King Bee

In The Mail that morning, there were two solicitations for life insurance, a coupon from the local car wash promising a"100 Percent Brushless Wash," four bills, three, advertising fliers and a death threat from his ex-son, Anthony. Anthony had used green ink, the cyclonic scrawl of his longhand lifting off into the loops, lassos and curlicues of heavy weather aloft, and his message was the same as usual: I eat the royal jelly. I sting and you die. Bzzzzzzzzb. Pat, too, the bitch. He hadn't bothered to sign it.

"Ken? What is it?"

Pat was right beside him now, peering over his elbow at the sheaf of ads and bills clutched in his hand. She'd been pruning the roses and she was still wearing her work gloves. They stood there out front, the mailbox rising up like a tombstone between them. "It's Anthony," she said, "isn't it?"

He handed her the letter.

"My God," she said, sucking in a whistle of breath like a wounded animal.

"How'd he get the address?"

It was a good question. They'd known he was 'to be released from juvenile hall on his 18th birthday, and they'd taken precautions--like changing their phone number, their address, their places of employment and the city and state in which they lived. For a while, they'd even toyed with the idea of changing their name, but then Ken's father came for a visit from Wisconsin and sobbed over the family coat of arms till they gave it up. Over the years, they'd received dozens of Anthony's death threats--all of them bee-oriented; bees were his obsession--but nothing since they'd moved. This was bad. Worse than bad.

"You'd better call the police," he said, "and take Skippy to the kennel."

•

Nine year earlier, the Mallows had been childless. There was something wrong with Pat's Fallopian tubes--some congenital defect that reduced her odds of conception to 222,000 to one--and to compound the problem, Ken's sperm count was inordinately low, though he ate plenty of red meat and worked out every other day on the racquetball court. Adoption had seemed the way to go, though Pat was distressed by the fact that so many of the babies were--well, she didn't like to say it, but they weren't white. There were Thai babies, Guianese babies, babies from Haiti, Kuala Lumpur and Kashmir, but Caucasian babies were at a premium. You could have a nonwhite baby in six days--for a price, of course--but there was an 11-year waiting list for white babies--12 for blonds, 14 for blue-eyed blonds--and neither Ken nor Pat was used to being denied. "How about an older child?" the man from the adoption agency had suggested.

They were in one of the plush, paneled conference rooms of Adopt-a-Child, and Mr. Denteen, a handsome, bold-faced man in a suit woven of some exotic material, leaned forward with a fatherly smile. He bore an uncanny resemblance to Robert Young of Father Knows Best, and on the wall behind him was a photomontage of plump and cooing babies. Pat was mesmerized. "What?" she said, as if she hadn't heard him.

"An older child," Denteen repeated, his voice rich with insinuation. It was the voice of a seducer, a shrink, a black marketeer.

"No," Ken said, "I don't think so."

"How old?" Pat said.

Denteen leaned forward on his leather elbow patches. "I just happen to have a child--a boy--whose file just came to us this morning. Little Anthony Cademartori. Tony. He's nine years old. Just. Actually, his birthday was only last week."

The photo Denteen handed them showed a sunny, smiling towheaded boy, a generic boy, archetypal, the sort of boy you envision when you close your eyes and think boy. If they'd looked closer, they would have seen that his eyes were like two poked holes and that there was something unstable about his smile and the set of his jaw, but they were in the grip of a conceit and they didn't look that closely. Ken asked if there was anything wrong with.(continued from page 83) (continued from page 83) him. "Physically, I mean," he said.

Denteen let a good-humored little laugh escape him. "This is your average nine-year-old boy, Mr. Mallow," he said. "Average height, weight, build, average--or above average--intelligence. He's all boy, and he's one heck of a lot fitter than I am." Denteen cast a look to the heavens--or, rather, to the ceiling tiles. "To be nine years old again," he said, sighing.

"Does he behave?" Pat asked.

