,” Emma said, drawing from personal experience.
“Excellent excuse,” Melanie said. “Both of you go home.”
“What’s a worker bee brood?” Ross asked.
Melanie groaned.
“Where the bees live,” Emma said. “Bees don’t like being dropped. Would you?”
“Right,” Melanie said. “Emma, you don’t need to work tomorrow. Mum and I won’t be here and the work can wait. Melissa arrives tomorrow and intends to stay until Mum recovers, so you will be working with her. Now go home, both of you.”
Ross trudged outside and Emma gathered her things and left.
“Wait, I can’t bike in my condition,” Ross said, standing uncertainly on the cottage step.
“I’m not driving a man,” Emma said because it was the kind of thing her mother would say. “Good luck asking Melanie.”
In her car, Emma texted Melissa: Auntie Joan wants me to tell the bees she broke her hip and tell them not to attack and kill people. How? What if they attack the hospital? Then she drove home.
Ross’s wife picked him up at the farm’s gate and made him go to the doctor.
Melanie cleaned the dried pesticides from the lavatory ceiling and wall and the floor’s puddles of pesticides, soapy water, and hemolymph on the floor. Despite her efforts and the fan running constantly for days, the lavatory stank like an unethical pesticide factory’s illegal chemical dumping ground.
Then Melanie dismantled Paige’s hive and hid the pieces, locked up, and visited Joan, who was in surgery. Norman berated Melanie for waiting to call an ambulance, and Melanie hissed at him to be quiet. He refused.
Part 6 coming Monday, December 25, 2023.
The Queen Bee, Part 4 of 7
Melanie longed for decades to kill her mother’s bees or otherwise get rid of them. She did not want them to suffer; she just wanted them to die. Melissa’s older half-sister’s sentiments confused Melissa until bedbugs infested her university dormitory.
In one instance, Joan agreed with Melanie’s philosophy—when Melissa’s pet tarantula ran away, presumably afraid of the bees. Norman was fine with small bugs and found a few larger ones acceptable, like butterflies, but in general, the larger the bug, the less he liked it. He tended to place them outside instead of swatting them. Reluctantly, Norman allowed Melissa to buy Buttercup if the spider remained cozy and safe in the terrarium or on cleaning day, inside a designated tarantula jar. How, exactly, the tarantula escaped remained a mystery forever, but a family inquest determined it was not a malicious disappearance.
The honeybees surrounding the cottage meekly let Joan pass with her old lady cart and picnic blanket. A few scout bees followed her and peeked through the apiary and shed’s windows. She hid the necessary equipment under the blanket, but she worried the bees smelled it.
To the queen bee’s indignation, Joan caught her yet again and placed her inside a queen bee cage. From a human’s point-of-view, Joan handled the queen gently, but the queen bee felt jostled. Joan wrapped the queen bee cage in a clean hanky.
Ross’s ordeal frightened Melanie, but she would feel better after the battle. Over the years, Melanie thought of the anti-bee weapons and stored an inordinate number of bee killer cans. It distressed Joan, but she overlooked Melanie’s thirst for hemolymph until Ross’s ordeal was over. Melanie’s preparations and Joan’s apparent calmness about the bees’ behavior convinced Ross they expected premeditated bee attacks. The attacks were not necessarily on him, but on somebody, and not necessarily carried out by humans, but expected by humans who did nothing to prevent it.
When Joan returned, she instructed Ross through the cupboard door.
In the lavatory, Melanie removed anything possible, plugged the sink and tub, closed the toilet lid, and taped over the plugs and keyhole. She coated every surface with bee killer, frequently escaping to the hallway for fresher air. Joan had no need for insecticides, even organic ones, and the bees had never been inside her cottage, so she thought the bees would disregard the stench.
Melanie, Joan, and Ross worried a bit about extended skin contact with the pesticide, but they wore several layers under bee suits. Inhaled fumes hopefully caused fewer respiratory problems than anaphylactic shock. The other side effects sounded as pleasant as bee stings, but he, Joan, and Melanie had cleaned up many bodily fluids before. But at least the pesticide did not intend to kill him.
Meanwhile, Norman mixed sugar syrup and spread it over plastic food containers. He poured soapy water into spray bottles, water balloons, and plastic food containers with soapy water. He floated popsicle sticks in pots and bowls of plain water. Finally, he sprayed the sugar syrup, containers of soapy water, and plain water with bee killer.
