Love Is a Beehive
Chris Tannhauser
He could forgive her love for truck stop buffets and the fact that her admirable physical fitness seemed to stem from nothing more than moonlight strolls and the digging of “therapy” holes, but the unsent text message on her phone dropped his heart into his gut. It was just a string of numbers, really, with an area code somewhere in Central Asia. His hands shook and his vision blurred. The shame he felt for daring to snoop was brutally knocked from his mind. Who is he? he thought, staring at her phone in a world gone suddenly sunless.
•••
Mysti showed teeth beneath dead eyes. “Tell me about the time you hit your girlfriend,” she said.
Mitch groped through a brain like spilled soup. “I don’t—I don’t have a girlfriend.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ,” said the weird kid.
“Tell me about the time you struck a woman.” Mysti flipped the shovel off her shoulder and plonked it point down, leaning forward on it, her eyes as black as her knuckles where white.
Mitch felt as if his flesh were transparent, his bones little more than whispers, his soul flayed wide and glistening beneath her glare. “I didn’t—I don’t—” and his mind congealed enough to realize he was in real mortal danger here as the cage in the corner didn’t look very lived in at all, like it was more of a temporary thing, and no one who was ever locked up in it was locked up for long, at least not long enough to leave a mark or even try to worry at it. His mouth kind of went loose then and he entered a flow state he’d never experienced before or since where he tried to explain how everything he knew about relationships came from SPERMAGEDDON X and the X was a number, not a content qualifier, as the previous nine spermageddons were apparently insufficient, and because he was that guy he’d never actually had a girlfriend, just a series of random fucks with women who weren’t looking for boyfriends at all but didn’t want to be alone for 25 minutes and 51 seconds, and yeah, some of them liked to be choked, and okay, some of them like to get hit but not hit like that, like it was about evoking a sensation in soft tissue, just a wake-up sting, like a pinched nipple, but not to really hurt anyone or leave a mark that wasn’t gone the next day and everyone seemed to go away happy or at least not disappointed because the only thing more important than a condom was consent.
Mysti and the weird kid looked at each other. The kid shrugged and tapped a cigarette out of the pack. Mysti burst out laughing. The sound actually made Mitch feel a little better because it was clear she thought something was really funny.
“Put him in the cage,” she said when she caught her breath.
The kid pulled a face. “But—”
“You heard me.”
“Goddammit,” said the kid around his unlit cigarette. He struggled to knock Mitch over and then struggled and grunted as he scrape-dragged Mitch and the folding chair across the concrete floor in fits and starts and Mitch did his best to help, kind of inchworming his way over the lip of the cage by hinging the chair where he could until he was in and the door was clanged shut and padlocked.
“I like this one,” Mysti grinned.
•••
The day she met Mitch was like any other; it certainly didn’t feel like the life-defining inflection point it turned out to be. He was just supposed to be the next pulse in a steady beat of serial killings, bludgeoned to death with a shovel in an alley, not her person, not the man who gave her everything she dared the world to relinquish. She was the one who held hearts in her hand, not the other way around.
If she were the sundress tradwife-type who put up stupid signs in her house, hers would say LIFE IS A BALL PIT FULL OF HOLOCAUST SHOES. She preferred knotty, complex things with blood-soaked history, like her metallic blue 1961 Lincoln Continental four-door convertible, or that absolutely ludicrous chopper she got off an enormous biker-cum-meth-mogul named Bear that had lots of welded chain, chipped chrome, and a goddamn fenderless truck tire for a rear wheel—if your ass came off the seat it was going straight onto the tread at speed—it had a V-twin with a blower, all exposed belts and pulleys under the scoop, hungry for ankles. It sounded like an avalanche of Panzers with some ’67 Huey hog harmonics thrown in for good measure, as subtle as an airborne blitzkrieg.
“Looks like a lot of bike for a little lady,” shouted every random douche she bumped into while straddling the throbbing beast.
“Ooh, is it ever,” she would reply. “Maybe you should come back to my place and help me with it?” ...aaand dead.
