By Brian Benson
Four years old
I’m in Dad’s truck, the gray one with the hole in the floor and the seats that spit dust when you slap them. Dad’s fiddling with the radio and I want to be closer to the dials, or maybe just him, so I lean over and brace my weight on my plump white hand. Something burns my palm, and I scream, crying before I even see that it’s a bumblebee, curling into itself, like a flower blooming in reverse.
Seven years old
It’s always been a good idea to run outside and skip through the grass and torpedo my twiggy body into the tire swing hanging from the oak beside the house, so that’s what I do today. When I land in the tire, though, my butt sinks into something that’s not rubber, something delicate and brittle, like the papier-mâché volcano Mom helped me make for science. It happens all at once, the buzzing and the stinging and my screaming, and then I’m yanking my body out of the swing and off the bees’ house and running toward my house, and when Mom meets me at the door I’m crying so hard I’m no longer making a sound but if I could make a sound what I’d say is, “What have I done to deserve this?”
Nine years old
A few months before or after my best friend Nick and I find a hornet’s nest in the woods and throw rocks at it until it breaks and then run screaming back to his house and hide inside of it for the rest of the day, I’m digging in pine duff during recess, and some hornets come out of nowhere and sting my ear three times, for what seems like no good reason at all.
Ten to thirty-seven years old
I get stung six times while playing hide and seek with Kendra Maxson. I get stung while playing soccer with twenty-one other boys who do not get stung. I get stung while sitting in a friend’s bed, past midnight, watching South Park. I get stung on the bottom of my bare feet during a softball game in a park. I get stung between the eyes while picking berries on a date. I get stung and I get stung and I get stung, and though I learn, eventually, that bees are much more than their stings, that mostly they do good, they are good, are in fact essential, I still keep a tally: thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-eight. I relish each new sting. Each opportunity to wonder what I wondered when I was seven years old.
Thirty-eight years old
I don’t talk about bees in therapy, but I do talk a lot about what I’ve done and what I seem to believe I deserve. I own a house now. So do my friend Jess, and my friend Peter, and they both keep bees in their yard. I haven’t been stung in over four years. I’m frozen at thirty-eight.
Forty years old
This spring, my partner planted a million native flowers in the yard. They’re in bloom now, and the bees love them. Honeybees, bumblebees, mason bees, sweat bees. Sometimes, when I’m reading on the porch, I get up and go sit on the bench by the asters and listen to the bees. It isn’t a buzz, really. More like a hum. Sometimes I get off the bench and sit beside the bees, just to hear them better.
Brian Benson is the author of Going Somewhere and co-author, with Richard Brown, of This Is Not for You. Originally from the hinterlands of Wisconsin, Brian now lives in Portland, Oregon, where he teaches at the Attic Institute. His essays have been published in X-R-A-Y, Pithead Chapel, Tahoma Literary Review, Cleaver, and Sweet, among several other journals.