That Time I Was Tickled By A Bee

So I'm 5 years old. I think. Somewhere around the age when Capri-Sun was the only thing I would drink. I'm on the beach. Dunes, patches of dry plants, the clouds in the sky with linings painted sunset colors. I remember always doing things with my hands. Touching, building, tearing, snapping, burying them in the sand, letting it fall between my fingers. I remember Dan's Volkswagen Van, the kind you could live in. I remember asphalt--a parking lot, a path leading up between the dunes toward the crashing ocean waves. I remember a bench. A trash can. Red-and-white checkered tablecloth barbecue with paper plates and baked beans. I'm here with my mother and her frizzy leftover 80's hair and my godfather, Dan. Not sure what time of year, where we were, what the occasion was. Summer Day, early 90's. Ripped jeans and baggy beach clothing. Someone flying a kite. Cigarettes in red packages and beer in brown bottles. The summer life of an adult's world that I could hardly comprehend.

With the adults preoccupied, I pop open a Capri-Sun.

I'm at the bench, folding napkins into paper airplanes. I'm coloring. I'm opening another Sun by sticking the straw through the flat bottom. I'm swinging my feet dangling three inches off the sand. I can smell the food cooking in the barbecue. Smoke blowing up the face of the dunes. 

Mom comes over to see where she packed the playing cards. She kisses my forehead and says, "Food's almost done. Are you hungry?"

"Yeah," I tell her, slurping the last of my Tropical Blast beverage. 

"Do you still want a hotdog? I'll get a bun ready for you."

I nod. Mom opens a bag of chips to hold me over for the next two minutes. I can hear her tinkering with the barbecue. I can hear Red Hot Chili Peppers on the radio and I can feel the way the wood felt on my elbows when I leaned over the table to grab the playing cards that Mom left out. As food is prepared behind me, I empty out the cards like I'm getting ready to play Go-Fish.

Then I feel a tickle on my right shoulder.

Fingertips. 

Instinctively, I flinch my shoulder up to my ear, doing that thing Mom does when she wants to hold the phone with no hands. I expected to feel fingers press against my cheek in the process--I wanted to catch Mom's hand in the act. Who else could it be? I certainly didn't expect the culprit to be a bee. 

The pain was immediate. Caught between my shoulder and my face, the bee (over)reacted, driving its stinger into the base of my neck. I flew backward off the bench in a burst of panic and was wailing before I'd even hit the ground. Mom was there in an instant. I held nothing back. I screamed and I screamed and I screamed. Mom couldn't figure out what was wrong, at first, and carried me back to the van to meet Dan, who heard the screams and came hurtling over the nearest dune, Frisbee in hand. 

All I could do was pick one syllable and repeat it between sobs, so quickly sometimes that Mom had to remind me to breathe. Was she crazy? How could I think about breathing at a time like this?

It wasn't until Mom and Dan sat me down in the van and got a look at the red bump on my neck that they figured out what was wrong with me. Ice from the cooler was immediately applied. The crying continued as tragically as possible. I screamed until my throat went dry, until the ice had nearly melted and to be honest it didn't hurt as much as it did before.  

Mom finally grabbed me a Capri-Sun from the cooler and that shut me up. 

I went later to the bench where I'd been attacked and I found the bee on the ground, half-buried in the sand. I picked it up by its wiry wing and held it close to my eye--perplexed by our differences in scale. What was it thinking? I wondered. Why did it land on my shoulder like that? And then I couldn't help but wonder if maybe the bee wanted to tickle me. Maybe it was trying to make friends with me. Maybe it didn't know that I was actually very ticklish on my neck. Maybe the bee didn't mean to sting me.

I brought the bee to the ocean and dropped it where the tide would take it. 

And now I hate bees.

The End

That Day Steve Kicked The Door Open

The summer heat snuck up on us, scattering us for our electric fans and air-conditioning, turning us into sluggish, sweaty heaps about the house. My dad and I were watching Lord of the Rings in my room on the big TV, drinking cold Coca Cola from cans leaving perspiration rings on the carpet floor. I knew the sugar was bad for my teeth but as soon as I finished one can, I panicked for another, not simply for the cool drink in my throat, but to have something cold to hold between my knees. Dad faced the same moral dilemma, though with less concern for dental hygiene. “Want another one?” he asked, standing from the bed. The mattress springs squeaked. I nodded.