Emma gathered miscellaneous supplies from around the cottage. With bee killer, she poisoned the bee brushes, the altered swarm box inside and out, and the bee vacuum’s interior, until they dripped. She carried tray loads of Norman’s ammunition upstairs to the lavatory. As Emma hauled up two old paint buckets of water balloons, the insecticide fumes wafted down the hall.
“Are you sure the bee spray is safe?” Emma asked, eyes watering.
“We will need extra oxygen after all,” Melanie wheezed. For Paige’s allergic reactions, Melanie bought very small, portable oxygen tanks, which included masks.
“Positive you feel all right?” Emma asked.
“It needs to dry.” Melanie coughed.
“Let me have a turn.”
Melanie shook her head and after a few tries, said, “No.”
Joan, Melanie, Ross, Emma, and Norman took extra-strength allergy medicine and slathered their faces and necks with hydrocortisone cream. Emma put on her winter things again and the adults borrowed Joan and Norman’s winter clothes. The group wore safety goggles, wellies, and rubber dishwashing gloves. Joan, Melanie, and Ross donned the oxygen masks, but Emma and Norman did not need them. At Norman’s recommendation, they covered the bee suits’ zippers and any gap between layers with duct tape.
Ross, Joan (carrying the queen), and Melanie filed into the lavatory and shut the door. Emma tucked a towel against the door’s crack. She stood on a stool to tape around the door with masking tape. Finally, she placed a chair under the door to prevent accidentally jiggling the handle open.
“Ready,” Emma called.
“Thank you,” Joan said.
Joan unwrapped the queen bee cage, held the cage to Ross’s eye level, and said, “Tell the bees to come indoors so that Ross can apologize properly. They can come in through an open window upstairs. I shall put you on the ledge.”
Ross quavered, “I’d like to apologize to the bees buzzing around the cottage.”
Joan opened the window. She set the queen bee cage down and opened it. Bees promptly clustered around the queen bee.
The queen bee steadily grew suspicious, but except for her nuptial flight, she had never been outside her hive before that day, let alone in a human’s hive. The humans smelled nervous and upset. However, the queen bee obeyed Joan.
The bees swarmed around the window. Ross whimpered and covered his face with his hands.
“Come in,” Joan said. “Come in so Ross can apologize. Have a bit of syrup and a drink of water. Rest your weary exoskeletons.”
The worker bees did not understand how humanhive worked, and they trusted Joan. 40,000 bees flew lethargically into the lavatory, bearding the countertops and walls, unless they collided with each other on the syrup trays and popsicle sticks. So much flying exhausted them and they desperately needed the rest, food, and water.
“Is everybody indoors?” Joan asked, looking out the window. Seeing no other bees, she shut it. She knocked on the door. “Are you there, Emma?”
“Yeah,” Emma said.
“You ought to begin now.”
“All right.”
Outside, Emma and Norman proceeded with their part of the plan.
Ross blubbered and whimpered an incoherent apology for a minute—the longer he talked, the more poison the bees absorbed. His tone confused the bees, who accustomed themselves to Joan’s quiet, steady voice, Norman’s cheerfulness, Emma’s teenaged tones, and Melanie’s temperament. The beekeepers who came and went were more comprehensible than the sweaty, mucusy mess of pheromones who attacked Paige. On the other antennae, Ross, Melanie, and Joan smelled scared. The bees wondered if the humans should be scared of the bees or if the bees should be scared of the humans or something else in the humanhive. It and others they occasionally saw through windows were very unusual places to live.
A bee dropped off the wall, paralyzed, and another struggled for a position on a popsicle stick, fell in, and found herself unable to swim out. Within seconds, other bees sent out an alarm signal.
Refreshed bees flew towards Ross, who shrieked. Melanie and Joan clamped lids on top of the food containers, trapping bees inside. She considered hunting for the queen but thought she made little difference to the bees’ tactics. Often through the slaughter, Melanie cackled.
“Vacuum up the bees, Ross,” Joan said.
Ross flailed with the vacuum, but Joan specifically instructed him to move calmly. Frantic movements provoked bee attacks. With one hand, Joan brushed bees from him, spreading bee killer across their bodies, injuring their legs and wings, and theoretically provoking them to attack her instead. With her other hand, she sprayed them with soapy water, which either drowned them or made them damp and heavy.
Immediately after Ross gained control of the vacuum, he fell over.
“Are you hurt?” Joan asked.
Ross whimpered and rolled onto his back. Joan turned off the vacuum.
“Ross! Are you hurt?”
He shook his head and spluttered something about the vacuum being off. Joan turned it on and he aimed at the bees. According to the plan, Ross needed to vacuum his entire body, but he focused instinctively on his face and neck.
