Abbey Kos

When the bees came they chose Harpa because it looked like home. People think of honeycomb as yellow, but it doesn’t start out that way: virgin wax is clear as windows. It only darkens after worker bees eat it and sick it out, eat it and sick it out.

The first time I saw them I laughed. You know I’m afraid of regular ones, but there’s something about a five-meter bee that just gets me. You can see how clumsy they are, how gentle. Their stingers could cleave someone in half, but it turns out humans are too small to threaten them. They mostly just ignore us.

I was there the day the bees showed up. One moment there was Reykjavik like I knew it, and then there were these noises, low and high, blending, tuneless. (It was the buzz, of course, the sound of their wings.) And then we saw them at the horizon, rising like old gods.

I laughed, but everyone else screamed. There was a lot of running. People like to say the bees blackened the sky that day, but I was there and the swarm was really only a thousand or so. There’s no need to be hyperbolic about things.

They headed straight for Harpa like they knew it was there, and watching them take that place was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Every window was the right size and shape for a brood cell, so the bees just started building up and out. Within two months Harpa was swallowed. It became something new, something organic and strange.

Nowadays people hardly notice the bees anymore. We harvest their body heat to warm our homes. We export honey and candles. And in spring we take our children to Harpa — we can still get through the doors, you know — to watch life growing on the other side of the windows. We say to them, look: an egg the size of a globe, a grub as big as you. We say to them, listen: God did not make this world just for you and me.

ABBEY KOS is a writer and editor living in London. She was raised in Ohio and attended Hiram College and the London School of Economics. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, The Daily Meal, and Jezebel.

William Ables

The dead loved Dwight Eisenhower, they went crazy for him back in ‘56. Had the deceased been registered voters (or had Ike been a Kennedy), they would have cast hordes of ballots to keep the President in office for eternity.

Charles and Anubis were driving across the country. Charles was a middle-aged-looking man, slightly pudgy around the middle with a constant five o’clock shadow that refused to be shaved. Anubis was a rat terrier; Charles had rescued him after the dog had wandered out into the middle of I-40. Anubis was half starved and all mean when Charles managed to calm him with a bit of leftover Quarter Pounder. Anubis had hopped up into the passenger seat of Charles’ big-rig and never left. They lived on the open road and they always drove west.

The pickup was waiting for them in the middle of nowhere. It was a young girl. She was a short and skinny thing, dressed in a white christening dress that floated along the roadside. The tall spidery lights in the median winked in and out as she passed by them. Charles pulled to a stop just beside her; the right lane was empty, and there wasn’t anyone else on the road yet. He swung open the passenger door and frowned when it creaked ominously. He loathed theatricality.

Vote Ike was practically a motto for the deceased and it was all because of the Eisenhower’s National System of Interstate Highways. Before the new sparkling system of roads, the specters of America had been forced to wander, looking for familiar landmarks and wailing for someone to give them reliable directions.

“My name’s Charles,” he said.

“Where are we going?” she asked as she settled into the big passenger seat. She was already fluctuating in and out of touch, her eyes looked like faded Polaroids.

“West,” he said. “Always west.”

“What does that mean?” she asked.

He pointed out over the steering wheel, pressing a smudge into the glass of the windshield, “Towards the sun. Don’t you think it’s wonderful to catch it from over the edge out there?”

The girl was frowning, her face scrunched up in the look of a child who thinks she is being treated like one. “It’s night. The sun is gone.”

“Not everywhere,” he said. Anubis came bounding up off the floorboards and onto the girl’s lap. He spun in circles until she started scratching behind his ears; he was sleeping again before he curled up.

“What’s his name?” she asked.

Charles smiled like a father. “Anubis.”

She nodded and kept petting him; Anubis was murmuring happily. “Like the Egyptian guy?”

He nodded. “You’re smart for your age, aren’t ya? The old, old Egyptians used to believe it was Anubis who weighed a person’s soul after they died.”

“Why?”

Charles ran a hand along his jaw, an affectation when he was thinking, “Well, to see if they were worthy, I suppose. I’ve always said any dog can do that. Measure a person, I mean. Don’t need no magic god-dog to do that.”

