By Zachary Reisch
I shuffled forward, trying to ignore the sunburn forming on my arms. The day was cloudless but of course they hadn’t given us sun umbrellas. We were just forager bees, after all.
The house bees in line next to us weren’t faring any better, though. They were wiping away sweat just as often as we were.
The line moved slowly as the company reps checked us in. We were in an enormous field of dandelions stretching as far as I could see. I’d never been on an airplane, but my cousin had been, and she told me the dandelion fields looked endless from the sky as well.
Eventually it was my turn. The tired-looking employee had me scan my fingerprint on a handheld console. When it beeped, he gave me the thumbs up and I entered the field.
There were a seemingly infinite number of stations set up, separated by walls. It was like voting booths, or a driving range. Each station demarcated a dandelions plot. A number of the booths were already occupied by crouching bees, their heads buried in flowers. I walked a few minutes until I found an empty station. Then I knelt and jutted my second tongue, also called a proboscis, into the dandelion closest to me. I tasted the sweet nectar as it slid down to my honey stomach.
When the flower was drained, I moved onto the next. And the next. And the next. It took a long time for me to fill up, and the sun was sweltering. At least they let us take water breaks.
After about two hours I got up, licked my lips, stretched, and ambled the hundred yards or so to the hive. I was happy to find Emma was my house bee.
She had short-cropped hair and a kind face. We were often paired because we took the same commuter train in the morning so got to work at the same time. I would always walk a bit faster when going to the hive if I noticed another forager about to match up with Emma.
She smiled at me, then her face drooped in a comically forlorn expression. When she sighed, her proboscis poked briefly between her lips.
“This is ridiculous,” she said. “Couldn’t they have made our skin sunproof while they were fumbling around with our DNA? I’m frying.”
“What, you didn’t have two hundred dollars to shell out on Sun Protect?”
She grunted and shrugged.
“My cheap stuff wore off hours ago.”
“Mine, too.”
We shuffled our feet for a few seconds, awkwardly.
“Alright,” she said. “Hand over the goods.”
I knew from television and movies — and from my non-bee friends — that for most people kissing was a purely romantic gesture. Or at least, it was supposed to be. But I was a genetically modified human created to replace the extinct honey bee, volunteered at birth by my parents in exchange for $3,000 from the government. So kissing was also part of my job.
Well it was sort of like kissing, anyway. Honey bees used their mouths to pass nectar between themselves. To preserve the authenticity of honey made by human bees, the company had us do the same thing.
Emma and I moved closer so our mouths were almost touching. My honey stomach started grumbling, then the nectar being stored there shot out my mouth and into Emma’s. She slurped it down.
We made eye contact for a second, then looked away.
“Alright,” I said. “Have a good one! Try to stay out of the sun.”
She laughed.
“Yeah, you, too.”
I didn’t move; neither did she.
“Do you want to get a drink after work today?” she blurted.
Some of the nearby bees snickered. It was a little on-the-nose for a house bee to ask out her forager. But hey, it was cliche for a reason.
“Sure!” I said, tucking a hair strand behind my ear. “If I’m not burned to a crisp by then.”
“Great!”
Emma gave a nervous wave and smile, then turned around and headed toward the hive. It was a gigantic concrete structure that housed the honeycomb and also some administrative offices.
I walked toward my storage locker to eat lunch and reapply sunblock, feeling lighter than before and not caring in the least about my sunburn.
About the Author
Zach Reisch
Zach writes speculative fiction in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A.
You can find some of his short stories at <https://medium.com/@zachary-deinreisch>.
Ion Newcombe is the editor and publisher of AntipodeanSF, Australia’s longest running online speculative fiction magazine, regularly issued since January 1998, and conceived back around November 2007. He has been a zealous reader and occasional writer of SF since his childhood in the 1960s, and even sold a few stories here and there back in the '90s.
Mark Webb's midlife crisis came in the form of attempting to write speculative fiction at a very slow pace. His wife maintains this is a good outcome considering the more expensive and cliched alternatives. Evidence of Mark's attempts to procrastinate in his writing, including general musings and reviews of books he has been reading, can be found at www.markwebb.name.
Garry Dean lives on the Mid Coast of New South Wales Australia, and has been a fan of SF for most of his natural life. Being vision impaired, he makes good use of voice recognition and text to speech in order to write. Many of his stories have appeared in AntipodeanSF over the years, and his love of all things audio led him to join the narration team in 2017.
Laurie Bell lives in Melbourne, Australia. She was that girl you found with her nose always buried in a book. She has been writing ever since she was a little girl and first picked up a pen. From books to short stories, radio plays to snippets of ideas and reading them aloud to anyone who will listen.
Geraldine Borella writes adult short stories and stories for children and has been published in anthologies for both. In 2018, one of her children’s short stories placed second in The Buzz Words Short Story Prize and she won an ASA Emerging Writer’s Mentorship. She currently works part-time as a hospital pharmacist and as an online creative writing tutor.
Timothy Gwyn is a professional pilot in Canada, where he flies to remote communities. During a lull in his flying career, he was a radio announcer for three years, and he is also an author.
Tim Borella is an Australian author, mainly of short speculative fiction published in anthologies, online and in podcasts.
Margaret lives the good life on a small piece of rural New South Wales Australia, with an amazing man, a couple of pets, and several rambunctious wombats.
Ed lives with his wife plus a magical assortment of native animals in tropical North Queensland.
Alistair Lloyd is a Melbourne based writer and narrator who has been consuming good quality science fiction and fantasy most of his life.
Mark is an astrophysicist and space scientist who worked on the Cassini/Huygens mission to Saturn. Following this he worked in computer consultancy, engineering, and high energy research (with a stint at the JET Fusion Torus).
Jessie Atkin writes fiction, essays, and plays.
Brian Mahon is a former cook, lab technician, submariner, and now-and-then writer.
Bryan is a writer, activist and retired-barrister based in Melbourne, Australia. He appeared in the High Court in significant constitutional, native title and refugee matters including the Mabo litigation, Bryan has published numerous legal articles, and the book "A Mabo Memoir" (2013).
Deborah Sheldon is an award-winning author from Melbourne, Australia. She writes short stories, novellas and novels across the darker spectrum.
PS Cottier is a poet who lives in Canberra, with a particular interest in speculative poetry.
Old enough to just remember the first manned Moon landing, Kevin was so impressed he made science his life.