It looked as if Ross’s bee suit was made of bees. The honeybees crawled over him, stepped on each other, or hit each other with wings, and pushed the dead aside. Altogether, the bees were surprisingly heavy. The bees stung Ross, but his clothing and the bee suit protected him. However, the sheer number of stings meant some penetrated his clothes. Others prepared to land.
The bees considered Melanie and Joan minor inconveniences. Bearding the bathtub and shower walls, they waited for an opportune moment to attack Ross and avoid the vacuum simultaneously.
A cloud of bees surrounded Melanie, but she sprayed them with one or two bottles of soapy water.
Joan wanted the bees to attack her. She hoped to distract them from Ross and especially Melanie. Naturally, Joan felt deeper concern for Melanie than Ross, but she prayed Ross survived. Panic-induced cardiac arrest seemed a more likely cause of death than anaphylaxis.
Joan switched off the full vacuum and took it from Ross, which was the signal for Melanie to barrage Ross with water balloons. Melanie’s water balloons drove bees into the air again and they landed on the ceilings and walls. Having emptied the vacuum into the swarm box, Joan suctioned bees covering the walls and ceiling; she assumed the ones on the flat surfaces were weaker.
The bees moved aside as Joan suctioned them and some regained their positions after one of Melanie’s water balloons, but they observed their attacks were ineffective. Though thousands of bees had stung Melanie, Ross, and even Joan, only Ross showed the slightest sign of a reaction. Joan had taught her bees the human’s scared dance—curling into a ball and whimpering—and Ross displayed it excellently.
Joan switched off the full vacuum.
“Are they dead?” Ross sobbed.
“I estimate about 20,000 bees on the walls and ceilings,” Joan said. “But, look, she fell off.”
Melanie happily said, “The pesticide worked!”
“Good. No offense, Auntie, Joan,” Ross said.
“Needs must,” Joan said.
More bees fell. Others flew to a flat surface, but some became paralyzed mid-air. Joan, Ross, and Melanie pelted the remaining water balloons at them.
“Melanie, I’m awfully hot,” Joan said, delicately moving food containers from the toilet seat to the counter as if a slosh was the only thing threatening the bees inside. “But I will feel better if I sit.”
“I’ll hurry up and kill them. Ross Andrews, do something before my mum has heat exhaustion.”
“They stung me,” Ross said.
“Is your airway closing?” Melanie asked.
“I don’t…think so?”
“Since you can’t tell, you are fine.”
“Melanie!” Joan said in her affronted mother voice.
Totally unchagrined, Melanie said, “Kill bees, Ross, before my mum has heat exhaustion. Use water balloons or spray bottles.”
Joan rested her head on the counter and waited patiently.
Melanie stepped into the bathtub and sprayed her last pesticide can over the bees. They cascaded down the walls and off the ceiling. Ross tossed water balloons or sprayed water at straggling bees elsewhere in the lavatory.
The thousands of living bees clustered into an irregular shape, and synchronized a flight at Ross. They stung him.
Part 5 coming Monday, December 18, 2023.
The Queen Bee, Part 3 of 7
The queen bee dispatched thousands and thousands of honeybees to sting Ross to death for attacking Paige. The bees traveled slowly, stopping frequently to eat nectar and pollen or drink at the river. They spent the night in a hollow tree. The bees intended to reach the restaurant the next day, but Ross biked past them. As the bees chased him, he called Joan, the local bee authority.
Joan dressed quickly, hurried to the bee shed for a bee suit, and checked on Paige’s hive.
Upon opening the hive, Joan estimated 20,000 bees were chasing Ross, and the present bees buzzed irritably. The bee queen scuttled into a corner. Joan placed her inside the jar, which had holes punched in the lid.
Several dozen bees flew from the hive and landed on Joan’s hands.
“Did you send bees to sting Ross?” Joan asked.
The queen bee flew up and down steadily, a positive answer.
As soon as Joan unscrewed the lid, the bees flew from her hands.
Approximately 40,000 bees followed Joan to the cottage but hovered outside. Joan prohibited bees inside the cottage. In order of against whom the bees were most likely to hold a grudge, Joan worried about Melanie, Emma, Norman, Paige, herself, and anybody else who interfered with the bees. Joan’s bees defined “interfering” as “anything humans do to the hive,” but, on account of the benefits and stability, they tolerated the humans’ ignorance of proper hives and colonies.