This was the trick. Every ambush predator has to come out of a hole—a physical, societal, metaphorical, or conceptual blind spot. At truck stops she adjusted her gait as she strode across the nightslick parking lot, shortening her steps, catching a toe, stooping like she had 10 miles of bad road on her back, becoming the lot lizard, hiding inside things that look like victims. She slid into a cab with practiced resignation and said “Get it out for me,” so his hands were in his lap when hers were on the knife and three quick pops to the neck and then pushing that look of deep confusion away to keep the blood on the dash.
But sanity requires hobbies, and to keep things straight she dreamed up bigger and bigger kills, like that one time she took a contract and ended up with 13 dead, none of them the actual target—she got wind that they considered her less a professional and more a loose end, so she doubled back and cleaned up on her own. Lost a tooth and limped for a week, but it was worth it to teach fistfuls of lessons, learned and then lost at the ends of crowbars and revolvers.
But the pearl in the oyster, the lustrous thing she thought she loved more than anything in the world until she met Mitch, was nuclear fucking Armageddon. It started with an honest-to-god Soviet ICBM launch key she wore around her neck, the weight of it between her breasts a pendulous reminder of the great mass of fear and hate and greed with an oily sheen of patriotism that lay buried and waiting. She collected documents, photographs, patches, chipboard and plastic fallout calculator wheels, and at the center of her collection, at the very heart of her before she met Mitch, the nuclear launch codes for a lone SS-9 Scarp intercontinental ballistic missile in Turkmenistan. It took a fractal chain of time, effort, kids and crypto to secure it, but it was more than worth it. Just looking at the numbers gave her the focused predatory rush of following a would-be john into the men’s room for ritual strangulation—only magnified 8.3 billion times.
All she had to do was send that signal, a pebble flicked atop a mountain-peak snow shelf, to deform the authenticating layer and pierce the insufficient fail-safes, flipping zeros to ones and offs to ons from machine to brain to hand to a mechanical twist that jolts 45,000 pounds of chemical propellent into a self-perpetuating cascading reaction that lifts the missile into the sky on a pillar of flame over the desolate Karakum Desert; within a minute it’s at 100,000 feet and igniting the second stage to push for orbit; in another minute it’s at 300,000 feet and the third stage lights to kick the orbital bus over the long, dark-blue arc of the horizon; and a minute after that it’s flying silent above the North Pole, little more than a city-killing bullet at this point, before Earth calls to its wayward child with the voice of gravity and the bus kicks out the warhead and a swarm of penetration aids, aluminum chaff and decoy warheads, and after falling into the thickening atmosphere and surviving maximum aerodynamic heating while decelerating to a stately Mach 20 with the sketchy outlines of the terminal city in view, the warhead arms itself—
—and she comes.
She had no intention of actually using the digits—that would be insane. Civilization was the grass to her tiger, and she wasn’t about to burn her hiding place.
•••
Dhruv was jonesing for a cig and vaguely embarrassed to be dressed as a kid again, but it was either that or Mysti would do her thing to him instead. It was a long fall from self-styled dapper criminal mastermind to serial killer’s assistant, and he had hit his head on every goddamn rung on the way down. By his second job they had him crawling through HVAC ducts, and it never really got any better. The end came when he tripped an alarm while wedged in a transom and the guys scattered, leaving him hanging for the cops to take pictures and laugh a good long time before they bothered to get him down. He went to prison for a short stint that went bad pretty much from the get-go. Everything you can imagine happening to a little person in prison happened to him, only doubly so because he had a mouth on him.
None of this made any sense. He held no fewer than three Guinness Book World Records for chrissakes, and if you’ve ever looked into those you know it’s no mean feat—things that you can imagine killing someone in three days stand for a week; amounts that are surely illegal are exceeded ten times over. His records were for Glass Chewed in a Single Sitting (14 kilos), Sustained Blows from a Supermarket Checkout Divider (10,481), and Breath-holding Under Duress (5 minutes, 17 seconds). He was practically a comic book superhero.
Dhruv gave a smokeless sigh and picked a likely-looking simp out of the sidewalk flow just beyond the mouth of the alley, someone who wouldn’t put up too much of a fight—she might like it rough, but that shit scared the piss out of him. “Hey mister, can you help me find my mom?”