"Does he behave?" Denteen echoed, and he looked offended, hurt almost. "Does the President live in the White House? Does the sun come up in the morning?" He straightened up, shot his cuffs, then leaned forward again--so far forward that his hands dangled over the edge of the conference table. "Look at him," he said, holding up the picture again. "Mr. and Mrs. Mallow--Ken, Pat--let me tell you that this child has seen more heartbreak than you and I'll know in a lifetime. His birth parents were killed at a railway crossing when he was two, and then, the irony of it, his adoptive parents--they were your age, by the way--just dropped dead one day while he was at school. One minute they're alive and well, and the next they're gone." His voice faltered. "And then poor little Tony ... poor little Tony conies home...."

Pat looked stunned. Ken reached out to squeeze her hand.

"He needs love, Pat," Denteen said. "He has love to give. A lot of love."

Ken looked at Pat. Pat looked at Ken.

"So," Denteen said, "when would you like to meet him?"

•

They met him the following afternoon, and he seemed fine. A little shy, maybe, but fine. Superpolite, that's what Pat thought. May I this and may I that, please, thank you and it's a pleasure to meet you. He was adorable. Big for his age--that was a surprise. They'd expected a lovable little urchin, the kind of kid Norman Rockwell might have portrayed in the barber's chair atop a stack of phone books, but Anthony was big,' already the size of a teenager--big-headed, big in the shoulders and big in the rear. Tall, too. At nine, he was already as tall as Pat and probably outweighed her. What won them over, though, was his smile. He turned his smile on them that first day in Denteen's office--a blooming, angelic smile that showed off his dimples and the perfection of his tiny white glistening teeth--and Pat felt something give way inside her. At the end of the meeting, she hugged him to her breast.

The smile was a regular feature of those first few months--the months of the trial period. Anthony smiled at breakfast, at dinner, smiled when he helped Ken rake the leaves from the gutters or tidy up the yard, smiled in his sleep. He stopped smiling when the trial period was over, as if he'd suddenly lost control of his facial muscles. It was uncanny. Almost to the day the adoption became formal--the day that he was theirs and they were his--Anthony's smile vanished. The change was abrupt and it came without warning.

"Scooter," Ken called to him one afternoon, "you want to help me take those old newspapers to the recycling center and then stop in at Baskin and Robbin's?"

Anthony was upstairs in his room, which they'd decorated with posters of ballplayers and airplanes. He didn't answer.

"Scooter?" Silence.

Puzzled, Ken ascended the stairs. As he reached the landing, he became aware of an odd sound emanating from Anthony's room--a low hum, as of an appliance kicking in. He paused to knock at the door and the sound began to take on resonance, to swell and shrink again, a thousand muted voices speaking in unison. "Anthony?" he called, pushing open the door.

Anthony was seated naked in the middle of his bed, wearing a set of headphones Ken had never seen before. They were attached to a tape player the size of a suitcase. Ken had never seen the tape player before, either. And the walls--Gone were the dazzling sun-struck posters of Fernando Valenzuela, P-38s and Mitsubishi Zeros, replaced now by black-and-white photos of insects, torn, he saw, from library books that lay scattered across the floor, gutted, their spines broken.

For a long moment, Ken merely stood there in the doorway, the sizzling pulse of that many-voiced hum leaking out of Anthony's headphones to throb in his gut, his chest, his bones. It was as if he'd stumbled upon some ancient rite in the Australian outback, as if he'd stepped out of his real life in the real world and into some cheap horror movie about demonic possession and people whose eyes lighted up like Christmas-tree ornaments. Anthony was seated in the lotus position, his eyes tightly closed. He didn't seem to be aware of Ken. The buzzing was excruciating. After a moment, Ken backed out of the room and gently shut the door.

At dinner that evening, Anthony gave them their first taste of his why-don't-you-get-off-my-back look, a look that was to become habitual. His hair stood up jaggedly, drawn up into needlelike points--he must have greased it, Ken realized--and he slouched as if there were an invisible piano strapped to his shoulders. Ken didn't know where to begin--with the scowl, the nudity, the desecration of library books, the tape player and its mysterious origins (had he borrowed it--perhaps from school? A friend?)? Pat knew nothing. She served chicken croquettes, biscuits with honey and baked beans, Anthony's favorite meal., She was at the stove, her back to them, when Ken cleared his throat.