It was at that moment someone pounded on the front door.

Outside of my room, our home on Lincoln Way was quite literally falling apart—though by our actions entirely. We’d lived her for almost a year and spent the past month ripping down the walls, tearing out the cabinets, uprooting the moldy carpet, breaking, ripping and destroying everything that would eventually be torn down anyway. It was all part of the plan to transform this little red-and-white home into a coffee-shop. With my mother and my sister, we took up residence here while the permit paperwork did the local government shuffle, only recently getting full go-ahead construction clearance.

During that time, however, there was Steve.

The restraining order, obviously, was not working.

“Lisa!” he was yelling now, pounding on the door. “Lisa! I want to talk!”

Bam! Bam! Bam!

My dad turned to me, biting his lip, wide-eyed, and he said, “Stay here.”

Outside of my room, so far as I knew, my mom was in the kitchen making lunch or doing a crossword puzzle or reading a book. I heard her shout, “Don’t come in here!”

Bam! Bam! Bam!

My dad, who’d been staying with us for about a month with the intention to work in the coffeeshop, but mostly to help protect us from Steve, grabbed the baseball bat leaning against the wall of my room and opened my door.

Steve kicked his way into the house.

“I’m calling the cops!” my mom yelled.

Steve, I imagined, with his ex-military bulk and recent rise of drug use, moved forward like an irritable bull looking for a red towel to charge. Not too long ago, he drove his motorcycle onto the porch around midnight, woke us up with the roaring revving engine, then peeled away with a screech and holler. Not long before that, my ex step-father spent a half-hour circling our house, kicking the walls, beating on the windows, shouting, “I just want to talk!” while my mother passed me the phone and told me to call 911. Both times he evaded the cops moments before they arrived. Before that, there was infidelity, verbal abuse, police involvement, restraining order headaches, death threats on the answering machine, the stalking of relatives, drug use and sleepless nights.

Hell, basically, and nothing we could do about it.

Here Steve was again, inside, and as the movie continued to play and my dad stepped out of my room with the metal bat in hand, time slowed down and I moved toward the door to see what was going on out there.

“I’m calling the cops. Don’t get any closer,” my mom shouted.

“Don’t play that bullshit with me,” was the response, the roar, followed almost immediately by the charge—the bull horns lowered, fingers grasping—and my mother, with the phone receiver in one hand, backed up into the kitchen. Steve slapped the device from her hands and smashed it with his foot, grabbing her throat with his hands and forcing her against the wall.

“Hey!” my dad yelled, lifting the bat.

Steve, startled out of his trance, let my mom go. Without a word, he turned and left the house, slamming the door behind him.

In the silence that followed, the busted lock let the warm breeze push the door open. Dad put the bat down and went to check on my mom. I stood in my bedroom and looked out at the results of the scuffle, wrapping my head around it, making sense of it, rejecting it, accepting it, and my mom was astonishingly calm as she wiped a few tears from her face and rubbed her neck. We photographed the evidence: the red skin, the smashed phone, the busted door lock after we called the cops to file another report.

Not long afterward, Steve was in prison.

I wondered about that afternoon for a long time, wondering how it would’ve been different if my dad wasn’t there, wondering if I would’ve grabbed that bat and what I would’ve done with it. The moment was so brief. I hardly saw Steve, catching just the sight of him leaving the house, slamming the door. And what if Steve had put up a fight? What if he’d shoved my mom down and gone after my dad? A crack across the head from a metal baseball bat wouldn’t have ended pretty for anyone, and certainly Steve would’ve wound up in a hospital if my dad’s aim was any good, not running from the cops again. Or what if Dad missed? What if Steve totally lost his mind and killed us all?

Different outcomes for different universes, I suppose.

I’m just glad I’m in this one.