the hive

My mother and I were playing with our dog, Hunter, when we noticed the honeybees. There were hundreds of them, maybe more, all zipping and zooming and dive-bombing around us like the world's tiniest scud missiles. Panic-stricken, we ran to the house, dragging a very puzzled Hunter along.

When the coast was clear we went out and scanned the trees in our backyard. Sure enough, there was a hive, dangling like a black woman's boob (mom's word) on the mango tree that gave us plenty of bounty last summer. It looked dark and gelatinous and droned with life and peril. Its vicious occupants were all over it, crawling like maggots, ready to swarm on any poor creature dumb enough to get close to it.

The entrepreneur in my mom took over. "We can sell the honey," she said. "People use it for food and medicine." I stood there musing on what kind of ill luck a man has if that thing falls, of all places, on his head. Hunter paid no attention; he was busy wrestling a toad.

Morning drifted languidly into noon, into afternoon. We had lunch, watched Wowowee, shook our heads at the sheer stupidity of some contestants, napped. When we later checked on the alien housing project in our backyard, it was . . . gone. Gone! As in poof! Not a single trace of it, not even a small splotch of honey. None! It's as if it was never there at all.

Mom, who grew up in the company of trees and wildlife, had a theory: "Something disturbed them, so they transferred. Maybe it's the birds, or the light, or the wind. Maybe they saw us gawking at them earlier. They say honeybees are sensitive and highly territorial." I was reading a creepy story by Bradbury then, and my head was full of it, so my theory was different: "Maybe it's the maligno."

Theme from The X-Files started playing in my head . . .