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Don't Eat West Virginia Honey (Part 1)

Sometimes the sweetest treats are filled with the worst kind of tricks.

By Isaac ShapiroPublished 6 years ago 9 min read
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[Image courtesy of NBC Universal's Hannibal]

I know that Gramercy Honey is kind of a local phenomenon. Award winning at all kinds of local fairs in the West Virginia Appalachia area, and all that crap. But you really shouldn’t be touching the stuff. I haven’t in years. You see, the thing is Gramercy isn’t just a brand of honey. It’s also a town. Yeah, I know you can get all that off the label, and a whole bunch of other feel good artisanal small business bullshit too. But you see, I grew up in Gramercy, and I know its secrets. I know that sounds vague, but it’s true. There are so many things I can tell you, so many cracks in the rural small town facade the town presents, but I’m going start all the way at the beginning. This was the very first time I realized something was very wrong in the tiny little town I grew up in.

When I was eleven, I used to live Atlanta. It was hot as all hell, but I always loved living in the big city. My dad, not so much. He worked for the city police department, and he hated it. One day, he came home and said we were moving. I found out years later later he’d helped bust a human trafficking ring, and that was the last straw. My dad quit when he was offered a job as a natural resources officer in Gramercy. See, Gramercy is so small that they don’t even have a real police department. They have Natural Resources Police to deal with stupid tourists who try to hunt or fish out of season and the state police for everything else. Not that there ever was an anything else. It was a big deal for him. He couldn’t pass up the opportunity for some actual peace. My mom didn’t care because she hated the city as much as my dad did, but I had to leave all my friends behind

We pulled up roots and moved a few hundred miles north, and the only company I had was Peaches, my dog. He was a poodle pug mutt, and he was probably closest thing I had for a friend in the middle of bumblefuck nowhere, and I hated my parents for it. The weird thing about Gramercy is how completely devoid of industry it was. You’d think there’d be logging or coal mining or… something. Anything. The closest we had was a little resort hotel a half an hour away from the town. It never made sense to me that anyone there could make a living. The closest thing they had to civilization was the gas station near the exit ramp for the highway leading through the mountains and eight fucking churches. Why does a town with 700 people tops and an area of just under a square mile needed eight churches? They ran all the city council meetings out of the biggest of them in the middle of town.

I used to joke that if my dad really did his job, he’d have to shut down all the moonshiners then the town would completely collapse, and we could go back home. My mom used to kick me in the shins under the table for saying that. What the town did have was bees. Lots and lots of bees. All the local rednecks knew how to shoot, they knew how to drink, and they all knew how to take care of honey bees.

I tried making friends with the local kids, but they never were interested in playing. It was really hard to try and find anything to talk to them about. I tried seeing if anyone had ever watched Transformers, G.I. Joe, or ever seen Star Wars. I might as well have been speaking a different language. Only thing they ever seemed to like was hunting and fishing. Didn’t get any TV out there and the only books I could find in the damn library were 20 years out of date. Seriously, who still reads Nancy Drew or Encyclopedia Brown?

The best thing I could do to entertain myself was wander around outside with my Game Boy, but since I’d already played all the games I brought with me and the nearest city was almost an hour away, I was stuck playing the same things over and over again. So I used to get my walking stick and start exploring in the woods. I used to go with Peaches, but he’d always end up running off every chance he got, so I eventually just left him chained up in the yard when I’d go exploring. It wasn’t like it was such a great adventure. Mostly I just found dirt and bugs, but occasionally I might find a salamander, and I always thought that was a good catch.

Each time I went deeper and deeper. Then one day I stumbled across these weird flowers. They were like nothing I’d ever seen before. They looked like they weren’t from the West Virginia mountains. They looked like they came from a rain forest or something. They were the size of dandelions, but they had these huge petals that had this sickly dark purple color and the center of the flower looked sticky with a color that reminded me of half-dried blood. They just felt unnatural. That wasn’t the creepiest thing though.