Joan required an informed person of an age of majority to drive the pickup. She called Melanie, the closest suitable person, saying there was a rather serious, peculiar bee emergency. Then Joan called Emma to warn her the bees were chasing Ross and, in case the bees threatened any human, Joan canceled the day’s usual work.
Melanie hurried to Joan’s cottage, bringing along anti-bee weapons from her attic, while Joan collected her things and Ross hid from the bees in a petrol station restroom. On the drive, Joan explained the situation to Melanie. Ross listened over the phone and updated them about the bees.
“We need to kill the bees,” Melanie snapped.
“Once we rescue Ross, the swarm will go home,” Joan said, already preparing to exterminate them before they found another way to kill Ross.
“The swarm will follow him,” Melanie said.
“But Ross will come to my cottage and the bees will want to rest their weary exoskeletons in their hive.”
“When do we trap them?”
“We shan't discuss it here.”
“Why? Because the bees might overhear?” Melanie asked, rolling her eyes.
Melanie sarcastically identified the real reason. Joan thought the bees understood speech enough to report extermination plans existed. She said, “We need to rescue Ross first.”
“Killing the bees will rescue him,” Melanie said.
“I agree with Melanie,” Ross said.
“We shall do one thing at a time and we need time indoors, in the same room, to gather our thoughts,” Joan said.
“Oh, we have two thoughts between the three of us. Kill the bees or let them kill Ross,” Melanie said.
The bees examined the petrol station for entrances and coincidentally blocked the automatic doors, which they thought were windows. How humans entered the hive baffled them. Other customers drove away to a different petrol station or else the bees would have learned to activate the doors.
Joan sucked the bees into her bee vacuum, then emptied the bees into a swarm box with a plugged hole cut in the top. She blocked the entrance, placed a funnel into the hole, and Melanie gleefully flooded the hive with gallons of soapy water, drowning the bees.
The extermination saddened Joan, but she believed it was right and necessary. Ross wanted to know why she tricked the bees and Joan promised to explain once he wore a bee suit and sheltered in a safe place—the closet under her stairs. Melanie and Joan intended to tape up the cottage’s vents to protect him from an incursion and drew the curtains and blinds.
Dressed in extra layers, Emma approached the cottage’s front door. She walked calmly and quietly around the house to investigate. Most bees bearded the walls and windowsills. Bees buzzed around the front and back doors and before both stories’ windows. Individual bees hovered between the clusters and other bees snacked on Joan and Norman’s flowers or napped inside them.
Emma forced herself to smile but remembered the bees smelled alarm pheromones. With fake cheeriness, she said, “Hello, bees! It’s just me, Emma.”
The bees turned to look at her.
“Excuse me, please.”
The bees flew aside enough for her to reach the door. She turned the locked knob—and expected trouble. Joan and Norman never locked their doors, but Joan gave Emma a key for emergencies, and when Melanie automatically locked the door. Emma fumbled with the lock, and while pushing it open, took one large step to enter the hall, and then slammed the door behind herself, locked it, and leaned against it.
Melanie, Joan, and Norman were in the hall next to the cupboard under the stairs, but they stopped arguing and looked at her for a second. Simultaneously, Joan said, “Emma, I told you to stay home,” and Melanie yelled, “I locked the door and it was supposed to stay locked!” and Norman said, “Don’t yell at Emma!”
With no idea what Melanie referred to and positive that Emma had nothing to do with it, Emma yelled, “I didn’t know!” Emma had controlled herself around Melanie very well for years and Melanie yelled at her first. She unwrapped the plaid scarf from her head.
A muffled man’s voice from the cupboard under the stairs called, “What’s going on? Did they get into the cottage?”
Discombobulated, Emma looked around for Ross, as Melanie examined her for bees.
“How did you unlock the door?” Melanie asked.
“I gave her a key,” Joan said.
“I found a swarm,” Emma said because it was her only explainable recent experience.
“We are quite aware of the swarms,” Joan said.
“Did they get in?” Ross asked.
“Who is in the cupboard?” Emma asked.
“Ross Andrews,” Melanie groaned.
“This morning has been a bit of an ordeal for Ross,” Norman said.
“Emma, best stay here and leave the door shut,” Joan said.
“Right,” Emma said.
“And put your winter things in the living room before you overheat. I heard you tell your mother about skipping work. Where does she think you are?”
“I’m here to help out since your family might be busy with Paige.”
Ross's demands for an explanation of the bees’ behavior (they showed him a picture of Paige’s face) delayed the argument, and just as it began, Emma interrupted it. Now the adults continued.
