The Lava in My Bones (21 page)

From the gym ceiling hung pink and orange streamers undulating in rollercoaster waves. Music thumped as girls in low-cut
chiffon wiggled their hips and boys in misshapen suits stepped rigidly back and forth.

“Without
you,
babe,

I can't go on, on, on …”

Jimmy and I faced each other in the centre of the dance floor. I'd never danced, but didn't care how I appeared now. In the half-darkness, arms thrust and dove, heads bobbed like buoys at sea, and pelvises spun. I was so pumped full of adrenalin, I felt myself exploding into the flood of bodies and sound. I stamped loudly, threw my head forwards, spun my arms like propeller blades. I ceased to notice Jimmy and became a part of the gyrating mass. In my peripheral vision the crowd dissolved into disjointed body parts; shoulders thrust toward walls, red-lit fingers pointed upwards, hair thrashed to and fro. The bodies fragmented, jostled, and disintegrated into each other.

This is how it feels to be happy, I thought. This is what other people feel all the time.

The song ended and a ballad began. The small sea of dancers coagulated into dozens of swaying couples.

“Let's leave,” I said.

Jimmy shrugged and nodded. We headed to the bushes. The smokers on the football stands saw us enter the underbrush, which is what Jimmy wanted. We crouched in the light-dappled darkness beneath the overarching tree branches. I peered out onto the lit-up football field. Throngs of students milled around on the distant parking lot.

Behind the gnarled tree trunk we'd stashed our tools and my pack of provisions, including a T-shirt, pants, sandwich, and
twenty dollars. Jimmy didn't ask me about my pack, but assembled his instruments: a wire cutter, a razor-edged chisel, a mallet, and a handsaw. We both put on work gloves.

“All right,” I said. “Let's get cutting.”

I sat down, and Jimmy commenced filing one dress strap with the chisel tip. I attacked the other with the cutters. Beneath the cotton-covered strap ran dozens of intertwined metal filaments that were shiny and taut. I discovered it was most efficient to snap the filaments one at a time. They broke with a loud twang. Every so often I pulled at the cut ends with my gloved fingers to unravel the cord. I came upon nodules where the wires were knotted together. I concentrated so hard that I didn't notice time passing.

Goink!
At last one strap broke free of my shoulder. A minute later—
goink!
—Jimmy chiselled through the other strap. He sat down on the ground, exhaled loudly, and wiped a hand across his forehead.

“Jimmy, there's no time for breaks.”

He examined the dress's wide iron belt ringing my waist. Jimmy placed a sharp steel rod against the side of my waist and struck it with an iron-headed mallet. The
bang
echoed about the field; all the smokers in the stands turned their heads in our direction.

“Can you be quieter?” I said.

“Do you wants it off or not?”

Bang, bang.

With each hammer blow, I felt a sharp painful jab into the side of my stomach. Was my skin bruising? My organs being shaken apart? I became terrified that Jimmy might accidentally drive the steel rod right into my torso.

“Be careful! The dress is made of steel, but I'm not.”

We heard people leave the gym and join the smokers in the parking lot. The music had stopped. Was it eleven o'clock already?

“Hurry up, Jimmy!”

“It's hard to get through; it's really thick.”

Bang,
went the mallet,
bang, bang, bang.

The guys in tuxes had noticed the sound. Some drifted onto the field.

Bang, bang.

Five boys climbed down from the bleachers.

“When are you gonna be finished?”

“Do you wants it to stay on or do you wants it to come off?”

Bang!

People stood in groups near the bush where we hid.

I heard voices. “Somebody's hunting gophers.”

“It's a knife-fight, steel against steel.”

I panicked. Surely you were in the vicinity, Sam. You were waiting at the beach right then.

A larger crowd formed in a choir-like half-circle around our quivering bush. How was I going to make a run for it with everyone there? I wished I'd tried to convince Jimmy to go farther from the school. For the first time I wondered what would happen to him if he were caught helping me.

“Somebody should go in and check things out.”

Bang, bang, bang, bang.

The choir parted as Estelle strutted across the field like a queen, her headdress of hair like a multi-tiered wedding cake. On one side was a silver barrette with the word Lovely.

“Finished?!” I hissed.

“Almost done.”

Estelle asked, “What
is
that awful noise?”

I counted the final blows.

With a crackling sound, the belt around my waist snapped and the whole dress fell to the ground with a thump. I gazed down at my exposed stomach, hips, the V of my pubic hair. Jimmy's eyes widened in the shadow-shuddering moonlight.

Suddenly, honey gushed from my skin. It shot in waves from the pores in my scalp, filled my eyebrows, and flowed so thickly across my open eyes that the edges of Jimmy's body wavered as if seen through the window of a car in a car wash. The honey had been damned up for so long that it now poured forth in quantities I'd never experienced. It streamed from the crease below my jaw, cascaded in sheets over my breasts, hung in rippling curtains from my forearms, and was like a waterfall tumbling from my vagina. The parched ground below became a foam-dappled honey quicksand that splattered onto my ankles and calves and stuck to the soles and sides of my feet.

Jimmy whispered, “My God.” Torch lights burned in his eyes. His mouth hung open. I towered above him gleaming like a goddess in the moonlight. My body was no longer a body but a rushing river. Why had I feared he could conquer me? How could I
ever believe that anyone was greater than I? With my untrammelled honey flow, I felt, just for a moment, that the world was mine.

