Bee King

Bee King

by M. Lazarus

Lark Publishing 2014

For more stories, visit http://subsidingsun.uk/lark/

Bee King

I know the local kids call me names. They don't even bother to hide it, the little curs. Nobody has any respect any more. It's as much the fault of their empty-headed, beer swilling, chain-smoking parents as it is the little feral animals. In my day, we had some panache, some excitement in our life and enthusiasm for our work. We were planning to invent a better way for humanity, to overturn all the fossilised, parasitic institutions that maintained a corrupt and stupid world for their own self-interest. Instead of change and improvement, there are chip-shop franchises and horrific sports-bars, and they called us villains!

I grunted as I pried myself out of my old battered leather armchair. It always hurts to move now. Even little things, things we never consider when we are young have become troublesome. Getting out of bed in the morning is a blasted nightmare. It had taken me fifteen minutes of my back locking up and spasming pains down my side to get from lying down to standing up this morning. When I had been working back in the day, I'd been a spry fellow. You had to be, back then. In our line of work, we would often ruffle feathers and end up in physical altercations with those agents of the status quo. We thought a lot about the future of the world back then, but we never reflected on our own futures, on being frail and weak.

Perhaps I have lived too long.

A bunch of boys who appeared to be dressed in the usual sports-clown fashion threw rocks at my house. Their aim was very poor. When they ran out of rocks, they chanted 'Creepy Bee Fuck' at my house.

When I went outside to work on my garden, it became apparent that someone had been permitting their dog to defecate on my front yard. It would appear that the dog in question must be a large breed, based on the size of the deposited faeces. In addition, there was a clear element of malicious intent from the dog's owner, as the befouling is always more or less targeted at the same part of my garden. The whole process of cleaning up the excrement was very tiresome, having to wrap my hand in plastic bags, bend over and nearly breaking my back, the unpleasant sensation of the texture of the droppings on the other side of the plastic, the awkwardness of handling it and finally the wearying trek to the rubbish bin at the corner of the street for disposal. It is nothing less than stomach-churning thoughtlessness that drives the feckless owner to refuse to clean up after themselves. Such selfishness is endemic, and that dog owner is a perfect model of the sore lack of consideration in the neighbourhood where I am entrapped.

I decided that I have had enough. While I am not permitted to construct new devices without the greedy eye of my keepers falling upon them, I have been cautious and managed to cobble together a few harmless machines without any interference. I may have been forced into retirement, but you cannot force the mind to give up so simply. Walking out through the kitchen and down the back yard, I browse in my garden shed until I located an old case. Inside were all manner of parts and wires and half-completed tinkerings that have accumulated over the years. Eventually I found what I'm looking for, a rough, unfinished thing that had the appearance of a variety of metal colander on a tripod, with a small box on the top connected by wires radiating all over the device. This is not the original, of course, but a substitute I have constructed. It is, however based as closely as possible, on the original device that the Countess had given to me back in the heyday of our group. She was the greatest woman I ever had the privilege to know, beautiful in body and mind. Naturally, she was a real Countess, too. The grubby newspapers pounced upon that, as indeed, they always had a facility for getting their claws on the most trite and sensationalist aspects of any story. Their damnable obsession with absurd nicknames and childish phrasing! Ah, but the Countess could also dance wonderfully! We once waltzed atop the tallest skyscraper of the day as all the lights of the city were switched off by our machinations. Glorious, she was. That's something else people don't do any more. Dance together. Not properly. It was an equal pleasure to work with the Countess. She was perhaps the most brilliant of us all - why, how her knowledge of biology informed my own mechanical experimentation! She had loved animals, which is how she had come to build the original of the device, and I had the joy of adding some small improvements and efficiencies to her design. It had been a very long time since we waltzed together. I no longer had any idea if she was even still alive.