Emma obeyed and sat on the couch, playing a game on her phone with headphones on. Still, she heard Melanie, Joan, and Norman, and through most of the discussion, the living room and cupboard radiated awkward silence. Initially, convincing Melanie she misinterpreted Joan’s behavior was the hard part, and until Melanie calmed down, nobody could do anything about the bees.
To everybody’s surprise and Melanie’s indignation, Ross said that assuming the bees were as weird as they seemed, Joan’s earlier actions made sense. He wanted to know, since Joan did not sic the bees on him, how the bees found him. In retrospect, Emma realized the bees in Joan’s hat acquired Ross’s face and location. Joan had forgotten the incident, but once Emma mentioned them, she and the others, except for Ross, thought it a good explanation.
“I want to ask a question that you might find a bit rude,” Ross said.
“Ask away,” Joan said.
“How do I know you aren’t trying to kill me?” Ross asked. “No offense.”
“Excellent question,” Joan said. “Vengeance isn’t Christian.”
“The law says we can sue you,” Melanie said.
“You and the bees ought to be justly punished, but we shan’t seek revenge. And we forgive your cook and your business.”
Ross asked, “Enough to drop the suit?”
“No,” Melanie snapped.
“Thought as much. So if you did not tell the bees to attack me, why did they?”
Joan had told the bees the family sued the restaurant owned by Ross Andrews. Because the bees lacked the concept of suing, she theorized they thought Ross himself attacked Paige. Mentioning the chef at this point might provoke the bees to attack another victim, so the bees needed to think Ross attacked Paige. The humans unanimously agreed the chef and Ross deserved to live.
Also, Joan wondered if the queen bee thought she attacked another queen bee: Ross. If the queen bee knew the restaurant had employees, the employees could be considered worker bees. When a colony of bees entered another, colonized hive, the queen bees fought each other. Joan’s bees took over hives when they deemed it necessary, bringing along their queen to depose the other one, but Joan frowned upon it. Normal bees stole honey, requiring several thousand bees to assault the hive, but Joan’s bees preferred signaling her. She was fairly confident her bees did not revenge wrongs amongst themselves.
Joan wished that when the bees suggested poisoning Ross, she told the bees, “Don’t kill Ross,” which sounded ominous and threatening to Ross, who required further assurances Auntie Joan was not a murderer. Fortunately, her reputation for decades and her descriptions of the bees’ abnormal behavior convinced Ross she told the truth.
“We shall kill Paige’s bees,” Joan said.
“Can I help?” Emma asked.
“I ought not to ask a minor.”
Joan intended to limit provocations to chaos. A horde of 40,000 stinging bees alarmed her. The queen bee might plan a stinging ambush or find another murder method. And, like anybody when threatened, the bees might hide and find Ross before Joan and Melanie found them, or, they might attack immediately before Joan carried out her threat. If the bees naturally split off into groups, Joan intended to exterminate each group. But she worried about scattering the bees—even a hundred missing bees stinging the right places threatened Ross’s life.
Norman scootered to Emma as Joan and Melanie went into the kitchen.
“Hi,” Emma said.
“Hello,” Norman said. “Joan gave you the day off.”
“I don’t want you to lie to your mum.”
“But I would be helping, and we can’t let the bees kill Mr. Andrews, so it isn’t a bad lie.”
“Paige can’t come over for a few months and her mother gave me a list of approved websites. Could you please show me how to use them?”
“Sure.”
While Emma helped Norman with things obvious to her, Joan and Melanie worked out a decent plan that terrified Ross as much as being stung to death by bees.
Reluctantly, Joan’s plans included Emma, simply because Melissa was unavailable. Melissa studied depictions of dragonflies on Zuni pottery in the United States and not only would she reach the cottage long after Emma’s 11:00 PM curfew, but the bees refused to let Emma leave, even when Joan asked. Standing for a few minutes or walking a short distance exhausted Norman, limiting his usefulness. Therefore, Norman promised to supervise and protect Emma while she participated in a physically challenging part of the plans.
Part 4 coming on December 11, 2023.
The Queen Bee, Part 2 of 7
The sight of the bees forming Ross’s face and deadly nightshade unnerved Emma. Prior to witnessing it, Emma assumed Joan exaggerated her bees’ picture-making skills, and Emma adjusted to it. Forming Ross’s face was extraordinary. To productively procrastinate in the apiary, she dusted and swept, and waited for Joan to find her.
The first year Emma worked at the apiary, Joan said that she had a weird array of precocious bee colonies, but loved them too much to alert scientists, who would take them away or interrupt their work. Joan quickly decided Emma was the right kind of person to keep her bees. Most other beekeepers were best suited to normal bees.