The simp turned his head even as the rest of the crowd didn’t. The hook thus set, Dhruv faded into the alley.
“Hey—hey little guy,” said the simp. “What seems to be the trouble?”
Dhruv made a face. “I think my mom’s back here somewhere.” He walked back around the dumpster like Mysti told him to.
The simp followed, and Mysti stepped out, grinning, a shiny, stickered shovel over her shoulder.
“Oh!” said the simp, startled. “Are you his mother?”
“Nope,” she said, “I’m the bad bitch who’s gonna kill you with a shovel.”
“Uh,” said the simp, and fainted dead away.
Dhruv and Mysti stared at him for a moment.
“Slap him awake,” she said.
Dhruv put his little hands on the simp’s neck. “He doesn’t have a pulse!”
“Well, do CPR or something.”
Dhruv spread his arms. “Have you seen me? I can’t! I’m too small!”
“Then get on his chest and dance, little man!”
“Wha—what dance should I do?”
“What?”
“I mean, which dance is best for CPR?”
“Maybe something shovel related?” she growled.
Dhruv landed on the simp’s chest with both feet and started doing the first thing that came out of his body, a reflex, really, from middle school: The Running Man—arms out and back, stomp and slide, stomp and slide, just like Vanilla Ice ripping off MC Hammer.
Unbeknownst to both of them, the simp was currently having a vision of a disappointingly genderless angel. YOU HAVE TO GO BACK, it said in a voice like an avalanche, THERE IS SOMETHING TERRIBLY IMPORTANT JESUS NEEDS YOU TO DO.
The simp woke up crying and you know the rest; as for Dhruv, this is the last we’ll ever see of him—so we just have to hope something really good happened to him, like winning the lottery, and drowning in a bubble bath with like three supermodels, high as a fucking kite.
•••
Like many predators who revel in the joy of the hunt, Mysti liked to play with her food. She was nude, sitting on the edge of the bed, legs spread. Mitch stood before her likewise naked, erection throbbing with noose-terror and whatever she had shot him up with.
“I don’t get it,” he said finally.
“Well,” she said, “you better think hard and figure it out.”
“Does my life depend on it?”
She laughed. “Oh yeah.”
“What do you want?” he asked.
“I want whatever you think you can get away with.”
He glanced at the bedroom door.
“You’ll be three-steps dead before you get close.”
“I’m dead anyway.”
“Like a true samurai, honey. This is your lady or the tiger moment. Either you figure this out and die like a man, or you don’t and you get the shovel.”
There was a quiet, electric moment and something happened in him, something from the angel maybe, or whatever was in the hypodermic—he saw CEOs in handcuffs, the pyramid on the dollar screwed upside down, the gradient of mollusks from hard to soft and the timidity fled him like a ballon kissing open flame—he grabbed her wrist, yanked her sideways and flipped her over, put his knees between her thighs and clamped a hand onto the back of her neck, pressing her into the mattress—she gasped as he spit on his cock and reached down with the other hand to rub it up and down against her until her folds gave way to liquid heat; as he built to a rhythm that made the bed shudder, he wasn’t just fucking a pussy or even fucking her—he was fucking the world, not giving, not taking, just pure animal dominance. She arched her back into the pounding and when she came it was harder than anything she could ever do for herself.
•••
Love is a beehive, a myriad of little things, turning, dancing, pressing and sliding against each other, and somehow, after a revelry of this, the honey comes out. The way she took a drinking straw with her teeth first, then enclosed it with her lips; the absent-minded finger-pass to tuck her hair behind an ear; the zig-zag crease between her brows when she was concentrating. Sure, there was the mind-blowing head she gave him in the back seat of her Lincoln Continental, but 25 minutes and 51 seconds later you’re back to the other 23-and-a-half hours of the day, and you damn well better find something just as good to squeeze between the rest of the ticks and tocks. And so they did.
•••
Who is he? he asked the universe again, looking at the unsent message on her phone. He took a deep breath that caught at the end—and pressed send, awaiting what he hoped wouldn’t be a world-shattering reply from her secret lover.
No comments:
Post a Comment