The Honeys

by Ryan La Sala

When someone dies, suddenly you’ve made an enemy of the past tense, but the past tense is all you’ve got now and it feels like it knows it. Well. Fuck the past tense, I guess.

A million times I don’t find her, and I shiver when I remember that she’s in the one room I refuse to enter:

They are waiting for my answer. When they blink, it’s a cascade from left to right, like they’re one large spider.

Every small want grows out of me like thorns, making me impossible to embrace.

I wanted—I have always wanted—what the Honeys had. It was an instant, unconscious wish anytime I saw beautiful girls. I coveted not just their beauty, but their freedom to embody beauty. Their sororal closeness, too, and the power it gave them. I wanted in on the act, and I’m not sure that Caroline ever understood why. Whenever I tried to talk about this incoherent need, or the frantic, harsh static that writhed under my skin—when I saw girls, saw myself,

My body betrayed me. Then it was my sister’s turn, I guess.

Just a sisterhood I resented, envied, adored, and despised all at once.

So scared that her fear occupied her fully by the spring. It walked around in her skin, a doom clothed as my sister. Some seed of dread planted long ago was now blooming in her body.

It is up to you to demand people see you as you, or they will almost always decide you are someone else.

I consider throwing myself in the lake but decide to save the histrionics for when a lifeguard is on duty.

Bria raises a hand and snaps her fingers, the rest snapping quickly after.

I’m the focal point of hundreds more eyes.

And then Bria looks up. She looks at me. We lock eyes, and a chill caresses my bare skin as she smiles. It’s a wild smile, like she’s on the verge of screaming with laughter.

Just a sea of golden eyes shining in the dark, the firelight flickering within them.

Wendy places one hand on my shoulder now. With her other, she reaches out into the sea of faces. Hands reach back, grasping her. Grasping me. Crawling over my shoulders, layering atop one another, knuckle on palm on wrist, so that I’m knotted into the center of a monstrous, heavy huddle. It happens so quickly I can’t even think about running. And then it all goes quiet. All the eyes close. All sound ceases except for the crackling fire and the calls of loons off the lake. I am overcome with the urge to shout into the silence. I don’t want more silence surrounding Caroline. I’m going to be crushed by it, by these hands, by their pulsing grip. I want to scream, but the thing about screaming is you have to let yourself breathe first. And I won’t. The air will taste like warm skin.

She raises our held hands, and like a congregation the camp rises to their feet. I force myself not to run, expecting all one hundred of these white-clad children to charge after me, splashing and writhing into the lake like knotted moon-white leeches.

A single sight separated into many eyes.

Sightless black eyes whirled into bark. The sideways light of dawn lids them in shadow, and dew sparkles in their seams. Like tears. Like they’re crying with me. I can’t say why, but I feel a kindness in their quiet solidarity. Then I feel a little embarrassed. Twice now these trees have watched me vanish into my grief. The first time was when I nearly plunged off a cliff, and now this. I’m still only wearing a towel.

The shadows sweep around us and even though they’re nothing more than negative space in the dim light, I get the impression that they’re smiling.

I can’t make out their faces for some reason. When I try to look, they blur, like they’re vibrating too fast for my eye to keep up with.

Bria lifts her fingers, poised for a snap. Maybe it’s the glare of the flashlight, but her features begin to quiver and vibrate, her own face starting to blur. The girls sulkily mirror her, and they snap as one. The sound they create is a singular crack, like too-close lightning, and I can’t even hear myself scream as the night tears itself into brightness. In its wake I hear that hum, the one that I heard when I first arrived at Aspen. I’m sure it’s that hum, vibrating and hot and saturating the air. But this time it’s loud. All at once it’s inside me, crawling on the inside of my eyes.

“He fell,” the girl repeats, and in her words I hear a silvery overtone. Like a needle of sound slipped right through my skull. I shiver. I know she’s right. Callum fell. Right? Earth to Mars.

But I know better. Maybe it’s because I was raised with a sister, or maybe it’s because I’ve spent my life on the outside, peering through a yearning distance at the games girls play, memorizing every turn and trick with the desperate hope that one day I’d be invited to play along, too. So of course I know better. And of course a beast of cunning and misdirection like myself recognizes what’s happening here.

Aspen trees grow in groves. It’s said they’re all connected, just one ancient organism under the earth, and the black whorls in the bark are their eyes. They watch us, making sure we respect this place and one another. It’s said that no secret deeds exist among the eyes of the aspen trees.”

I feel the eyes in the bark, never blinking, never averting. Their unyielding pressure follows me as I brush my teeth at the river’s edge, spitting into the moonlit water; it follows me as I step into my muggy tent and pick over restless, anonymous bodies; it follows me as I drift right up to the edge of dreams. Then it follows me further.

Their world feels pure, unbound from creativity or pride or rebellion. All those vices live within me, so maybe I couldn’t live within a hive after all.

Anything more than nothing leaves too many questions. Conditions and bargains I can’t deal with. There must be nothing. I need to know that there is nowhere left to look, otherwise I’ll never stop looking.

I saw the shadowy blots riddling her body. The constellation of voids, like a prophesy for all the emptiness she’d leave behind.