"Anthony," he said, "is there anything wrong? Anything you want to tell us?"

Anthony shot him a contemptuous look. He said nothing. Pat glanced over her shoulder.

"About the library books...."

"You were spying on me," Anthony snarled.

Pat turned away from the stove, spoon in hand. "What do you mean? Ken? What's this all about?"

"I wasn't spying, I----" Ken faltered. He felt the anger rising in him. "All right," he said, "where'd you get the tape player?"

Anthony wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then looked past Ken to his adoptive mother. "I stole it," he said.

Suddenly, Ken was on his feet. "Stole it?" he roared. "Don't you know what that means, library books and now stealing?"

Anthony was a statue, big-headed and serene. "Bzzzzzzzz," he said.

•

The scene at the library was humiliating. Clearly, the books had been willfully destroyed. Mrs. Tutwillow was outraged. And no matter how hard Ken squeezed his arm, Anthony remained poker-faced and unrepentant. "I won't say I'm sorry," he sneered, "because I'm not." Ken gave her a check for $112.32 to cover the cost of replacing the books, plus shipping and handling. At Steve's Stereo Shoppe, the man behind the counter--Steve, presumably--agreed not to press charges, but he had a real problem with offering the returned unit to the public as new goods, if Ken knew what he meant. Since he'd have to sell it used now, he wondered if Ken had the $87.50 it was going to cost him to mark it down. Of course, if Ken didn't want to cooperate, he'd have no recourse but to report the incident to the police. Ken cooperated.

At home, after he'd ripped the offending photos from the walls and sent Anthony to his room, he phoned Denteen. "Ken, listen, I know you're upset," Denteen crooned, his voice as soothing as a shot of whiskey, "but the kid's life has been real hell, believe me, and you've got to realize that he's going to need some time to adjust." He paused. "Why don't you get him a dog or something?"

"A dog?"

"Yeah. Something for him to be responsible for, for a change. He's been a ward--I mean, an adoptee--all this time, with people caring for him, and maybe it's that he feels like a burden or something. With a dog or a cat, he could do the giving."

A dog. The idea of it sprang to life and Ken was a boy himself again, roaming the hills and stubble fields of Wisconsin, Skippy at his side. A dog. Yes. Of course.

"And listen," Denteen was saying, "if you think you're going to need professional help with this, the man to go to is Maurice Barebaum. He's one of the top child psychologists in the state, if not the country." There was a hiss of shuffling papers, the flap of Rolodex cards. "I've got his number right here."

•

"I don't want a dog," Anthony insisted, and gave them a strained histrionic look.

We're on stage, Ken was thinking, that's what it is. He looked at Pat, seated on the couch, her legs tucked under her, and then at his son, this stranger with the staved-in eyes and tallowy arms who'd somehow won the role.

"But it would be so nice," Pat said, drawing a picture in the air, "you'd have a little friend."

Anthony was wearing a black T-shirt emblazoned with red and blue letters that spelled out Megadeth. On the reverse was a full-color representation of a stupendous bumblebee. "Oh, come off it, Pat," he sang, a keening edge to his voice. "That's so stupid. Dogs are so slobbery and shitty."

"Don't use that language," Ken said automatically.

"A little one, maybe," Pat said, "a cocker or a shelty."

"I don't want a dog. I want a hive. A beehive. That's what I want." He was balancing like a tightrope walker on the edge of the fireplace apron.

"Bees?" Ken demanded. "What kind of pet is that?" He was angry. It seemed he was always angry lately.

Pat forestalled him, her tone as soft as a caress. "Bees, darling?" she said. "Can you tell us what you like about them? Is it because they're so useful, because of the honey, I mean?"