Whenever I found one, I kept on hearing this loud buzzing sound. The flowers were surrounded by bees. But they didn’t look like normal honey bees. I was never afraid of honey bees. They’re docile if you don’t try to piss them off; they’ll even let you pet them as long as you’re gentle. But something about whatever breed of backwoods redneck killer bee these things were just scared the shit out of me. They weren’t the usual fuzzy yellow and black. They were an ugly mix of purple and brown… like a three day old bruise. They looked more like horse flies with stingers than bees, and they were aggressive. The closer I got to the flowers, the more they swarmed. I should have gotten the hell out of there the first time I saw them, but I just wanted to see the flowers up close. They smelled absolutely foul, and I couldn’t help but be curious.

The bees didn’t like that. I’d knelt down to brush my fingers over the petals, but I stopped when I got closer to the ground. Half hidden by the waving stalks of the flowers that swayed with a gentle summer breeze was the corpse of a deer. I stumbled back, landing among the flowers as I fell and scrambled away from the half-rotted head of a large doe. The skull showed through in places and the stomach had split open from what I later realized was the swell of gases bloating up as it decayed. I had a brief second to wonder why no scavengers had touched it when I realized that the spilled intestines rotting in the summer sun were covered in bees. They were all over the body, crawling in and out as I realized with a wave of nausea that they had built their hive inside the rotting corpse. The doe’s chest cavity was literally honeycombed, glistening amber fluid dripping off the wax and mixing with the putrefaction. I fought down the urge to vomit.

They came boiling out of their grisly hive then; the image still haunts me, a myriad of stinging, buzzing insects rising like a cloud out of the decaying animal as I scrambled up and ran, legs pumping as I flailed my arms, in a futile effort to keep them from stinging me. I crashed through the trees, tripping over roots and exposed rock, hauling myself back to my feet in a desperate effort to get away from the bees. I don’t know how long I ran, but when I finally broke free of the forest and saw the overgrown field that bordered our house, I was close to passing out. I had a stitch in my side, and I was covered in painful stings, my heartbeat crashing in my ears and my breath tearing in and out of my lungs. The swarm had followed me the whole way, and I was so desperate to get back into the house that I just bolted across the yard and yanked the door open, slamming it behind me... thankful for once that we lived somewhere so completely tiny and isolated that no one ever locked the doors.

I sank down against the door, sobbing with pain and staring at the welts that covered my body. In a state of shock, all I could think of is how strange it was that none of the bees had left their stingers in me, instead stinging me over and over like wasps. I stared in horrified fascination as the insects covered the house, crawling all over the doors and windows, searching for a way in. And then I heard it; the high pitched yelping. Peaches! I’d left him outside. He was chained to his doghouse. I went to open the door to try to rescue my dog… but my hands froze on the doorknob. I could see through the decorative glass set in the back door, but only barely.

Those ugly brown-purple bees were everywhere, and once I was no longer a target, they had gone after my dog. There was nothing I could do. All he could do was just run back and forth for a few feet before the cord on his collar yanked him back. I could hear his chain rattle as he tried to escape. He tried rolling in the dirt to get them off, but it was useless. I cried, face pressed against the glass as I watched a small, shape twist and writhe on the ground, covered in layer of stinging insects. The yelping lasted only a few minutes; it stopped after Peaches stopped moving… and was replaced with a soft constant whimper that tore at my heart. It’s terrible to admit, but I just wanted him to die, so he would stop.

I stopped crying after the first hour, they left after the third. My parent’s didn’t get back until after the fourth. I tried to explain to them what happened, pointing at the crushed insects around Peaches’s body. I tried to take them to show them where I’d found the bees, but I couldn’t retrace my steps. I wanted to bury Peaches in the yard in front of his dog house, but the next morning, the body was gone from the garage. I was nearly inconsolable; my parents said we could get a new dog, but I couldn’t go through that again.

Everyone in the town swore they had no idea what had happened to the body; they swore they’d never seen anything like what I described either. In time, I came to realize they lied about both, but even before I had proof, deep down I knew. You see, there were nights I would wake up strange buzzing noises coming from outside the house, a deep almost hypnotic sound that burrowed into your mind, making it almost impossible to think, calling me in a soft, low drone back towards the forest and the scent of rotting meat and honey.

fiction
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About the Creator

Isaac Shapiro

When not scrounging the internet for the best content for Jerrick Media, Isaac can be found giving scritches to feathery friend Captain Crunch.

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