Upon hiring Emma, Joan said that only certain people, especially children, could see the bees’ shapes. Paige said that unimaginative adults outgrew it, which Emma wanted to believe. Emma wondered if some adults were children at heart.
“Why can they do that?” Emma asked.
“Do what?” Joan asked.
“Make faces.”
“I haven’t the faintest idea. We shan’t collect any honey from their hive this year, and next year, we must destroy the comb and honey. Too late in the year to do it now.” Joan got out her bee genealogy book and sat down.
“Did they come from a testing facility or something?”
“The bees simply became more intelligent over the years. But I’m glad you saw them and you can help me watch for funny honey.” Joan sighed. “They don’t understand Paige’s situation. It is a bit beyond them, to be honest. Please, don’t tell Melanie about them. She has enough to worry about, and you’ve probably noticed by now she doesn’t particularly like bees.” Joan worried about being a dotty old lady whose children would take her beloved colonies away and send her to a home. Ross’s face agitated her concerns. She said, “And I just need to check the colony’s family tree.
Emma proceeded with her normal work as Joan searched her genealogical records, which, especially regarding her own bees, rivaled Debrett’s Peerage & Baronetage. She and her younger daughter, Melissa, tracked hive queens as thoroughly as European royalty monitored each other’s successions. They even tracked down the bees she sold, but generally, investigating their offspring required a time machine. Many died without swarming. Joan spread out several of her other books, binders, and notebooks and continued researching.
“Do you know about my first husband?” Joan asked when Emma returned to the shed.
“Mum said not to mention him unless you did,” Emma said.
“Paige's bees trace back to a swarm from a particular hive. The hive had the same queen during the swarm and when the bees murdered Clarence."
Joan was born in a small row house with a garden too small and shadowy for a victory garden. Her parents kept a beehive to support the war effort. The queen bee filled the hive with normal, hardworking, healthy bees. Pollinating bees were essential for proper agriculture in the best or worst outcome of the War; Joan’s family’s bees might not have routinely reached the countryside, but families planted gardens across town and might already tend orchard trees. Later, Joan wondered if her bees traveled the maximum distance to do their bit. She spent most of her childhood under sugar rationing, but due to the family beehive, she or one of her siblings took turns having a birthday cake.
Soon after sugar rationing ended, Joan’s parents intended to stop beekeeping, but they let Joan maintain the hive herself. She sold honey and wished for more space. But her descendants of wartime bees seemed happy in the cramped garden. As a teenager, Joan must have noticed clever, storybook-like bees. Their intelligence and emotional microevolution were probably unobservable outside a laboratory. Shortly before Joan met Clarence, she noticed her bees were particularly vivacious compared to other beekeepers’ and she wondered if loving the bees biased her.
Even though Clarence despised bees and considered honey disgusting, he tolerated bees for Joan’s sake and admitted the world needed pollinators. He was not scared of bees and avoided them like they were a dog’s mess. Joan and Clarence loved each other anyway and married. When Joan told the bees, she gave them a slice of wedding cake. Clarence considered it and her many folksy ways silly, but he rarely outwardly objected to them. He gravitated towards the modern, developed world.
When Joan became pregnant with Melanie, Clarence vetoed the name Melissa—Joan excitedly pointed out the etymology before she stopped herself—and, therefore, he and Joan compromised with Melanie. Joan warned the bees when contractions began. She doubted Clarence intended to tell the bees on her behalf, but she visited the bees daily and the long interruption might discombobulate them like the rare days she felt too sick to notify them.
Clarence and Joan bought a house with a larger garden and he built a wooden fence around Joan’s bee yard and gave her a corner of the cellar. She kept three hives. She struggled to acquire books and scholarly bee research. The scientific articles baffled her and she had little opportunity to study science.
Joan sold the excess honey and harvested more beeswax than she needed or could give away. Concerning beeswax, she was more likely to break even than profit. Clarence discouraged her from expanding the bee business, or trying to sell the excess beeswax, or spending money on processing the disturbing beeswax. She sold bees, to his relief. Her bees evolved to the point Joan worried her sold bees alarmed beekeepers. Along with normal quarantine practices, she blocked their convenient view of other bees with a muslin screen.