Anthony was up on one foot. He tipped over twice before he answered. "Because they have no mercy."

"Mercy?" Pat repeated.

"Three weeks, that's how long a worker lasts in the summer," Anthony said. "They kick the drones out to die. The spent workers, too." He looked at Ken. "You fit in or you die."

"And what the hell is that supposed to mean?" Ken was shouting; he couldn't help himself.

Anthony's face crumpled up. His cheeks were corrugated, the spikes of his hair stood out like thorns. "You hate me," he whined. "You fuck, you dickhead--you hate me, don't you, don't you?"

"Ken!" Patcried, but Ken already had him by the arm.

"Don't you ever----" he said.

"Ever what? Ever what? Say fuck? You do it, you do it, you do it!" Anthony was in a rage, jerking away, tears on his face, shouting. "Upstairs, at night. I hear you. Fucking. That's what you do. Grunting and fucking just like, like, like dogsl!"

•

"I'll need to see him three days a week," Dr. Barebaum said. He was breathing heavily, as if he'd just climbed three flights of stairs.

Anthony was out in the car with Pat. He'd spent the past 45 minutes sequestered with Barebaum. "Is he--is he all right?" Ken asked. "I mean, is he normal?"

Barebaum leaned back in his chair and made a little pyramid of his fingers. "Adjustment problems," he breathed. "He's got a lot of hostility. He's had a difficult life."

Ken stared down at the carpet.

"He tells me"--Barebaum dredged up the words as if from some inner fortress-- "he tells me he wants a dog."

Ken sat rigid in the chair. This must be what it feels like before they switch on the current at Sing Sing, he thought. "No, you've got it wrong. We wanted to get him a dog, but he said no. In fact, he went schizoid on us."

Barebaum's nose wrinkled up at the term schizoid. Ken regretted it instantly. "Yes," the doctor drawled, "hmmph. But the fact is, the boy quite distinctly told me the whole blowup was because he does, indeed, want a. dog. You know, Mr., ah----"

"Mallow."

"Mallow, we often say exactly the opposite of what we mean; you are aware of that, aren't you?"

Ken said nothing. He studied the weave of the carpet.

After a moment, the doctor cleared his throat. "You do have health insurance?" he said.

•

In all, Anthony was with them just over three years. The dog--a shelty pup Ken called Skippy and Anthony referred to alternately as Ken and Turd--was a mistake, they could see that now. For the first few months or so, Anthony had ignored it, except to run squealing through the house, the puppy's warm excreta cupped in his palms, shouting, "It shit! It shit! The dog shit!" Ken, though, got to like the feel of the pup's wet nose on his wrist as he skimmed the morning paper or sat watching TV in the evening. The pup was alive, it was high-spirited and joyful and it took him back to his own childhood in a way that Anthony, with his gloom and his sneer, never could have. "I want a hive," Anthony said, over and over again. "My very own hive."

Ken ignored him--bees were dangerous, after all, and this was a residential neighborhood--until the day Anthony finally did take an interest in Skippy. It was one of those rare days when Pat's car was at the garage, so Ken picked her up at work and they arrived home together. The house was quiet. Skippy, who usually greeted them at the door in a paroxysm of licking, rolling, leaping and tail thumping, was nowhere to be seen. And Anthony, judging from the low-threshold hum washing over the house, was up in his room listening to the bee tapes Pat had given him for Christmas. "Skippy," Ken called. "Here, boy!" No Skippy. Pat checked the yard, the basement, the back room. Finally, together, they mounted the stairs to Anthony's room.

Anthony was in the center of the bed, clad only in his underwear, reprising the ritual Ken had long since grown to accept (Barebaum claimed it was nothing to worry about--"It's his way of meditating, that's all, and if it calms him down, why fight it?"). Huge color photographs of bees obliterated the walls, but these were legitimate photos, clipped from the pages of The Apiarian's Monthly, another gift from Pat. Anthony looked bloated, fatter than ever, as pale and white as a grub. When he became aware of them, he slipped the headphones from his ears.

