“Queen Bee” by Flavia R. Montiero

BEES ARE CREEPY

I watch the sun-rays dance at the bottom of the pool, impossibly blue, and I dip my toes just to goosebump my skin, delighting in the light buzz of a carefree moment. Until, a bee. 

She flies maniacally around my ankle, like she’s strapping an invisible rope to my leg. Every now and then she lands, perching on my skin, sniffing. She doesn’t find what she’s looking for, doesn’t stop looking either. I can feel her anger building. As she turns a corner around my heel, she jiggles her striped ass to warn me, Don’t move. Don’t move, or I’ll sting. 

With bees, to raise a shield is to invite an all-out attack. 

Her jiggly ass is equipped with a built-in weapon, always ready to pierce my skin with her venom. She seems more fragile than me, and in fact, is more fragile, weapon notwithstanding. But it is precisely her fragility that scares me. I’m scared to scare the bee. Between the two of us, I have to be the chill person. Because if I lose my shit, she loses her shit. And if she loses it, we both get hurt.  

To be fair, I get hurt; she dies. Arguably, she’d have it worse. But I would be doomed to keep on living, now with a throbbing toe and the feeling of guilt over the bee’s death.

Had you been chill, this bee could’ve lived another 37 days, my pillow will whisper at night.

A BEE STORES VENOM IN HER BODY 

Like a bee, my mom kept her anger inside, always an instant away from discharging, but never discharging, until it did. It shot out in my direction, a venom-filled spear lodging under my skin. The anger was hers, but its management was mine. It was my responsibility to predict and avoid her breaking point.    

BEE VENOM IS DEADLIER THAN COBRA VENOM

My siblings and I were emptying mom’s house so we could rent it out. Cupboards were gutted, boxes were opened, dusty piles of paper were lifted, all sorts of memories surfaced. From a drawer spilled a heap of recipes and postcards, and underneath them, a crinkled note. Unfolding it, I recognized my wiggly handwriting in colored pencil. At the top of the page there was a heart, and at the bottom, the date: August 21, 1990.

Mommy,

I like you a lot, 

and never want you to talk like this:

“I hope you die.”

Because I adore you.

Keep this card.

Bye

I imagine it’s not uncommon for a mom of a six-year-old to wish her kid dead, in that split second that separates her exhaustion from her consciousness. A wish that dissipates almost before it exists. What I cannot imagine is this wish making its way into words, and being shot out at the child. I can’t imagine six-year-old me being pierced with that sentence.

Yet I must’ve been, because the venom from that day is still stored in me. That explains how my body now, thirty years later, reacts to otherwise harmless interactions. It explains the swelling in my throat when the person behind me on the sidewalk harrumphs. Or the sudden redness on my skin when the cashier taps her fingers. Or the nausea when the Uber driver growls. My veins carry the conviction that I am to blame for anything that erupts, especially other people’s temper. 

After all, if my mom was so often so angry around me, the reason must have been me. I must give off a smell that awakens people’s rage; people’s rage, in turn, is a sign I may be in serious danger.

Already at six, when snapped at by my mother, my instinct wasn’t to snap back, but to calm her down with a note, a heart, an adore-you. Already at six, I knew that if I lost it, she’d lose it. And if she lost it, we’d both get hurt. 

BEES HAVE SILENT WAYS TO COMMUNICATE 

A rice bowl was passed around the table—along with the beans and the farofa—between my parents, my siblings, and I. Everyday menu, everyday conversation. Until my mom mispronounced the word CD-ROM, her tongue crumpling as she spit out a rolled R. The shiny discs, along with their acronym, were just arriving in Brazil, were alien to her, fluent neither in English nor in computers. I laughed at her pronunciation, the mean yet innocent laughter of a ten-year-old who was as young as the foreign machines; too young to consider there had ever been a world where words like modem mouse microsoft weren’t part of the Portuguese language. I laughed; she left. She stood up mid-lunch and locked herself up in her room. A reaction by then so familiar, I saw it in slow motion: the chair scratching the floor, the stomping, the slammed door, the silence that followed for a whole day. After she left, the whole family turned to me with a head-shake. You should’ve known better, I read in their bugged-out eyes.

I should’ve known she was so fragile; her fragility stung. 

A BEE MAY BE UNABLE TO NOTICE A FLOWER JUST INCHES FROM HER 

But she will notice every microscopic bump on the surface of a petal. Bees are peculiar in the way they read the environment around them. My mom, too, would sometimes disregard the larger picture and get hung up on the slightest detail. Her anger wasn’t fueled by long traffic jams or high interest rates, but by a misplaced laughter.   

BEES ARE DEFENSIVE

A Fanta bottle was sitting on the table, halfway empty, its ribbed glass opaque from wear. Tiny me was looking at it, my legs dangling from the chair. The sun snuck in from the side and drew a yellow triangle on the table top. All was peacefully golden. Until a bee landed on the bottle’s sticky mouth. I freaked out, arms flailing. From above came a soothing voice, one of the adults explaining the trick was to sit still: The bee won’t do you harm unless she feels threatened by you.

On that day, I began to understand that my safety depends on how I make others feel. I can’t  recall how old I was, and whether that was a new lesson, or a recap. 

THE QUEEN BEE SETS THE MOOD OF THE HIVE  

My house had a heavy wooden door that protected us from outside danger. I opened and closed this door, never giving it much thought. My biggest concerns were MTV and PMS and ICQ. Until my father, my brother, and my sister all walked out that door, within months of each other. One divorce and two marriages, and over the winter we went from a five-person household to a household of two: a teenage daughter and her fragile mother. Danger was now inside. I’d been left alone with the bee.