Joan longed to expand the bee business somehow and suggested building hives. However, she needed to learn the necessary carpentry skills (Clarence refused to teach her), he disliked people borrowing his tools and deemed another set too expensive, and the idea was a probably an unprofitable, expensive venture. Then Joan suggested a cookbook—knowing full well that Clarence objected to honey-contaminated food since only she and sometimes Melanie ate it. Finally, Joan suggested renting hives to farmers. The hives spent the growing season on the farmer’s land and in the garden through the winter, when nobody bothered with the garden. However, Clarence refused. In his opinion, Joan had more worthwhile activities than bee enterprises and Joan considered herself capable of both.
Over the generations, the bees began to respond to her, and she thought they understood some of what she said. They coordinated their flying into shapes and pictures. She considered herself incapable of experimenting on the bees. When Joan showed Melanie the pretty pictures, the bees scared Melanie. Joan expected it to appeal to children. She habitually did not tell Clarence bee matters, but this time, she needed to tell him. He declared the whole idea ridiculous and that Joan made up a nice story upon which Melanie’s imagination expanded.
To read, think, nap, or have some time to herself undisturbed, Joan sat in the bee yard. Her bees required less attention than Clarence thought. Often, she vented in a whisper to the bees—nobody could read it in her diary, overhear her because nobody else went near the bees, and there were no worries of spreading gossip or leading to a petty quarrel.
Melanie agreed with her father’s bee opinions more than Joan’s, possibly because Joan rarely contradicted Clarence. Keeping her opinions and facts to herself was easier and better for a good home life. She and Clarence usually had a good, peaceful home and a happy marriage, tensions arose from the bees.
Clarence gradually noticed the bees’ extraordinary behavior, hence Joan’s insistence they reveal themselves privately to select people. He thought it best Joan got rid of all her bees and, since he long ago resigned himself to her bees, begin again with a fresh strain. Knowing extermination distressed Joan, he suggested sending them to the government. The bees absconded and Joan spent several days searching for them and reassuring them of their safety. It convinced Clarence they needed to stay—he dreaded freaky bees swarming the countryside. Also, he insisted Joan stop selling swarms; she cooperated. She never sold swarms again.
Bee issues and their influence on other issues grew worse, but Clarence and Joan tried to work them out. Neither considered divorce. In her head, never to the bees, Joan wondered if she ought to exterminate the hives. Melanie and the bees seemed aware of the problems. As much as Joan and Clarence comforted Melanie, Joan theoretically comforted the bees.
One Sunday, Clarence was sick. Joan and Melanie walked to church and he stayed home. Joan finished cooking lunch and sent Melanie to find Clarence. Melanie found her father stung to death by bees. She screamed and cried incoherently, prompting Joan to search for her husband, still in his pajamas. Thousands of dead and dying honeybees surrounded and covered him. The garden hose continued running. It tangled around his legs and the medical examiner determined it tripped him. The medical examiner found bees in his ears, nose, and throat and stings directly on his eyeballs and tongue.
However, Joan had taught Clarence to defend himself from attacking honeybees.
The medical examiner called Clarence’s death an accident. Joan confessed to the police her bees had killed him. She could not prove it, except for a mostly empty hive from which she did not expect a swarm, but the police named her bees as the most likely suspect and that it was an accident. Joan wished the bees communicated more coherently to humans—the queen bee knew why the bees swarmed. She certainly never asked the bees to kill anybody, let alone want Clarence dead. Perhaps he provoked them. Just in case they attacked first, Joan banned stinging people to death.
Promptly, Joan euthanized the colony. Because the colonies which swarmed from it had not hurt anybody, she left them alone.
Joan brought a bit of funeral biscuit to the hives and draped them in black cloth. Sneakily at night, Melanie attempted to knock off the biscuits and tear down the cloth. Every flying bee flew far from the beehives; Melanie believed they intended to sting her to death. She ran to the house.
Then Joan bought her farm and a tractor and increased her bee business while working in town. Carefully, she placed the hives out of sight of the cottage and road. Bright violet fences marked a boundary beyond which she allowed synchronized flight only in emergencies.
Joan met Norman and quickly, she showed him the bees. Norman bolted into her apiary shed, but he met Joan halfway up the path. He apologized for his rudeness to Joan and the bees. Soon, Joan and Norman married. He and Joan brought a slice of wedding cake to the bees. While Joan recovered from delivering Melissa, he personally informed the bees.
Norman wanted Joan to keep bees if she liked it, and so she proceeded with her bee enterprises. He helped her in his spare time. People were familiar with Auntie Joan and her delicious honey and precious bees. She wished they called Norman Uncle Norman, but people practically ignored him; he did not mind.