"Honey," Pat said, reaching down to ruffle his hair, "have you seen Skippy?"

It took him a moment to answer. He looked bewildered, as if she'd asked him to solve an equation or name the 20 biggest cities in Russia. "I put him in his cell," he said finally.

"Cell?" Ken echoed.

"In the hive," Anthony said. "The big hive."

It was Ken who noticed the broomstick wedged against the oven door, and it was Ken who buried Skippy's poor singed "carcass and arranged to have the oven replaced--Pat wouldn't, couldn't cook in it, ever again. It was Ken, too, who lost control of himself that night and slapped Anthony's sick, pale, swollen face till Pat pulled him off. In the end, Anthony got his hive, 30,000 honeybees in a big white box with 15 frames inside, and Barebaum got to see Anthony two more days a week.

At first, the bees seemed to exert a soothing influence on the boy. He stopped muttering to himself, used his utensils at the table and didn't seem quite as vulnerable to mood swings as he had. After school and his daily session with Barebaum, he'd spend hours tending the hive, watching the bees at their compulsive work, humming softly to himself as if in a trance. Ken was worried he'd be stung and bought him a gauze bonnet and gloves, but he rarely wore them. And when he was stung--daily, it seemed--he displayed the contusions proudly, as if they were battle scars. For Ken and Pat, it was a time of accommodation, and they were quietly optimistic. Gone was the smiling boy they'd taken into their home, but at least now he wasn't so--there was no other word for it--so odd, and he seemed less agitated, less ready to fly off the handle.

The suicide attempt took them by surprise.

Ken found him, at dusk, crouched beneath the hive and quietly bleeding from both wrists. Pat's X-ACTO knife lay in the grass beside him, black with blood. In the hospital the next day, Anthony looked lost and vulnerable, looked like a little boy again. Barebaum was there with them. "It's a phase," he said, puffing for breath. "He's been very depressed lately."

"Why?" Pat asked, sweeping Anthony's hair back from his forehead, stroking his swollen hands. "Your bees," she choked. "What would your bees do without you?"

Anthony let his eyes fall shut. After a moment, he lifted his lids again. His voice was faint. "Bzzzzzzzz," he said.

They kept him at the Hart Mental Health Center for nine months, and then they let him come home again. Ken was against it. He'd contacted a lawyer about voiding the adoption papers--Anthony was just too much to handle; he was emotionally unstable, disturbed, dangerous; the psychiatric bills alone were killing them--but Pat overruled him. "He needs us," she said. "He has no one else to turn to." They were in the living room. She bent forward to light a cigarette. "Nobody said it would be easy," she said.

"Easy?" he retorted. "You talk like it's a war or something. I didn't adopt a kid to go to war--or to save the world, either.

"Why did you adopt him, then?"

The question took him by surprise. He looked past Pat to the kitchen, where one of Anthony's crayon drawings--of a lopsided bee--clung to the refrigerator door, and then past the refrigerator to the window and the lush still yard beyond. He shrugged. "For love, I guess."

As it turned out, the question was moot--Anthony didn't last six months this time. When they picked him up at 11 the hospital--"Hospital," Ken growled, "nut hatch is more like it"--they barely recognized him. He was taller and he'd put on weight. Pat couldn't call it baby fat anymore--this was true fat, adult fat, fat that sank his eyes and strained at the seams of his pants. And his hair--his rich, fine white-blond hair--was gone, shaved to a transparent stubble over a scalp the color of boiled ham. Pat chattered at him, but he got into the car without a word.

Halfway home, he spoke for the first time. "You know what they eat in there, "he said, "in the hospital?"

Ken felt like the straight man in a comedy routine. "What do they eat?" he said, his eyes fixed on the road.

"Shit," Anthony said. "They eat shit. Their own shit. That's what they eat."

"Do you have to use that language?"

Anthony didn't bother to respond.

