Hive
by Zak Salih

They have no idea we, the dead, still watch them. On their wooden benches, in their wooden rockers marked up for $114.99. The old mountain men tickle banjos, breathe into harmonicas, slap their thighs to the rhythm of folk songs first sung by fur trappers and horse traders. The tourists guzzle vintage pop, toss empty glass bottles of Royal Crown Cola, Cheerwine, and Bubble Up into a metal trashcan. Two bottles, five bottles, eight bottles. So many bottles, making so much noise. Only one bottle for us, however. Plastic, not glass. 

#

Look at you up there, at the top of our hive, hovering around what you think is a fat flower but is really just the opening to an empty jug of cooking oil, its false petals bent inward and inviting you to sup. We watch you skirt, sugar-drunk, under the arch of a yellow plastic handle. Don’t, we say to you from below. Stop. It’s not real. There’s nothing sweet here. Just us, the waterlogged and forgotten. The ones who’ve given up. Ah, what’s the use. Down you come anyway.

#

Two more pop bottles drop into their cylindrical grave. Cheerwine. Cheerwine. They clang against metal, clink against glass. We, the dead, are silent. We, the dead, like you, go willingly because we think it’s sweeter inside. The truth is that we’re here because they don’t want us there, pestering the valley-town tourists stepping in and out of the old general store with their sunglasses, their children, their plastic bags of flannel napkins and wooden serving bowls and small cast-iron skillets and biscuit mixes and wool socks. Their deliberately faded tin signs. Their fucking jars of fucking honey.

#

Not nearly halfway down and already you’re starting to panic. Banging against the clear plastic walls, trying to escape. Freedom visible but impossible. Tsk. If only you, alive, could see yourself up there as we, the dead, see you from down here. Dumb and desperate. It reminds me of when I one flirted with the inner thigh of an Appalachian State University student—how smooth, how tender that flesh!—when he’d kicked aside the mashed cider donut I’d been exploring. I remember the book he’d been reading. No Exit, by Jean-Paul Sartre. I’d recommend it to you, but. Well. Anyway, at least you can find some comfort in the fact we’re not all Philistines down here. We’re not all drones.

#

Look! There’s another one, right above you! Not from my hive. Yours? Ah, now you realize the sour layers to this sweet struggle—so many for such a confined space. There’s the top layer, where you search for the promise of cane sugar or chocolate, where you dream of rewards your queen will bestow upon you. (A knighthood, perhaps? I would have settled for an extra cell or two.)  Then there’s the layer of confusion, when, disappointed at the lack of treasure, you discover your escape thwarted by those traitorous plastic petals that invited you in but won’t let you leave. No choice but to descend now to the layer of anger: a layer for which our apian temperaments are especially suited. You realize you’ve been duped. You fatten your stinger with venom, smack yourself against the plastic to strike at anyone: the grandmother with her metal garden flowers, the pubescent girl sucking dark syrup through a plastic straw, the tiny infant in his father’s flannelled arms. After that: the layer of fear. There. Now you see us, floating in tempting sugar water a half-liter below your tiny, eager wings. You stop tossing about like a mad thing and simply cling to the side of the plastic. You’re trembling. You’re terrified. You wait for your energy to leave you, for your will to fail you, for your microscopic heart to give out. You realize, now, how this journey ends. You see the floating landmass of once-dangerous black and yellow, of waterlogged wings and wilted stingers. A carpet of fuzzy little bodies conforming, through no design of their own, to the shape of this vessel. I’ve lost count of how many of us are down here by now. It’s been a long day. Maybe you can tell from up there? When you get down here, let me know.

#

Ah, what I’d give for news from outside. For a tattered shred of Le Monde or Bon Appétit. I’d even settle for a scrap of The Mountain Times. There’s only so much of this banjo-twang, this harmonica-wheeze, this back-porch applause I can take. The interminable clang of empty glass bottles. I imagine them in their trash can, drained like us, but resigned, willingly, to their fate. No complaints, no cries. No struggle. Would that we could do the same.

#

A small girl comes up to our plastic hive. She points at us, at you. Energized, you try to leap at her. As if what? As if you’ll be released? As if you’ll be spared our fate? And what would you do, were those impossibly plastic walls to miraculously give way, to crumble like the walls of Jericho? Would you spread the terrible news to other hives of this flower-that’s-not-a-flower? Would you simply meander over to the next patch of milkweed, oblivious and forgetful? Me, I’d sting the little salope. Right on her fat glossy lips.

#

I suppose it’s time to speak of that other layer. Yes, there’s one more. You’ve no doubt flitted past that horrible pit over there behind the dumpsters at some point in your journeys. You pay it no mind. You think: That won’t be me. I don’t belong to that sad crowd tossed out on the grass, their bodies soft like boiled peanuts. A scattered hill that suggests—what? Reliquit dives omnia allis et moritur? Mors te manet certissima? Stimulus autem mortis peccatum est? No, no. I know. Lines from an obscure French poet I once perused in a small box of giveaway books outside the library. Fools: We speak like masters, / We, who in the ocean of being, / swim sadly confused; / We, whose airy existence, / Comparable to a passing shadow, / Begins, appears and is no more. (You’ll excuse, I trust, my hasty translation. I’d been discovered by a withered old librarian and rudely waved away.)

#

Look! Here he comes, as if summoned by these very lines! Our exhausted, underpaid executioner, in his branded long-sleeved shirt that reads TODD GENERAL STORE, his bright yellow button that reads FALL GARDEN SALE! EVERYTHING MUST GO! He lifts our hive by its plastic handle, and we slosh against one another. Wings wet with sugar water, you fall the rest of the way onto our backs. Welcome! You’re dazed, I can tell. Disoriented. Allow me some weak words of comfort: I’ve made this trip before. Earlier this morning, in fact. While the rest of us dropped out onto the dirt, I stayed stuck at the bottom, overlooked, only to be drowned once again in a fresh cup of simple syrup. Bobbing here patiently while, one by one, the others came to join me. Then you came. And then one after you. And the one after that. No, surviving this final journey doesn’t happen often. But it can happen. I suspect I won’t be lucky twice. Maybe you will. That’s the beauty of being small, of being insignificant. Sometimes, you can get by without ever being noticed.

#

The banjo, the harmonica, the clapping picks up speed, as if applauding our departure. Be brave, mon frère! You are not in this alone! We, the dead, are with you—even at the end! Even as we’re carried by our executioner, reverently, down slanted wooden steps. Even as the parking lot gravel passes beneath us. Even as the dumpster, and the grave beyond, approaches. Even as the little girl points at us and asks her oblivious father where we’re going. We, the dead, are doomed. Thankfully, we are doomed together.

Zak Salih lives in Washington, D.C. His fiction and essays have appeared in The Chattahoochee Review, The Rumpus, KROnline, Apogee Journal, The Millions, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and other publications. His debut novel, Let’s Get Back to the Party, is forthcoming from Algonquin Books in February 2021.

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