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