At home, they discovered that the bees had managed to survive on their own, a fact that somehow seemed to depress Anthony; and after shuffling halfheartedly through the frames and getting stung six or seven times, he went to bed.

The trouble--the final trouble, the trouble that was to take Anthony out of their hands for good--started at school. Anthony was almost 12 now, but because of his various problems, he was still in fifth grade. He was in a special program, of course, but he took lunch and recess with the other fifth graders. On the playground, he towered over them, plainly visible 100 yards away, like some great unmoving statue of the Buddha. The other children shied away from him instinctively, as if they knew he was beyond taunting, beyond simple joys and simple sorrows. But he was aware of them--aware in a new way--of the girls, especially. Something had happened inside him while he was away--"Puberty," Barebaum said. "He has urges like any other boy"--and he didn't know how to express it.

One afternoon, he and Oliver Monteiros, another boy from the special program, cornered a fifth-grade girl behind one of the temporary classrooms. There they "stretched" her, as Anthony later told it--Oliver had her hands, Anthony her feet--stretched her till something snapped in her shoulder and Anthony felt his pants go wet. He tried to tell the principal about it, about the wetness in his pants, but the principal wouldn't listen. Dr. Collins was a gray-bearded black man who believed in dispensing instant justice. He was angry, gesturing in their faces, his beard jabbing at them like a weapon. When Anthony unzipped his fly to show him what had happened, Collins suspended him on the spot.

Pat spoke with Anthony, and they both--she and Ken--went in to meet with Collins and the members of the school board. They took Barebaum with them. Together, they were able to overcome the principal's resistance, and Anthony, after a week's suspension, was readmitted. "One more incident," Collins said, his eyes aflame behind the discs of his wire-framed glasses, "and I don't care how small it is, and he's out. Is that understood?"

At least Anthony didn't keep them in suspense. On his first day back, he tracked down the girl he'd stretched, chased her into the girls' room and, as he told it, put his "stinger" in her. The girl's parents sued the school district, Anthony was taken into custody and remanded to juvenile hall following another nine-month stay at Hart, and Ken and Pat finally threw in the towel. They were exhausted, physically and emotionally, and they were in debt to Barebaum for some $30,000 above what their insurance would cover. They felt cheated, bitter, worn down to nothing. Anthony was gone, adoption a sick joke. But they had each other and, after a while--and with the help of Skippy II--they began to pick up the pieces.

•

And now, six years later, Anthony had come back to haunt them. Ken was enraged. He, for one, wasn't about to be chased out of this house and this job--they'd moved once, and that was enough. If he'd found them, he'd found them--so much the worse. But this was America, and they had their rights, too. While Pat took Skippy to the kennel for safekeeping, Ken phoned the police and explained the situation to an Officer Ocksler, a man whose voice was so lacking in inflection, he might as well have been dead. Ken was describing the incident with Skippy I when Ocksler interrupted him. "I'm sorry," he said, and there was a faint animation to his voice now, as if he were fighting down a belch or passing gas, "but there's nothing we can do."

"Nothing you can do?" Ken couldn't help himself: He was practically yelping. "But he broiled a harmless puppy in the oven, raped a fifth-grade girl, sent us thirty-two death threats and tracked us down even though we quit our jobs, packed up and moved and left no forwarding address." He took a deep breath. "He thinks he's a bee, for Chrissakes."

Ocksler inserted his voice into the howling silence that succeeded this outburst. "He commits a crime," he said, the words stuck fast in his throat, "you call us."

The next day's mail brought the second threat. It came in the form of a picture postcard, addressed to Pat and postmarked locally. The picture--a Japanese print--showed a pale, fleshy couple engaged in the act of love. The message, which took some deciphering, read:

Dear Mother Pat, I'm a king bee, Gonna buzz round your hive, Together we can make honey, Let me come inside.

Your son, Anthony

Ken tore it to pieces. He was red in the face, trembling. White babies, he thought bitterly. An older child. They would have been better off with a seven-foot Bantu, an Eskimo, anything. "I'll kill him," he said. "He comes here, I'll kill him."