Ghosts need to commute, unfinished business travel is the top vocation for a deceased person. The dead need to, have to, get where they are going.

“What are those?” she asked, looking down the road ahead.

Outside Charles’ windshield the highway was coming to bustling life. Lights, most of them alone, drifted along the side of the road. Occasionally there were pairs, sometimes there were groups. There might be dozens when something sad had happened, hundreds when something unspeakable. On rare nights there was nothing but the road. Those were the worst, he thought.

“Not everyone can see them,” he said.

“You didn’t answer my question.”

He sighed. “They chose to walk. Mostly it’s adults; old folks.”

“Old people get to do everything,” she said.

“Everyone gets to do everything.” He meant it to be comforting.

The first freeway cement was poured in Kansas and Missouri; from the heartland freshly liberated ghosts began to cruise all over the nation. Spectral Cadillacs and Studebakers cased the open roads where they left flesh and bone drivers in their dust, haunted by the experience. The familiar haunts belong to another era.

“How about we see what’s on the radio? I bet that will help.”

Charles spun the radio dial, cruising through rustling static. He twisted it all the way to the right and the two speakers came to life. Waves of rhythm came in low from just over the horizon; the beat sounded like it was skipping along the surface of a lake. Charles wondered what she heard. A lot of them said it was like a heartbeat in the middle of the night.

WILLIAM ABLES is a writer from Tennessee where he currently lives with his wife and their two dogs. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as 99 Pine Street, Pidgeonholes, and Slink Chunk Press.

Allina Nunley

This is pathetic, the scorpion thought. He didn’t think much of the old man, and really, why should he? The old man was on the floor, gushing blood from a bullet wound to the stomach, unable to crawl, only to scream.

But he didn’t.

He didn’t react to the scorpion, or to the young, barrel-chested peacekeeper at the top of the stairs, the one that had pulled the trigger. The old man didn’t even flinch at the bright glint of the sheriff’s badge.

The scorpion had seen these displays of bravery before. His sting had been the terror of the west back when you could still call it wild. He had relished the days of fighting with cattle rustlers and bad hombres, but he could feel the age in his stinger and knew that it was time to settle down.

The old man followed the scorpion with his eyes. The scorpion knew that daring look. He examined the man’s muscular structure, looking for the right place to strike. The man had to be in his seventies, but his body was lean and firm. The scorpion could read the past that he must have had. He was probably dashing once, uncompromising. He was the kind of man who should never be beaten in a fight. Age was the only enemy a man like this couldn’t outgun. This man was a killer, just like the scorpion.

A killer’s fearless gaze.

As he looked into the old man’s eyes, the scorpion felt that arthritic pain in his stinger again. Age had taken away the only thing that he loved. He tried to keep his youthful enthusiasm, but each killing strike ate away at him like his own poison ate away at his victims.

The sheriff descended the steps, all boyish exuberance and physical fitness. He knelt next to the old rogue with a chiding smile and put his gun against the man’s temple. He was so pleased with himself that he didn’t notice the scorpion. Instantly, the scorpion hated him; he hated honest men with their white hats and pristine spurs.

He thought, what a pathetic way to go. It wasn’t a fair fight. It used to be that law men were worthy opponents, now they’re just the clean-up crew, shooting down tired outlaws for sport.

For once in his life, the scorpion felt the urge to do a good deed. He’d only do it for someone as wicked as him.

It was excruciating to embed his stinger into the sheriff’s thigh, but it felt better than any kill before. He felt joy when he saw the sheriff hobble away in terror. The coward didn’t have long. The old man’s eyes met the scorpion’s as he bled his last. The scorpion knew that it was finally time to really settle down. He rested next to his dead colleague and embraced the blackness as the shining light of civilization enveloped the west.

ALLINA NUNLEY is a writer and filmmaker. She is currently pursuing an M.A. in English at California State University, Los Angeles, and she holds a B.F.A. in Film from Art Center College of Design. Her work has previously appeared in Foliate Oak and Eunoia Review