Then—in the sky—a deafening buzzing. The bees had not gone so far away after all.

I looked up through the open space over my head and saw an oozing dark blotch spreading across the sky. It covered half the stars and was slowly filling in the half-moon. The ground trembled. People screamed and began to run back and forth across the field.

As the clouds of buzzing bodies descended, the shrieking crowds swarmed over the parking lot and banged their fists on doors and school walls. “Let us in! Help!” Girls in floral dresses had fainted by the goalposts. Boys grabbed protesting females and tried to use them as shields. Some students piled into the few parked cars and drove off, tires screeching.

I was about to make a run for it when Jimmy lunged forward and threw himself on me; I fell backwards onto the ground. He pressed his open lips over the stream of honey at my waist and sucked loudly, swallowed, belched, sucked.

“Stop it!” I screamed. “Jimmy!”

With all my strength I forced him off me.

He sat dumbly on the earth, his nose, lips, chin, and nostrils shining with honey. His tongue lolled, his gleaming lips formed a perfect O. The O collapsed and Jimmy smiled so wide that every inch of skin on his face wrinkled and his eyes became two crescent moons. His chest had stopped moving. His whole body became as still as a boulder.

“Jimmy!” I cried. “Jimmy!”

He fell sideways like a rock to the earth and lay grinning as the colour drained from his face. His arms and legs twitched and stopped moving completely. His open eyes leered, still lit. I began crying. I ran one hand through his hair, which felt as dry and wispy as a field of wheat.

I repeated, “Jimmy … Jimmy.”

Should I cry out for help? Could anyone save him? I looked at his still face, then down at my body, and felt a deeper shame than any I'd ever felt.

In the football field, mayhem reigned. As the bee-cloud neared the earth, people flailed their bodies and shouted, boys wept in each other's arms, others ran insanely along the field's one-kilometre lap, while girls rammed their bodies into the crowded space beneath the bleachers or stood wailing and shaking the goal-posts hoping that would ward the bees off.

When the bottom of the bee-cloud touched the top seat in the bleachers, I knew I had to run. Yet I did not want to be seen as who I was. I did not want the school to know my body bred tragedy. I would not run out naked and exposed with my bee friends, in front of nearly every person in the world that I'd ever known.

So I made a huge mistake. I pulled the severed dress up and over my body and held the broken hinge together at my side with one hand. Honey gushed over the pink rayon.

I closed Jimmy's eyelids with the fingers of my free hand, took a deep breath, pushed through the wall of branches, and ran onto the field. The soles of my feet pounded into the lawn as I charged
in the direction of the basketball court. Once there, I'd run down the street to the harbour.

I was half-way across the field when the bees descended on me. I knew they'd alight on my forehead first and lick my flowing honey drops, then slide down my nose, neck, breasts—if I could just make it out of the schoolyard before I was covered—but as the first bee touched the space above my eyebrow, I didn't feel his soft tongue but a sharp, hot needle piercing my skin. The bees landed on me, their torrid stingers shoving into my cheeks, forearms, collar-bone, hips, earlobes, thighs, armpits, tongue, and the space behind my knees. I screamed and tumbled writhing onto the ground. Their stingers were poker-hot or ice-cold; some shot straight in or entered diagonally, others grazed the underside of my skin or twisted like knife blades. They sliced the twitching expanse of my stomach, the tender crescents of my lips, the creased cartilage gullies in my ears; they drove into the undersides of my stunned-open eyelids as my pierced skin reddened and swelled, my heart raced, and my whole body became a fire-lit forest where flames swept northward, southward, over, and across. Needles clung in quivering necklaces, in quilled tufts on my knees, in bull's-eye circles on my forehead, in lassoes around my nipples, and formed lines of artillery in the spaces between toes. My arms flailed, and only when my swollen fingers clutched and pulled the dress down and off my body did the needles stop thrusting. The bees now lapped and whinnied, scooping honey from my seared flesh.

I leapt up, my hands over my breasts and vagina, and ran weeping through crowds who howled with laughter.

“Serves her right!”

“Taste of her own medicine.”

“What a bitch on wheels!”

For a moment I was lost in a jungle of wailing gargoyles whose gouged wrinkles framed wound-like mouths. Tongues thrust like rifle tips, fingers pointed like darts. The waves of laughter mounted higher, and above all, I heard a smoke-alarm cry. Would Estelle's scream ring in my ears for the rest of my life?

No one pursued me as I ran down Connor Road. The streets were deserted. Even the bees had vanished. As I ran through the circles of light spilling out beneath street lamps, I heard only myself sobbing and my feet slapping the ground. I feared I'd lose strength and faint by the roadside, but told myself, think east, east, east, think of the ocean, the ocean that will save you, the ship that will transport you to the sky.

At last my soles sank into soft gravel. Frigid water lapped between my toes. My body was covered with an army of protruding needles. With face in hands I collapsed weeping by the shore. Behind me, bushes rustled in the breeze. Before me, the dark sea. No one approached me. No voice called my name.

Sam, would you arrive or had you forsaken me here on the continent's edge?

Ice