The Honeys

by Ryan La Sala

odor. The rich sweetness of decay, like molding flowers.

Only Caroline would know I still keep the window unlocked, just in case.

Caroline brings the sundial down on my hand, crushing nail and bone into metal and glass. I’m about to scream when she lifts it again, and this time she brings it down on my head.

feeling familiar skin bent into unfamiliar carnage.

trap me within it like a bug preserved in amber.

So recognizable that my agony—even my shock—dissolves into relief. This is the first time since this awful year began that I’ve looked into her eyes and seen her—seen her—looking back.

a storm of light and crystal and blood.

And she is smiling.

She liked it, but I loved it, and she loved me, so it became mine.

a little too insightful about what people wanted.

because she was Caroline, she’d drenched the buttons in sticky pink nail polish. Just for me.

Death isn’t the end of a life, but the division of it. When someone dies, their soul scatters into all the things they’ve ever given away. Love. Bruises. Gifts. You struggle to piece together what’s left—even the things that hurt—just to feel haunted.

I don’t know how anything in so many pieces could go back together. Caroline is dead. My sister is dead.

But so much worse are the small, infuriatingly small gaps—really just pinprick holes—that Caroline leaves everywhere else. Emptiness, fired through my memories like buckshot, so scattered that I can’t quantify what’s gone. I can’t count it. I can’t measure it. My sister becomes a constellation of voids.

When I fear something, I study it. Caroline would dance about it or probably write a poem.

What attempted murder? What accidental suicide? Not in this Lovely American Home. Here, enjoy a canapé, why don’t you?

The reenactment starts at four o’clock, don’t be late!

“I know I look bad, but you should see the bookcase.”

I was being sarcastic, the language Caroline and I shared behind our parents’ backs. Mom is being sincere.

I’m great at makeup but let me tell you, not even a drag-queen-level contour can hide that I’ve clearly been through some shit.

I catch myself tucking away certain observations so that I can trade with her later, like we always do at the end of Mom’s fundraisers. I shiver, sad all over again,

Maybe she felt that thing growing in her head.

I’m gender fluid, not a grenade.

My mind has become a storm of doubts and cynicism these past days. My defenses against my natural paranoia are at their weakest right now.

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

Needing things, she once told me, means you can be controlled. And I never want that. To be controlled. To need things. To need anyone other than myself.

Whatever it was, Caroline was scared. 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.

I know people think being queer is, like, very fabulous and full of witty repartee and all that, but sometimes it’s also crying in the bathroom of an Applebee’s somewhere near Margaretville, New York, while Rihanna’s “S&M” plays on the speakers for the early-bird crowd.

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

“Yeah, you didn’t know? Queer people dissolve in water. That’s how all those divers make such small splashes at the Olympics.”

Wyatt clearly wants to deploy some fresh, hot nature facts.

’cause the clones don’t live that long. But the root system does, so we don’t know know.”

His phony eagerness has given way to an outright naked need for approval. Is he nervous? It makes me nervous that I make him nervous. That usually doesn’t go my way, with boys.

I sit and watch, but I keep replaying Wyatt rushing to give me his shoes.

I don’t know why this should fill me with a tickling heat, but it does.

It gets louder as I pick through the forest. I forget about the heat and the sweat, focusing only on that rumbling. I picture it, like massive static in the distance, gray-blue clouds twisting into themselves as they spread over the horizon.

My name, someone shouted my name. I was walking, I was listening, I was about to fall, and someone shouted my name.

if a splinter of whatever drove Caroline into her frantic delusion has found its way into me.

He undoes it deftly, shoving it at me. I can’t help it—I laugh. It seems Wyatt is determined to dress me. He cracks a smile, too. The tension fades between us.

“I’m so sorry, Wyatt, but this I am definitely allergic to.” “What? Too straight?” I pick at it with two fingers. “Is that camouflage?”

I forgot how much guys love to just touch one another.

Awesome. I consider feigning an allergy to Awesome.

People came here to escape tuberculosis, thinking there was magic in the mountain air. Now they’re staff housing.

The last thing I need is to be dragged into every random micro-masculinity contest. I’ll be dead if I win one by accident.

See? My instincts are as sharp as ever.

Mars is hilarious

I clench my jaw against the memories it stirs, phantom bruises waking beneath my skin.

Outsmarting the bag checks is an ancient art passed down between campers at Aspen. We’ll see if I’ve still got it mastered.

I remember a smoke-choked fire, and an acoustic guitar, and enough sing-alongs to unnerve a show choir.

Don’t act up; handle your shit yourself; don’t tell Wendy; avoid Wyatt. I don’t want to see any of my boys get kicked out this summer. As if I’m a danger to their little club.

Still, not even a five-inch inseam is going to help me baffle the binary.