For decades, Joan rented hives to farmers. Their crops noticeably benefited from her bees, and to a certain extent, the bees avoided cross-pollination. She positively forbade rented bees to make shapes under any circumstances. Melanie doubted they followed her instructions. Still, Joan never received a complaint or heard, “I think I almost saw the bees doing the oddest thing…” While collecting a swarm, Joan fell and the farmer helped her up approximately an hour later, wondering what took so long. Meanwhile, outside Norman’s office window, a swarm of bees bumped gently against the glass to get his attention. He followed it in the direction of the farm. Joan stopped renting hives. It explained why Joan told Emma, if a swarm of honeybees were in an unlikely new hive site, to follow the bees.
Local people believed from sheer lack of evidence that Joan’s bees were normal bees who made good honey, guaranteed to taste exactly as the pink and brown label said. Artisans ranked her pure beeswax among the best. Oddly, Joan refused to enter competitions; she said she was not competitive enough, but she also thought her honey was average.
Thanks to Joan’s bee-decline awareness pamphlets, school talks, and giveaway bee habitats, native bees repopulated the village and neighboring areas. They were perfectly normal, like the wild bees in Joan’s previous homes.
Nobody (or, at least, cynically theorizing, nobody other than Melanie, who would rather become a nude, avant-garde, interactive, eventually deadly public art installation than imply Joan’s bees were unusual) said, “Be nice to Auntie Joan or a bee will sting your eyeball.”
“Why are the bees protecting Paige?” Emma asked.
“They love her,” Joan said. Looking through her notebooks and books, she said, “And ones in that hive are hers, but her mum doesn’t want people to see them. But I heard Paige repeat Anglo-Saxon bee charms as she played outside. But who knows what else she said.”
“Magic isn’t real.”
“But the bees believe what they are told. I thought they were like nursery rhymes for bees, but children believe nursery rhymes as well. Here ’tis. Two charms for swarming bees, but the bees wouldn’t know its purpose.” Joan read the English translation of the first charm:
“’I take under foot, I have found it.
Verily earth avails against every creature,
And against mischief and mindlessness,
And against the great tongue of man.’”
“Paige memorized that?” Emma asked, skeptically.
“Or she substituted words quite close. She enjoys old books,” Joan said, and read the second translated charm.
“’Sit ye, victor-dames, sink to earth,
Never to fly wild to the wood!
Be as mindful of my good
As every man is of food and estate.’”
“How do they know it’s about bees?” Emma asked.
“They know when we speak to them,” Joan said.
Joan, Paige, and Emma talked to the bees and she and the beekeepers talked to each other. Emma considered a one-sided conversation with insects silly until she started. In addition to Joan’s wealth of bee folklore, stories, songs, quotations, and facts, on boring drudgery days, she reminisced about her family, sang songs, and told stories. She memorized some of it, promised it on their breaks if they worked quickly, or, when feeble, read aloud from her garden chair. Otherwise, unless it disturbed the bees, they listened to music, audiobooks, and the radio.
“Your bees swarm,” Emma said.
“Yes, but they always return or tell me they require a new hive. But they could have misinterpreted the words. My bees pass down information through the generations, or they might have understood enough to misinterpret it. My bees understand more than they communicate, like babies.”
Emma did not believe Joan’s full explanation. However, Emma certainly believed the bees wanted to murder Mr. Andrews and that Joan worried deeply. Joan’s worry scared Emma. And she did not want to be around murderous bees, but Joan did not seem worried for her and Emma’s safety. If she was, she would send Emma home or give her extremely specific instructions.
“Why don’t you go home until all this is sorted out?” Joan asked.
“You have a stressful time and a lot to do, so I want to help,” Emma said.
“Very sweet. Thanks. But if the bees scare you, you can leave. And, of course, come back to work when it is all sorted.”
“I’m all right.”
“And you can change your mind.”
“Thanks.”
Throughout the day, Emma considered quitting her job, but Joan might be too old to handle the situation and Norman was in a wheelchair. After discovering Norman’s body, Melanie might be too scared; Emma wondered if her trauma caused her hatred of bees, and so it now seemed a reasonable opinion.
Every effort has been made to find Anglo-Saxon charm translations in the public domain. If copyright law has been violated, please contact the author and the copyrighted content will be removed. The charms come from Translations from Old English Poetry. Translated and edited by Albert S. Cook and Chauncey B. Tinker. Ginn & Company: Boston, New York, Chicago, London, 1902. Page 167. Sourced from the Internet Archive, archive.org/details/selecttranslatio0000albe_y1i1/mode/1up. 11 November 2022. Online.
Part 3 coming December 4, 2023.