It was early the next morning--Pat was in the kitchen, Ken upstairs shaving--when a face appeared in the kitchen window. It was a large and familiar face, transformed somewhat by the passage of the years and the accumulation of flesh, but unmistakable, nonetheless. Pat, who was leaning over the sink to rinse her coffee cup, gave a little gasp of recognition.

Anthony was smiling, beaming at her like the towheaded boy in the photograph she'd kept in her wallet all these years. He was smiling, and suddenly that was all that mattered to her. The sweetness of those first few months came back in a rush--he was her boy, her own, and the rest of it was nothing--and before she knew what she was doing, she had the back door open. It was a mistake. The moment the door swung open, she heard them. Bees. A swarm that blackened the side of the house, the angry hiss of their wings like grease in a fryer. They were right there, right beside the door. First one bee, then another, shot past her head. "Mom," Anthony said, stepping up onto the porch, "I'm home."

She was stunned. It wasn't just the bees, but Anthony. He was huge, six feet tall at least, and so heavy. His pants--they were pajamas, hospital issue--were as big as a tent, and it looked as if he'd rolled up a carpet beneath his shirt. She could barely make out his eyes, sunk in their pockets of flesh. She didn't know what to say.

He took hold of the door. "I want a hug," he said. "Give me a hug."

She backed away from him instinctively. "Ken!" she called, and the catch in her throat turned it into a mournful, drawnout bleat."Ken!"

Anthony was poised on the threshold. His smile faded. Then, like a magician, he reached out his hand and plunged it into the mass of bees. She saw him wince as he was stung, heard the harsh sizzle of the insects rise in crescendo, and then he drew back his hand, ever so slowly, and the bees came with him. They moved so fast--glutinous, like meringue clinging to a spoon--that she nearly missed it. There was something in his hand, a tiny box, some sort of mesh, and then his hand was gone, his arm, the right side of his body, his face and head and the left side, too. Suddenly he was alive with bees, wearing them, a humming, pulsating ball of them.

She felt a sharp pain on, her ankle, another at her throat. She backed up a step.

"You sent me away," Anthony scolded, and the bees clung to his lips. "You never loved me. Nobody ever loved me."

She heard Ken behind her--"What is this?" he said, then a weak curse escaped him--but she couldn't turn. The hum of the bees mesmerized her. They clung to Anthony, one mind, 30,000 bodies.

And then the blazing ball of Anthony's hand separated itself from his body and his bee-thick fingers opened to reveal the briefest glimpse of the gauze-covered box. "The queen," Anthony said. "I throw her down and you're"--she could barely hear him, the bees raging, Ken shouting out her name--"you're history. Both of you."

For a long moment, Anthony stood there motionless, afloat in bees. Huge as he was, he seemed to hover over the linoleum, de-realized in the mass of them. And then she knew what was going to happen, knew that she was barren then and now and forever and that it was meant to be, and that this, her only child, was beyond human help or understanding.

"Go away," Anthony said, the swarm thrilling louder. "Go ... into the ... next room ... before, before----" and then Ken had her by the arm and they were moving. She thought she heard Anthony sigh, and as she darted a glance back over her shoulder, he crushed the box with a snap as loud as the crack of a limb. There was an answering roar from the bees, and in her last glimpse of him, he was falling, borne down by the terrible animate weight of them.

"I'll kill him," Ken spat, his shoulder pressed to the parlor door. Bees rattled against the panels like hailstones.

She couldn't catch her breath. She felt a sudden stab under her collar, and then another. Ken's words didn't make sense--Anthony was gone from them now, gone forever--didn't he understand that? She listened to the bees raging round her kitchen, stinging blindly, dying for their queen. And then she thought of Anthony, poor Anthony, in his foster homes, in the hospital, in prison, thought of his flesh scored 1000," 10,000times, wound in his cerement of bees.

Anthony was wrong, she thought, leaning into the door as if bracing herself against a storm--they do have mercy. They do.