Every night, and sometimes all night, my mother and I had agonizing fights. Those fights bled into the wee hours, zig-zagging between accusations, until it wore us down and we simply split to our bedrooms. Our arguments had no resolutions, only respites. We lived in a permanent close-up of the microscopic bumps on the petal: she got worked up if I went out or if I stayed in or if I talked or if I was quiet or crying or laughing or nothing.

After those fights, there’d be the expected scratched floor, the stomping, the slammed door—but things wouldn’t get any better after she left her bedroom. In the following mornings, a dark cloud hummed over the house. We avoided the subject and we avoided each other’s eyes, until the hum became too loud to bear, and only an I’m-sorry punctured that hum. My mom would never—has never—apologized. So I did, every single time. 

I can only take so many apologies, she often said. Once I give up on a person, there’s no turning back. 

I sensed I was always treading too close to her breaking point. At every fight, I prayed it wouldn’t be the last. The last fight, I feared, wouldn’t end the conflict; it’d end the relationship. 

A HONEYBEE CAN ONLY STING ONCE 

But unlike a bee, my mom could sting over and over. A bee’s  stinger has blades like a screw anchor—once in, it can’t be pulled out. It’s attached to the bee’s lower abdomen, and if she flies away from the victim, the stinger stays, and with it a string of her internal organs. She stings; she becomes hollow; she dies.  

A BEE CAN STING ANOTHER BEE TO DEATH

A quiet truce—or rather a tense silence—followed our previous fight, as it did all our fights. The morning-after was made of our ghosts, exhausted, gliding through the house, eyes glued to the floor. Until I stirred up the hive by saying I was sorry, I—  

Do you know what it’s like to taste a gun with the roof of your mouth?

Her question pierced me. I was fourteen. I held the hem of my oversized t-shirt, frozen by her confession. This time, it was not me she wished would die, as she had when I was six. It was herself.

Much like when I was six, nothing happened. She didn’t find the courage to do it. But like I’d recorded in that note, in my childish  handwriting, she’d found the courage to say it. She wanted me to know she’d put a gun in her mouth. She wanted me to know what followed the scratching, the stomping, the slamming; what went on inside her bedroom, inside her mind. 

And she wanted to remind me I had provoked this. I’d either cried or laughed or moved in a way she wasn’t expecting. Careless, I had released her anger. She lost it, I lost it. We both got hurt. Only this time, what had been a sting to me, could’ve been her death.  

She wanted to warn me. I have a weapon. Don’t make me feel threatened. Don’t  make me feel threatened, or I’ll sting. And die. 

BEES REMEMBER  

Under the fluorescent light of a university lab in London, a scientist called Lars was placing robot-spiders on certain flowers. If a bee landed on those flowers, the robot would grab her and then release her unharmed. The bees, Lars learned, could keep a memory of the encounter, and so they started inspecting the flowers for robot-spiders before landing. Some of them, though, started not only avoiding the actual threats but also avoiding flowers where there was nothing. Scared by false alarms, maybe by alarms ringing inside their own minds. The bees, Lars learned, can develop PTSD.

BEES CAN BE TRAINED TO SMELL EXPLOSIVES

After the gun conversation, whenever my mom hurt me, I knew better than to respond. I did my best to appear innocuous. I dropped my shoulders, I wore my most tamed voice, I rushed an apology; my mouth spilled nothing but honey. Still, every time I came home from school or from the pool, I froze with the possibility I’d done something wrong, irreversibly wrong.

Had you been chill, your mom could’ve lived another 37 years, the front door whispered every time I slowly pushed it open.

ANY FEMALE LARVA HAS POTENTIAL TO BECOME A QUEEN BEE 

I’m talking about my mom in the past as if she died. She didn’t—not from suicide, not from other external threats. She lives a quiet life, wandering along the flower beds of a nursing home, her inside hollowed out by advanced-stage Alzheimer’s. No stingers left now that words have lost all meaning to her. 

That’d be a great time for forgiveness, say friends and therapists. The fighting’s finally over; my mother’s finally harmless.  

They ignore that certain harms cannot be contained in the past. Stored in our bodies, harm seeps into the present, will eventually seep into the future. Though her venom has dried, I’m not free from it. Her rage is still here. It lives inside me, in my own stinger. More often than I’d like to admit, I find myself replicating her fuckedupness. I, too, have become an angry woman. I, too, expect others to manage my anger. 

I want to yell at the bus driver who’s stuck in traffic. I want to yell at the lifeguard who does nothing about the rain on a Sunday. I yell on the phone that I need my package delivered now, while on the other end the robot repeats, unmoved, that I can press one to schedule a pickup or two to track a shipment.

 I went from sucking on guilt at fourteen to regurgitating it at forty. 

BEES ARE CREEPY  

I watch the shadows of the monstera leaves dance on the ceiling, a lazy feeling, and I let some Brazilian jazz softly pour onto the living room floor. My husband sits across from me, and between us there’s just our Manhattans in stem-glasses, our sweet banter, the occasional laughter.

Until.

Suddenly, the living room is buzzing with tension. Leaning forward, I’m spitting out barbed words. I can see my spite already piercing through my husband’s skin. He must’ve said or sighed or whispered something, and I’ve yanked out all my rage in his direction. I feel hollow, dead almost, but there’s nothing I can do to stop my venom from spilling now. I have no idea how to contain my anger. My husband, shrunk in his seat, is distressed yet striving to keep chill. Behind his dilating pupils, I can see the exact words he’s thinking. 

If I lose it, she loses it. If she loses it, we both get hurt.

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