yawn/scream

I’m laid out on the sofa, cursing the droning hum of the air purifier. My head is gripped in a coarse vice of fatigue. My every joint is lined with sandpaper. I’m stretched out on the sofa and I’m almost in tears. I’m praying for sleep, trying desperately to bail the thoughts from my mind, begging the blank void to grant me sweet nothingness, when there’s a knock at the door.


I roll, dropping onto my hands and knees. I get to my feet and I’m zombie walking to the hallway. I’m padding along the icy, lino floor that’s sending jolts up the backs of my ankles with every, single, heavy, step. Then the texture of the floor changes and I’m slipping on one of the letters strewn about the hallway and I’m tumbling forward towards the door and I just manage to reach out in time and get hold of the latch. I twist the latch, push off from the door and lean back. The door begins to swing open but then it’s caught by the chain and I clunk to a stop and my head jerks back. I pull myself upright and I’m peering out at a thin, vertical slice of Joan from next door.


“Hello, Joan-from-next-door,” I mumble.


She looks me up and down, frowning at my bare feet before quickly rearranging her face into this polite mask with crinkled eyes and a half-smile.


“Hi there!” she beams, “How are you?”


“I’m okay, Joan,” I say, “pretty tired.”


“Good, that’s good. That you’re ok, I mean.”

She forces a small cough and shifts her weight from one foot to the other while I blink and blink and blink and open my mouth to pull my tongue down from where it’s stuck to my pallet.

“We heard that we may have been making quite the racket last night,” Joan from next door says, or asks, or maybe sings.

It sounds like there’s a lilting to her speech that’s meant to impart some subtle meaning. It just confuses me.

So I say, “okay.”


“We may have unintentionally disturbed some people?”

Definitely a question that time and she’s nodding expectantly and I feel as if I’m messing up some sort of call-and-response, as if I don’t know my part in all this.


So again I say, “okay.”


“Well,” she looks past me at the snow-drift of post against the wall, “we received a call from Environmental Health you see. Apparently someone was disturbed. They decided to complain to the authorities, instead of being neighbourly and coming to speak to us personally.”

I have no idea what she’s talking about.


“I didn’t hear anything Joan.” I say while straightening up to block her view of the windowed-envelopes, take-away menus, and ignored correspondence.


“Oh good. That’s good. I’m glad you managed to sleep through the racket at least.”

She pulls her cheeks and lips apart like she’s trying to show me as many of her teeth as she can.


“No,” I correct her, “no sleep for a while actually.”


“Oh dear, oh dear. We are so sorry.” She’s hiding her teeth now. “It’s the bees you see.”


“Bees?” I ask.


“Yes, the bees! All the bees that live with us. They need to fly when the nights get warm and the swarm was clamouring to be let out. The buzzing got to be quite loud apparently.”


She’s making so little sense it hurts. There are no bees. What the hell is she talking about?


“What the hell are you talking about, Joan?”


“Our bees.” She repeats.


“Bees?” I‘m saying again, my head just surfacing from a thick puddle of confusion, “Like for honey?”


“That's our honey!” Joan shouts.

I plunge back down into the confusion and I’m only able to blink and then she’s speaking again.

“It must have been what was keeping you awake. All the bees...”


She’s opened her face to show off her teeth again but this time she doesn’t actually stop speaking. She’s still stuck on the word bees, forcing it out at me from behind those pearly-whites. She’s hissing and buzzing through her clenched teeth and I can feel a dull rumbling tremor grow in my chest and I want to scream at her, to make her understand how crazy she’s being, but the vibrations start to swell and I’m shaking, I’m wrenching as I see the swarm start to crawl out from her ears and I’m heaving as her eyelids bubble and bees start spilling from her eyes and her teeth finally part and there’s bees pouring from her mouth, they’re tumbling down her chin and her chest and taking wing and spreading out into an undulating, hissing mass of a million wings drumming at the air and then the dreadful, opened-up hive that is Joan-from-next-door and all of it’s bees say, “Knock, knock!” And…

I’m laid out on the sofa, cursing the droning hum of the air purifier.

-yotchki