The eulogy replaces the person; the story told takes the place of the life lived. The secret of tonight will replace these silly nocturnal antics with a forbidden luster. The truth will lock up behind the fraternal hush that I’ll never be invited into. And I can’t do anything about any of it, just like I can’t stop the sun from rising.

The boys echo it back. They yell, again and again, jumping and stamping until they fall out of sync, until the words are lost and it’s just chaos, a cry, the braying tantrum of animals marking their territory.

I forget about Caroline and me dancing in the dark garden. I forget my sadness completely. I almost forget my doubts, too, but they lurk just out of sight, like a body in the blur of my periphery, sprawled in the middle of the patio, head turned toward me, chapped lips parting to ask me: Why? Why are they all being so nice?

an innumerable chaos that looks more like one alien entity rather than a thousand individuals.

The light passes through him. Like a jack-o’-lantern, he glows an eerie gold, his bones black and twisting below his viscous, dotted flesh. Brayden screams again, his lower jaw yawning wide until it falls to the floor. Brayden implodes with it, smothering the flashlight. The light flickers beneath the quivering mass, flickers again, then goes out.

A new light rises, one from within the honeycomb. It’s not the harsh white of the lost flashlight but something more organic—a pulsing, waxy buttercup that gushes over us as we run.

Now I see them all around us. Phantom figures melted into the walls, the floor, the ceiling. The yellow light breaks around the shadows of shoulders, hips, skulls, and hands. Blurry bodies in the comb. I don’t think about it as we run. The stings are incessant now. Clots of bees cling to my flesh like they’re trying to burrow beneath it.

The light catches it and I see that it’s not a clear citrine, nor a lustrous gold, but a darker, deeper, red. Like mahogany wood stain. Like liquid garnet.

But I step away. Bria’s eyebrows knit in a kind of pity. She holds something up for me to see. EARTH Dangling between her elegant fingers is Wyatt’s abandoned flashlight, clinking on its snapped key ring. I can hear it, because Bria can hear it, because something connects us now. EARTH TO A network spreads out from her, like she’s the spider and I’m the fly straining against her web. EARTH TO MARS

Everywhere my skin erupts in aching fire. It’s not the needling sting of the bees this time, but a thickly spread agony. Dull. Huge. Enveloping me as my senses shut down.

Honeycomb sculptures, like those we glimpsed in that subterranean hive. In the light they’re hardly as sinister. It’s just their color—that deep crimson in each tiny well, like a lattice of gold beaded with blood.

But my eyes are stuck on the edge of the closest platter, where within the comb I can see the clear impression of a nose. I follow the slope up to a brow bone. The socket is empty, the eye melted away.

For a moment I forget my doubts. I let it ring, and the girls all around me seem to hear it. They smile at me—beautiful smiles, smiles so radiant that my cheeks hurt trying to reflect them—and they take my hands in their sticky grips, and they pull me forward. It’s like we’re all reaching together, our arms woven into a single appendage that stretches into my future without hesitation, with only hunger. Our grip opens, and together we scoop up a crescent of the dark honeycomb. It’s heavy—no, dense. Like it has its own gravity, but we work together to lift it up, so high the sun pours into it and splashes a red shadow over my face, over my closing eyes, over my parting lips, my reaching tongue, my stretched jaw.

The lace falls away, exposing everything below in the blue-gray of the breaking dawn. It’s not my sister. Not anymore. It’s curled at the slab’s center, nude, the limbs strangely sickled. But her face is the same. Same nose, same lips. Even the eyes remain perfectly preserved.

My sister’s features melt away, leaving behind a neon silhouette of molten glass.

That is where I am now. Beyond. Watching the churning design of the world from across a cold distance, like the stars watch us. Caroline used to tell me Earth to Mars. Well, the earth has finally come to me, and now I am vast enough to return its embrace.

I hug Caroline. She’s real. She hugs me back and I’m a body again. Not a floating mind, not a sprawling lace, but a body that feels her solid warmth, that smells her shampooed hair, that can hold her one more time.

It’s a minute before we break apart, or it’s a lot longer.

“Want to dance?” Caroline says. “Sure.” “Wait. But first, want to switch?” I’m in my usual suit, she in her summery dress. The second I consider switching, we’ve switched. Caroline smiles. “Gimme a twirl!” I give her a twirl. I throw a hand out for her and she catches it, and I spin her around. Her tie slaps my wrist. We dissolve into our dramatic routine, finishing the dance in her usual bow, my usual curtsy. What’s strange is that no adults come to disrupt us, though I hear them talking louder.

“I was jealous. I thought you were so ungrateful because you had the life I wanted, and you didn’t even want it back. And I resented you for it. But I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything at all. I thought we would have our whole lives to make up. I said goodbye to you so much earlier than I had to.”

“But I don’t want everything else, Caroline. I can’t apologize to everything else, or hug everything else. Or watch a movie. Or talk. Or see you. I don’t know who I am if I’m not your twin.”

“So dramatic, Mars. You’ve never needed anyone to tell you who you are. It’s what I admire about you most. No force on this planet can compare to that will of yours.” She taps my head.